DavidSays

What was God thinking?

Newspaper headlines read: Landslide buries a whole village in Mexico, fire razed down hundreds of homes, or Tsunami death toll reaches over 150,000. The usual reaction from people: “Jesus, why did God allow this to happen? What was God thinking?

No answer. Nobody knows the answer. And, as usual, heaven is silent.
While I was in Bible College, I remember my professor in Hermeneutics was confronted with almost the same question. And the student was saying, “If God is God, then He is not good.” The simplistic question was, “If God is in control of everything why does He allow bad things to happen to good people?”

The theology professor’s answer, “I don’t know. I can’t explain God. If I will be able to explain God, then I am God myself. Sorry, I really don’t know. When you reach heaven ... ask.”
“I don’t know, man, I think the professor is not making any sense,” the student next to me responded under his breathe.

It is tough for self-respecting individuals to accept the idea that some things happen for no reason. People want everything sensible, especially during aftermaths of great natural disasters.
Do natural disasters happen because ours in an imperfect world? Didn’t the God of the bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob already put order to the “formless and chaotic” world as shown in the first chapter of Genesis?

Author Harold Kushner, in trying to explain his randomness theory, surmised that the world is still in a state of imperfection. Said Kushner: “In the biblical metaphor of the six-day Creation, we would find ourselves in the middle of Friday afternoon. Man was just created ‘hours’ ago. The world is mostly orderly, predictable place, showing God’s thoroughness and handiwork, but pockets of chaos remain...”

He was saying Creation is still in progress, taking into consideration that the world took billion years to take shape, not six days. If that’s the case, then science can, at least, prove that the world is getting more and more perfect. Meaning, less and less natural disasters happen as eons and centuries go by.

No, scientists say, that is not the case. The idea that the world may be diminishing as it is turning into perfection runs opposite to the proven scientific perspective that “every system left to itself, will move in the direction to more chaos and randomness.” Albert Einstein himself thought that quantum physics, which is based on the hypothesis of things happening at random, is a bad science. He tried to disprove it. He believed that the world is not a system left to itself. He maintained “God does not play dice with the cosmos.”

When Job, the bible’s icon of personal disaster, accused God as a cruel and punisher God and dared to call for an audience with Him, he did not get what he wanted. Instead, God told him that his (Job’s) words are “without knowledge” and subjected Job with a litany of rhetorical questions, to each of which Job must plead ignorance. God did not address Job’s suffering, but His divine discourses succeeded in bringing Job to complete faith in God’s goodness without his receiving a direct answer to his questions (Job 38-41).

Christian theologians’ view on randomness of natural disasters usually goes with the idea that “God does not cause misfortunes. Our sufferings are consequences of who we are — mortal beings living in a world of good and evil and governed by inflexible natural laws. When great disasters strike, our questions should not be, “Why God?” and “Where was God?” Rather, we should look at how people respond with love and compassion to the suffering and the afflicted. See if we can see where God is from that vantage point. (The author may be reached at davecasuco@yahoo.com)