How Christians Handle Natural Evil

Faith & Science Conversation
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While I don’t agree with YECs explanation for the cause of quote-unquote “natural evil” (i.e., diseases, viruses, volcanoes, tsunamis, etc.,) being that of strictly Adam’s fault and not God’s … I notice that Old Earth Creationists try to postulate explanations for why God did things the way he did (course this is just theorizing and not to be dogmatic) … I’ve heard one claim that the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs paved the way (very long in advance) for the modern era!

Where TEs are concerned, I feel this tendency to separate Evolution from God … And I just wonder what the reason might be.

Have we fallen for materialist’ objections: “If God guides Evolution then that means God is responsible for thorns, diseases, lower back pain, extinction etc.,” … ? I don’t really see this as a theological problem.

1 Samuel 2:6-7 says “The Lord killeth, and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up. The Lord maketh poor, and maketh rich: he bringeth low, and lifteth up.” <<< these are the words of Hannah after being blessed with Samuel.

Obviously Hannah wasn’t contemplating realty in the scientific sense … But she had no theological squabbles for God’s Universe having unpleasantness in it at times. Whatever God ordains to happen, should we really separate the issue and say, “That wasn’t God.” Or should we say, “I don’t know the reason why God did it this way, but he had his reasons, and I trust Him.”

In this sense, I feel that YECs and ECs alike BOTH have materialistic origins in it’s idealogy — where one blames all natural evil to the cause of a single man, and the other just relegates it to natural causes (that are somehow disconnected from God).

But who says that the world before Adam had to be “perfect” and “void of suffering”? Where in the Bible does it depict God’s purposes as HAVING to be filled with “all things wonderful and pleasant” otherwise it’s not God?

What do you guys think?

-Tim

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Tim,
I think you have to better define what you mean by evil. Limiting the discussion to earth over the past 4.5 billion years, there are geologic processes that create volcanoes, tsunamis, hurricanes. These non-living processes lead to and make life possible. So saying any geologic process is evil is quite a stretch. Turning to life processes, pathogens, viruses, genetic mutations, birth, death, are all integral parts of the life processes. Again I don’t know how a bacteria or a virus can be considered evil (or good for that matter). To me, evil is defined by cultural and individual reasoning.

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Agreed, Tim!

If it isn’t God … or Divine … then it is by definition flawed, vulnerable and inferior.

The phrase The Fall was an innovation by a latter Church Father. The Fall was really The Eviction.
“Original Sin” simply describes reality - - if the world is not heaven, and all creation is not
divine, I can’t think of anything MORE original than that!

George Brooks

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Hey Patrick.

The way in which I’m using “evil” is different than the way you are used too. I’m not talking about a moral evil, but simply something that is “negative”… Not good in other words. An ancient person could say “I got an evil disease”, simply to say I got “a very bad disease”.

When a lion eats a deer, you might say “what happened to the deer was evil”. But you also might look at how that same lion dragged the deer to her cubs who were starving and see a certain kind of beauty in it.

I’m not saying geologic processes are evil at all. Tsunamis and volcanos are just things that happen. But when those tsunamis devastate a village or that volcano erupts on a city, then people might call that “natural evil”.

My basic point is that YECs blame a majority of this on the curse brought on by Adam’s sin. And TEs blame it on natural processes, and yet conveniently exclude God from it.

Isn’t God apart of Nature?

-Tim

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It is unfortunate that most Bibles include “Fall of Man” as a presented theme, right before Genesis 3 … so that thought is automatically in your mind before reading the text. In scholarly terms that’s called “eisegesis” — reading “into” the text. Eviction is a very common theme through out the Bible.

-Tim

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