A timeless problem for those who claim that the six creation days of Genesis all ascend relentlessly towards the creation of Man is the problem of premature human deaths from random acts of Nature.
Why does a caring God permit good innocent babies to die so young from pandemics, floods, wild animal attacks, starvation, volcanoes etc ?
And why was God so pleased when his imagined creations of stars and lights, night and day, earth and sea, plants and animals came forth ?
We might start by acknowledging that the Universe and everything in it will die someday - not just its living beings.
Even the seemingly elemental atoms 'die' (we call this "natural radioactivity").
Half Life estimates of just when half of the sodium atoms may break up are just averages - the individual atoms can die far later than their estimated past due date ----- or far earlier.
Rather like humans, really.
Ditto for estimates of just when earthquakes should shake or volcanoes should explode ----- versus when most actually do.
Or when Stars might collapse or when planets might get walloped by huge pieces of space debris.
Our whole Universe, whether created by a personal God or by forces of Nature was built from the start in an asymmetrical, hence dynamically active, way.
It has a birthing past and a dying future, not just an eternal present so as to act as a neutral, harmless, backdrop to the human drama played out at the front of the stage.
It decays, it cools, it heats up, it careens, it staggers, it bumps and bruises, it ricochets.
It acts rather Life-like indeed and it seems to exhibit something, that to untrained human minds at least, seems to be almost like Free Will.
Most of what makes us humans truly human is our need to survive on a stage where the scenery - quite literally - is intent on eating the actors.
If there is a personal God, perhaps God is enjoying all of this resulting kaleidoscope of reality and doesn't really place the creation of humanity on that much more of an exalted plane than the rest of the six days of creation.
So perhaps, just six horizontal days of joyous labour - not six days spent "Building a Stairway to Man" ....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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