My God is not a God of death; he is a God of life. However, since the creators of sophisticated robotic medical equipment are responsible for faulty product if something disastrous should occur, can our God be held liable for the death we see all around us since time began?Yes, it is true that our God created all things perfect, but since he allows--for a variety of complicated reasons--for things to go on as they do, then, in a way, he has to take responsibility for the imperfections of our otherwise perfect world.
Let's face it, if God wanted to stop all pain and death right now, he could. God's hands are not tied. There must be valid reasons why so many negative realities continue to exist. Let's try to analyze what some of them might be.
Some conservative Christians believe that God allows the controversy between good and evil to continue to protect man's free will. Conservatively speaking, you have to admit that 6,000 years is ample time to show that God offers humankind his way or the other fellow's way.
Progressively speaking, however, we are not talking about 6,000 but millions of years for this cosmic struggle between good and evil to have been resolved.
This brings us to the subject that the title hints at. Does God bring about life, humankind's life specifically, through the death that is essential for natural selection and the survival of the species? It is, after all, only the strong that survive to procreate and pass on their genes to the next generation. How can a God of love possibly be responsible for a system that uses death in order to bring about life and complex organisms?
The Bible account is very simple: God creates all of our reality in six days and rests on the seventh day. For those who have a problem with such simplicity, then the only other option is that God used evolution, and before that--the Big Bang--to create our world and the cosmos. Because this would make God the author of death--and life--such a paradigm is not consistent with a God of love.
The third possibility we will not focus on very much other than to state, for the occasional agnostic who may wander in by chance, that evolution, life, death, etc., have nothing whatsoever to do with God, only with humankind.
So where does that leave us? Perplexed? Frustrated? Despairing? Not at all; there is a fourth explanation. We all think this is all happening to us. This dream called life, death, rebirth. The incredible reality is that we are dreamers twisting and turning--sometimes smiling and laughing--through a long dreamlike state called life and death. One day we will awaken and learn who God really is and why all this death and life and rebirth were necessary.
Until then, look to God and worship him for the hour of his judgment has come.
2 comments:
Whether you accept Theistic evolution or literal 7 days of creation there is ultimately no way around the idea that God is responsible for death.
It hardly makes sense that because Adam or Eve sinned that bacteria or whales should suddenly have to die. What did they have to do with humans sin. So it can only be because God instituted death upon them. So is that really any better then God using death through evolution? Does not seem like it to me.
Oh and the philosophy of life is a dream has pretty much been a no go since it was thought up, and really it seems no philosophers were willing to stand behind that idea. Probably because if you test it by jumping off a cliff or walking in front of a speeding train the commitment to the philosophy vanished.
Thank you, Ron, for taking the time to leave your thought-provoking comments.
As I was reading them for the third time, I thought that if for whatever reasons he allows death either as a result of sin or through the mechanism of theistic evolution, at least there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Maybe the reaon the good news is so good, is that God can introduce the gift of eternal life into a world designed with the mechanism of death and its practical applications. After all, if flowers never faded, we would never see new blooms. Thank God for the beauty that death brings through new birth.
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