Well I agree that looking at creation through the lens of evolution is important as you are doing. Because we know from science what our garden story was really like and we know, death, disease, pain, suffering and the like are all a part of nature as God intended it. God allowing for genuine freedom and pushing his special creation as a whole in certain directions by it is one potential explanation. But I still maintain there are some troubling questions that arise from this lens. especially if we look at images of an actual disaster. I don’t think we are supposed to look at all the dead, bloating bodies and think, “This is great, I can build character through this adversity.” Tragedy is tragedy and very bad to me. Good and evil loose their meaning to me if I can’t see disasters as anything but that. It would turn my whole thinking upside down. I wouldn’t know what is good or bad anymore. Evolution, as true as it it, does pose that problem!
In some sense for me it is the other way around… looking at the reality of evolution through the lens of creation by God. After all, I started with science and evolution – not with Christianity.
If evolution is the lens then it is for …
- understanding the nature of life itself
- determining whether the Bible and Christianity is in any way believable and worthwhile.
For me, life was never some magical thing which God added to dirt. Life was evolution. And when that is your reality then the text of the Bible has a different meaning.
But I am not the Christian starting with “this is all God’s will” to realize how phony that is and trying to get in touch with the devastating reality of the disaster. I am more the non-believer staring with the devastating reality of the disaster and then finding meaning for it as a believer in a God that chose love and freedom over power and control.
It is from existentialism, reading Camus “The Stranger,” that I learned to look at personal tragedy as a gift… a way to embrace the stark reality of life and have some faith that it is worth living. Of course, what we need to be thinking isn’t “how great this is,” but what can we do to overcome this disaster and next. It is meeting the challenges which is the substance of life itself. The only good and bad is in how we respond to the challenges and not in the challenges themselves.
This topic was automatically closed 6 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.