God's Role In Natural Disaster

[Cal]

First, so as to not be accused of failing to express sympathy for both the rightous and wicked that have suffered the ravages of the Tsunami in SEA, my first and sincere thoughts and prayers go out to anyone who has suffered as a result of this disaster.

On to a second thought--not a statement of facts or even opinion, just something to think about and stimulate philosophical debate--no hard fast answers, just commentary:

Current (and past) religious thought is full of claims that God is capable of bringing physical disaster on the wicked and physical blessings on the rightous and that he has done so historically.

The problem with imbueing God with the power to reign disaster on the wicked is that, by implication, it imbues him with the power to prevent the infliction of pain on the rightous, which he clearly does not do. Not only that, but He doesn't seem to know the difference between the rightous and the wicked, if the recent Tsunami is any indication of God's wrath or warnings of the "second coming".

When we insist on a God that can manipulate the physical environment, we also, by implication, imbue him with the responsibility to do so according to some sort of logic and reason. For example, to insist that God punishes the wicked and rewards the rightous in his manipulation of the physical world, implies that he has some sort of STANDARD by which he makes his decisions. If that standard is that the wicked will be punished, physically--by being killed--, and therefore send a message to others that would engage in wickedness that they should be afraid to engaging in that wickedness, then God would have to be competent enough to be able to use his "natural disasters" discriminately enough so that it would be readily apparent to the wicked that they are being singled out for destruction, and will thereby be detered from continued wickedness.

If there is some OTHER standard that God operated by, I can't think of what it is, if one is to take the old testament as the evidence of God's standards of operation. Clearly, the God of the old testament wants to prove to the wicked that he can and will visit them with natural disaster. What is the point of this? I'm just guessing that he is hoping to deter others from similar behavior. The problem is, I haven't seen any evidence in modern natural disasters that God is properly discriminating between the rightous and unrightous enough to send a message to the wicked.

IOW--if you were one of the wicked of the world, would you think "Wow, I better straighten up, that Tsunami killed nothing but child-slave traders. I better quit while I'm ahead"?

Now, if natural disasters are NOT God's wrath on the wicked, and logically they probably aren't, then what is God's role in such events?

Can he prevent them? If He can and doesn't, is He trying to make us hate him? Is he trying to test us? If so, wouldn't that make him kind of sadistic? After all, what parent tests his child by making the child think he is cruel, unfair and makes it look like human suffering means nothing to him?

Your thoughts.

[Amillia]

Here Cal, maybe this will help you conscentrate better~

Optical illusion:

If you stare long enough at this picture, you will see a giraffe

[Amillia]

For a more serious answer;

You are looking at this all wrong. You are looking at it from your 3 dimentional perspective. Try an eternal one. If you knew what God knows, would you ask these questions or see things in this light?

[Blessed]

Originally posted by Amillia@Jan 8 2005, 12:40 PM

Here Cal, maybe this will help you conscentrate better~

Optical illusion:

If you stare long enough at this picture, you will see a giraffe

That is twice now on this board that I have smiled and giggled.

Thank you!

[Jenda]

Originally posted by Amillia@Jan 8 2005, 11:40 AM

Here Cal, maybe this will help you conscentrate better~

Optical illusion:

If you stare long enough at this picture, you will see a giraffe

I stared that the picture for almost 5 minutes, and I did not see a giraffe.

Does that mean I am wicked and will be taken in the next natural disaster?

[Amillia]

Originally posted by Jenda+Jan 8 2005, 09:41 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Jenda @ Jan 8 2005, 09:41 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin--Amillia@Jan 8 2005, 11:40 AM

Here Cal, maybe this will help you conscentrate better~

Optical illusion:

If you stare long enough at this picture, you will see a giraffe

I stared that the picture for almost 5 minutes, and I did not see a giraffe.

Does that mean I am wicked and will be taken in the next natural disaster?

You are kidding right? ROFL! There is definitely a giraffe appearing if you stare long enough.

[Cal]

Originally posted by Amillia@Jan 8 2005, 11:40 AM

Here Cal, maybe this will help you conscentrate better~

Optical illusion:

If you stare long enough at this picture, you will see a giraffe

Here Amillia, maybe this will help you spell better:

C O N C E N T R A T E

Actually, I am no one to talk-- I commit as many typos as anyone.

[Guest jackvance88]

a bunch of people who can't handle cal's very pertinent question. i have no answer either. if we take the scriptures as our guide, god punished the wicked via earthquakes etc, both in the OT and the BOM. now he's destroying children, maybe all those kids were really wicked too for all we know?

why do all these disasters kill the most humble of people? why no huge tidal waves, earthquakes etc destroying hundreds of thousands on the west coast, new york, europe etc? why do tornadoes routinely avoid seattle and new york but reak devastation on christians in the midwest and south?

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Originally posted by jackvance88@Jan 10 2005, 12:58 PM

a bunch of people who can't handle cal's very pertinent question. i have no answer either. if we take the scriptures as our guide, god punished the wicked via earthquakes etc, both in the OT and the BOM. now he's destroying children, maybe all those kids were really wicked too for all we know?

why do all these disasters kill the most humble of people? why no huge tidal waves, earthquakes etc destroying hundreds of thousands on the west coast, new york, europe etc? why do tornadoes routinely avoid seattle and new york but reak devastation on christians in the midwest and south?

Because God has nothing to do with tidal waves. New York doesn't get annihilated because the Mid-Atlantic Ridge doesn't produce great earthquakes. And Seattle doesn't get tornadoed because it isn't in the convergence zone for polar and tropical air masses.

[Guest jackvance88]

Originally posted by TheProudDuck+Jan 10 2005, 03:39 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (TheProudDuck @ Jan 10 2005, 03:39 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin--jackvance88@Jan 10 2005, 12:58 PM

a bunch of people who can't handle cal's very pertinent question. i have no answer either. if we take the scriptures as our guide, god punished the wicked via earthquakes etc, both in the OT and the BOM. now he's destroying children, maybe all those kids were really wicked too for all we know?

why do all these disasters kill the most humble of people? why no huge tidal waves, earthquakes etc destroying hundreds of thousands on the west coast, new york, europe etc? why do tornadoes routinely avoid seattle and new york but reak devastation on christians in the midwest and south?

Because God has nothing to do with tidal waves. New York doesn't get annihilated because the Mid-Atlantic Ridge doesn't produce great earthquakes. And Seattle doesn't get tornadoed because it isn't in the convergence zone for polar and tropical air masses.

then why did the people in sodom perish in a ball of fire? and not abraham and the hebrews?

if nature is just that random, then it's meaningless too.

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Jack,

Back in high school, an earthquake knocked a wooden plaque off the little ledge on top of the chalkboard onto my head. I can't conceive of a theology that would require me to attribute my goose egg (along with every other insult from nature) to God's will or, alternatively, conclude nature is meaningless.

[Cal]

Originally posted by TheProudDuck@Jan 11 2005, 01:02 PM

Jack,

Back in high school, an earthquake knocked a wooden plaque off the little ledge on top of the chalkboard onto my head. I can't conceive of a theology that would require me to attribute my goose egg (along with every other insult from nature) to God's will or, alternatively, conclude nature is meaningless.

After all the questions I have asked, I can't think of any alternative to PD's position that makes any sense at all. If you allow gods hand in natural disasters you turn god into the worse random terrorist of all time. Every objection I've heard so far simply doesn't hold water, pardon the untimely metaphore. If God is punishing the wicked, from any perspective you can imagine, he is a terrible shot. If he is trying to teach the rest of us a lesson, where is the lesson? The good perish right along with the wicked, whose behavior are we supposed to be suspicious of? Who was the bad guy? The one that died? They all died!! If God goes to all the trouble of creating natural disasters, with no lesson to be learned, no good to come of it (at least the bad canceling out any good).....all we can conclude is that he is sadistic and cruel.

One might argue that the survivors learn compassion and caring for the victims thereby enriching them. What about the survivors that are permanently scared and never recover? If I had any choice, I would say "nevermind teaching ME humility by witnessing the suffering of others--- SAVE THEM!!!!!!!!!"

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Cal,

I think I may actually revise my position a little, or at least make it clearer. I won't state categorically that God never intervenes in the physical world, but I do think it's manifest -- and necessary to acquit him of criminal negligence -- that for some good reason, his interventions are limited.

Mormon theology has an advantage over other Christian theologies on the theodicy problem, because of its unique teachings on the premortal existence of man, the objective of mortality being exaltation to divinity, and the concept that God himself is bound by, or is inseparable from, certain universal realities that could be defined as natural law. (Other Christian theologians have touched on this last point, notably C.S. Lewis, but my impression is that Mormons are the only ones who make it explicit in canonized scripture; see Alma 42, with its repeated statement that if justice were ultimately frustrated, "God would cease to be God."

These three points avoid the problem that conventional theology (which I grossly and totally unfairly simplify here) has with its concept that God created humanity out of nothing, because he felt like it, for the ultimate purpose of being angels with harps and halos. Comes a disaster, and people naturally ask the question, if God could do whatever he wants, why not just create us fully equipped with said harps and halos and spare us the odd discomfort like, oh, being smashed up and then drowned by a tidal wave or smothered by a mudslide.

Mormon theology teaches that God didn't have that option. It wasn't a matter of preferring to create beings with harps and halos instead of nasty digestive tracts; he didn't have a blank canvas. He had "intelligences," co-eternal with him, with some kind of individuality of their own. The objective was to make those individualities like himself. He had to get from point A to point B, in other words. The path from point A to point B leads by necessity through the experience of a fallen world, where spit happens completely at random and more often than not. It seems (according to the temple ceremony, coming from the mouth of someone who apparently gets only this one point right), there is no other way.

I'm always uncomfortable trying to reconcile the Gospel with a tragedy; I always feel that anything I say would sound facile to a person who'd been more personally connected with it, for example by losing a child or suffering something equally unbearable. (Which is why I felt very uncomfortable in sacrament meeting two weeks ago, when the bishop, who is a good man and means well, suggested that the tsunami had a good side in that many people who had never heard of Christ were now being introduced to the gospel in the spirit world. Try telling that to someone weeping on the beach beside the body of his wife.) But this is the best sense I can make of any of this, and I try to make sense of it for my own benefit if nothing else.

Maybe it is possible for God to sneak in the odd miracle every century or so. I suspect that, being a loving parent, he does everything he can that is consistent with the final goal. In Matthew 15, Jesus initially tells a "woman of Canaan" who asks him to heal her daughter that he can't; he's only sent to the house of Israel. When she persists and humbles herself deeply, he relents and miraculously heals the daughter. I think an analogy here might be with minimum-wage laws -- yes, according to classic economic theory, there's no free lunch; if you artificially raise the cost of labor, you'll reduce the amount demanded, but economics is such a fuzzy science that you may be able to raise the rate a little at the margins without substantially effecting the demand curve.

OK, lame analogy. Maybe the character of miracles is such that they must remain ambiguous for the free-will component of the plan of salvation to work. That is, when a person recovers from an illness after receiving a blessing, it's possible that it may have been pure coincidence; unblessed people do recover in the ordinary course of things, and blessed people do die. We can't know for certain whether it was the blessing or random chance that caused the healing -- just as we can't know for certain whether a divine creation or random chance was at the origin of the world. The evidence is insufficient, and always will be. On those questions, faith is the only thing (other than a coin toss) that can decide between the possibilities, just as it is ultimately the only evidence (for most of us) for the existence of God. Is it possible that the reason miracles aren't universal is that this is necessary so that the decision to follow the Lord is a freely-made decision based on faith?

[Cal]

Originally posted by TheProudDuck@Jan 12 2005, 01:01 PM

Cal,

I think I may actually revise my position a little, or at least make it clearer. I won't state categorically that God never intervenes in the physical world, but I do think it's manifest -- and necessary to acquit him of criminal negligence -- that for some good reason, his interventions are limited.

Mormon theology has an advantage over other Christian theologies on the theodicy problem, because of its unique teachings on the premortal existence of man, the objective of mortality being exaltation to divinity, and the concept that God himself is bound by, or is inseparable from, certain universal realities that could be defined as natural law. (Other Christian theologians have touched on this last point, notably C.S. Lewis, but my impression is that Mormons are the only ones who make it explicit in canonized scripture; see Alma 42, with its repeated statement that if justice were ultimately frustrated, "God would cease to be God."

These three points avoid the problem that conventional theology (which I grossly and totally unfairly simplify here) has with its concept that God created humanity out of nothing, because he felt like it, for the ultimate purpose of being angels with harps and halos. Comes a disaster, and people naturally ask the question, if God could do whatever he wants, why not just create us fully equipped with said harps and halos and spare us the odd discomfort like, oh, being smashed up and then drowned by a tidal wave or smothered by a mudslide.

Mormon theology teaches that God didn't have that option. It wasn't a matter of preferring to create beings with harps and halos instead of nasty digestive tracts; he didn't have a blank canvas. He had "intelligences," co-eternal with him, with some kind of individuality of their own. The objective was to make those individualities like himself. He had to get from point A to point B, in other words. The path from point A to point B leads by necessity through the experience of a fallen world, where spit happens completely at random and more often than not. It seems (according to the temple ceremony, coming from the mouth of someone who apparently gets only this one point right), there is no other way.

I'm always uncomfortable trying to reconcile the Gospel with a tragedy; I always feel that anything I say would sound facile to a person who'd been more personally connected with it, for example by losing a child or suffering something equally unbearable. (Which is why I felt very uncomfortable in sacrament meeting two weeks ago, when the bishop, who is a good man and means well, suggested that the tsunami had a good side in that many people who had never heard of Christ were now being introduced to the gospel in the spirit world. Try telling that to someone weeping on the beach beside the body of his wife.) But this is the best sense I can make of any of this, and I try to make sense of it for my own benefit if nothing else.

Maybe it is possible for God to sneak in the odd miracle every century or so. I suspect that, being a loving parent, he does everything he can that is consistent with the final goal. In Matthew 15, Jesus initially tells a "woman of Canaan" who asks him to heal her daughter that he can't; he's only sent to the house of Israel. When she persists and humbles herself deeply, he relents and miraculously heals the daughter. I think an analogy here might be with minimum-wage laws -- yes, according to classic economic theory, there's no free lunch; if you artificially raise the cost of labor, you'll reduce the amount demanded, but economics is such a fuzzy science that you may be able to raise the rate a little at the margins without substantially effecting the demand curve.

OK, lame analogy. Maybe the character of miracles is such that they must remain ambiguous for the free-will component of the plan of salvation to work. That is, when a person recovers from an illness after receiving a blessing, it's possible that it may have been pure coincidence; unblessed people do recover in the ordinary course of things, and blessed people do die. We can't know for certain whether it was the blessing or random chance that caused the healing -- just as we can't know for certain whether a divine creation or random chance was at the origin of the world. The evidence is insufficient, and always will be. On those questions, faith is the only thing (other than a coin toss) that can decide between the possibilities, just as it is ultimately the only evidence (for most of us) for the existence of God. Is it possible that the reason miracles aren't universal is that this is necessary so that the decision to follow the Lord is a freely-made decision based on faith?

I think I may actually revise my position a little, or at least make it clearer.  I won't state categorically that God never intervenes in the physical world, but I do think it's manifest -- and necessary to acquit him of criminal negligence -- that for some good reason, his interventions are limited.

The problem I have with imbueing God with the power to intervene is that it raises the question, "upon what basis does he intervene?", and if he can chose when to intervene, real world observation makes it look like he is dramatically arbitrary and capricious. At least, it looks like he is cruel and uncaring, if he can intervene, and doesn't. I don't pretend to know anything different that what you have said, I just can't seem to find a way to allow God ANY power over nature, without then making him liable for the all of it. Put another way, can a God who has told us to be merciful with eachother set an example of such NON-MERCY with regard to human suffering?

The only way he can be exonerated, so to speak, is if he has no power to prevent it.

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Cal,

In considering whether, if God has any power to intervene in the natural world, I think you could apply the classic Learned Hand benefit/burden approach to liability. Specifically, if the cost of intervening past a certain point in the natural world in order to save a certain number of people from early death were the frustration of the entire plan of salvation (whose benefit we presume to be infinite), then God wouldn't be held to a "standard of care" requiring him to save everybody from natural disasters. The harm to be avoided -- that some people die sooner rather than later -- would be less significant than the burden of frustrating the exaltation of man.

I'm going to be horribly callous here, but what would it really accomplish even if God abolished all tidal waves? Everybody is ultimately going to die. For most of us, the process is really going to suck. As I lie dying of congestive heart failure in my late seventies, I doubt I'm going to think much of how lucky I am that I wasn't drowned in a few seconds when I was 33. I'll be thinking of my present pain. I do not believe, as some people say, that there are some pains so great that "no future bliss" could ever compensate for them. Eternal life (assuming it exists as described) so exceeds anything in mortality -- by the ratio of a beach to a grain of sand -- that there is probably little difference between dying tragically young and dying old after experiencing a full life's inevitable share of tragedies.

The bottom line, which I reiterate, is that God, because of his infinite love, intervenes in nature as much as he possibly can to minimize his children's suffering. Depending on your religious preference, that may be often, seldom, or never. I do believe, however, that the theodicy problem can only be resolved by an understanding of God's omnipotence to be that he has all power -- that is, "all the power that exists", according to the natural laws that he cannot violate and remain God himself -- rather than "the power to do anything at all." The only way intelligence can be made God is apparently to pass it through a painful natural world. There is no other way. God does everything that can be done, but it's still going to hurt.