Dear People Whom God Loves,
GOD’S INTERACTION WITH THE WORLD – IX
In our discussion of the problem of evil, we last looked at moral evil. We now turn to natural evil.
Natural evil is evil that is not caused by humans. For example, hurricanes, earthquakes, diseases, the dead ends of evolution. As an aside. Humans can be a part of natural evils by building shoddy houses in earthquake prone areas, and by polluting waters and the rest of the environment.
We are not accustomed to think of non-human nature as free. It is true that non-human freedom is not the same as human freedom. John Polkinghorne uses the term free process to describe non-human freedom.
One of the blessings of the scientific discovery of evolution and the quantum world of electrons, quarks, and glucons is the realization that our world does not work like a machine. It is not an automaton. It does not rigidly proceed in a predictable fashion.
The law of the universe as science now understands it is a combination of predictability and unpredictability. It is partly stable and partly flexible. It is a combination of necessity and chance. There is a dynamic mixture of order and disorder. There are limits to what happens but there is freedom within those limits. This allows great progress, but also allows a lot of malfunctioning.
The blessing of this mixture of stability is that it allows for creativity. Some of us want stability. Some of us want flexibility. We are both wrong. If all were stability, there would be rigid sameness. If all were flexible, there would be chaos.
Indeed, a healthy society needs the mixture of stability and flexibility. This is true of church, business, government, and various smaller groupings. Many of our fights are between the stablists and the flexiblists. I see these fights as stupid. Alas, I am subject to that stupidity too.
More next time.
Smile, God Loves You,
Father Clay
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