Who Was This Guy Anyway?

I ran across a couple of articles written in 1987 and 1989 by some guy who thought not only that the world is ruled by a good God, but that he could prove it! How weird is that?

Lots of people believe that there is a good God, somewhere, but that this God does not do very much to help the world except maybe in some special once-in-a-while miracles, but that the universe pretty much operates as if there is no God. That is, they are not atheists. It’s just that God is pretty much irrelevant to the way the world works. But this guy saw the goodness of God operating all around him. I’ve got to hand it to him; he amassed a lot of disconnected information from his voluminous knowledge into a big steaming pile of assertions. He was apparently Piled higher and Deeper.

To his credit, this author spent his entire first article admitting that the natural world did not, in fact, reflect the God of love. Even the things that appear peaceful and beautiful actually resulted (by evolution) and continue to function (by ecology) by means of selfish processes. Pretty flowers, for example, are selfishly efficient at attracting pollinators, and singing birds are selfishly establishing territory and attracting mates. He admits, then, that the way for a Christian to look at what nature tells us about God is to look at it figuratively (as Jesus did in parables). The problem the author overlooks, however, is that the figure depends on the observer, resulting in circular reasoning about a God of love. This circular reasoning deliberately omits many important things. Jesus said, If God so feeds the birds of the air; but what about the ones God doesn’t feed, and they die?

Then, in his second article, the author describes a “pervasive theme” in the natural world and in human history, when viewed as one might view a piece of literature: Blessings emerge from adversity. I’m sure you can think of lots of examples; the author drew together a mixed grab-bag of them. An ape, or what the Bible calls “dust of the ground,” became capable of understanding the world. How’s that for a blessing from privation? He cites lots of Bible examples of God elevating the humble to positions of prominence, such as Joseph, David, the prophets, in fact the whole nation of Israel and the whole church. Our own spiritual development, he says, depends on our optimistic response to challenges.

Then he turns to the natural world for lots more examples. Some of the greatest evolutionary innovations occurred in response to natural disasters. Right from the start! Oxygen in the air was a primordial poison, but the cells that could not just tolerate it but use it became the ancestors of nearly all life forms now on the Earth. And on and on for billions of years. Mammals spent more millions of years skulking in the shadow of dinosaurs than as the dominant animal life forms as they are today, from our perspective. Altruism has evolved. Parasitism evolves into parasitism. He even points out that rates of extinction in the fossil record have been declining, a point he got from reading Stephen Jay Gould. Even the acclimatization of individual organisms to changes in their environments (which is not evolution), and ecological succession (which is not evolution either), are examples of life proliferating in adversity. He ends the second article with a quote from a largely-forgotten Scottish botanist who looked at the world the same way.

With all of these examples, how could the pattern not be true? But the author could not say that the pattern was miraculous. The best he could manage was to say that blessings out of adversity was God’s “activity” in nature. Like, how is that any different?

Of course blessings can arise from adversity. But we only hear about the successful ones. We hear the hero stories of people who confronted terrible suffering, and not only persisted but lived to tell about it. We do not hear from the ones that got killed because they are dead. We hear the story of Malala Yousafzai, shot by Islamic terrorists who attacked a girls’ school and who worked for peace, receiving a Nobel Prize (this happened after the articles were published); we do not hear the stories of the girls who died.

Of course blessings can arise from adversity. Adversity creates opportunity, and some organisms are able to capitalize on it. A forest fire releases nutrients from dead plant matter and allows an influx of sunlight. Too bad about those trees that died, but the wildflowers bloom like crazy. But that is what wildflowers do.

This author’s view is a beautiful artistic view of the world, but it tells us nothing, nothing at all, about God. The author was, and is, happy, even if this vision is a fantasy.

As you have figured out, the author was myself, back in my evangelical days. Though I can no longer assert the actual truth of these statements, I really enjoy thinking about the things about the natural and human world that I like, especially when I need some diversion from the things I don’t like.

The articles appeared in the September 1987 and March 1989 issues of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith.