Hilton Head Island, SC – February 21, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 1:26-31; Genesis 2:4b-9,15
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. – Genesis 1:31
God and Nature
An earthquake and tidal wave kill thousands of people in Indonesia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, and as far away as the east coast of Africa. Why? The epicenter of an earthquake is underneath the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. Two hundred thousand people are killed, and millions are left homeless. Why? Tornados and floods rip through the American Midwest at Christmastime, 2015. Why? An ebola epidemic sweeps through West Africa, and thousands die or are sickened. Why? A three-year-old child is diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer, and within six months she is dead. Why? A man walking down a city street is killed by a bullet from a bungled drive-by shooting. Why? Muslim terrorists attack the editorial offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, killing several people and wounding others. Why?
One year after the Charlie Hebdo incident, the cover of the anniversary issue of the publication showed an artist’s depiction of God as a terrorist with an assault rifle strapped to His back fleeing the scene of the crime. The caption beside the cartoon said, “One year later, the assassin is still at large.” The implicit idea is that people supposedly devoted to God perpetrated the murders, so ultimately it is God who is to blame for the carnage.
Does God convince people to kill people? Does God cause earthquakes or tidal waves or tornados or floods? Does He create epidemics or cancer or other illnesses? When bad things happen to good people, or to bad people for that matter, does it mean that God is the divine instigator behind all or at least many misfortunes?
The creation story in Genesis is truly one of the most important and theologically cogent stories ever created by any human beings in the long history of the human race. Considering how long ago the story came into being (it is minimally 2500 years old and perhaps as old as 3000+ years), it is astonishing that ancient Hebrews were so essentially correct in what they said about how the universe was created. Even the order of things in the six days of creation is basically correct in what it declares. I don’t know what Charles Darwin would have said, but he should have applauded the ancient writers in their evolutionary sequence, even if creation as we know it took far, far, far longer than a mere six days.
At the conclusion of each of the days of creation, the story tells us that God surveyed what He had created on that particular day, and it always says that “it was good.” God knew what He was doing.
Or did He? What about the natural disasters or the illnesses? What about the murders and the human-caused mayhem? Who is to blame, if anyone? God? Us? Who?
Many people equate God and nature, meaning that whatever happens naturally is ultimately due to the plan and intention and causation of God. Thus if someone is killed or injured by a natural disaster, God willed it. If a terminal illness afflicts someone, God, for reasons of His own which we shall likely never know or understand, intended it to happen. If climates change, at this or any other point in history or pre-history, God meant for it to occur.
It seems to me that such thinking, while it may be temporarily comforting in a perverse sort of way, is ill-conceived. It assumes that God intended tightly to control nature, both human and otherwise, and that everything that happens therefore is determined by God. But it seems obvious that cannot be the case. Human depravity does not originate in God. Accidents, such as when a limb falls from a tree and kills a passerby below, are not determined or caused by God. Natural disasters are not caused by God. It is nature, not God, which causes natural disasters and natural anomalies.
But what does that mean? It means that certain events occur because natural forces cause them to occur. If tectonic plates beneath the surface of the earth or the ocean push up against one with too much pressure, an earthquake may happen. If a mass of warm air drifts under a mass of cold air, a tornado may happen. If a tree has limbs, which all tress do have, eventually every limb shall fall off, and it might injure someone innocently strolling by. If people smoke, they are much more likely to get lung cancer than if they don’t smoke. Laws of nature have consequences. God doesn’t orchestrate all that; nature orchestrates it, for the better or the worse, and either we work with or against nature.
But why doesn’t God exercise control over nature? He’s God, isn’t He? Indeed he is. However, if anything is physical, it is subject to all the slings and arrows of physical entities. That means that tectonic plates shift and weather becomes violent and mountains eventually erode into dust. And accidents happen. And people get sick. God doesn’t guarantee these things shall occur, but often nature does, because that is what nature often does.
I contribute to an organization called Nature Conservancy. They purchase land all over the world to prevent it from being abused or developed. They also publish a magazine, also called Nature Conservancy, which has fascinating stories about this and that. A couple of months ago they had a story about Mexican free-tailed bats which live in a cave north of San Antonio and under a bridge in Austin. From March to October, every evening fifteen to twenty million bats fly out of Bracken Cave. Each night they consume 140 tons of insects. I don’t know exactly how you quantify such a figure, but that’s what the writer said. Every year they save farmers in the area $741,000 in insecticides and crop damage. You might say it is actually $752,000, and I wouldn’t dispute it. There are only 1.5 million Mexican free-tail bats under the Congress Avenue Bridge in downtown Austin on Interstate 35, so presumably they do only a tenth as much good as the Bracken Cave bats. But over the course of the summer hundreds of thousands of Austinians and others gather to watch the launch of the Congress Avenue bats. The cave, the story said, has the highest concentration of mammals in the entire world. I don’t know how you measure that either, but that’s what was reported. In any case, these small flying furry critters are amazing, and they are marvelously adapted to keep a certain part of the natural order in Texas in balance. And anything that keeps anything in Texas in balance is a good thing.
Nature, at least on this planet, is much more harmonious with itself than it is disruptive. Left on its own, nature is far more positive than negative. The problem is this: one of the millions of animate species on the Earth, the one called Homo sapiens (the term means “wise human”) frequently disrupts nature. People build houses along the American shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean, and big storms come and wash away the beach, and the houses are also washed away. Farmers around the world till soil that shouldn’t be tilled, and it blows away. International oil companies pump oil from the ground everywhere there is oil to be pumped, they turn it into gasoline, we use gas to power our cars, over time the climate changes, and the polar bears no longer have enough ice to traverse to do what polar bears do, and they are slowly moving toward extinction.
Nature proposes, but man disposes. We are the only species capable of thwarting nature in a major and potentially lethal way. The same issue of Nature Conservancy also had a story about the Malpai Range. It is an area adjoining the borders of Mexico, New Mexico, and Arizona. The Malpai was able to sustain itself until the mid-1800s, when ranchers started to raise cattle on its sparse grass. Now most of the land has turned to absolute desert, where scarcely anything can live. The Nature Conservancy bought a sizeable chunk of the 502-square-mile piece of land, and it will not allow cattle to graze there, in hopes that thin grass will return, which will feed a few desert creatures, and no Malpai cattle shall end up at McDonalds or Burger King.
Evolution is simply an astonishing phenomenon. (The fact that some people strongly deny it is a phenomenon in itself, but that is another issue.) How can a whale --- or a bat --- be a mammal? Why is the koala, which looks exactly like a small bear, not a bear? What drove the passenger pigeons into extinction? It was human beings, without question, and we know exactly when and how. Will we be able to save the California condor or the panda or the Atlantic cod? Endangered species can’t save themselves; only human beings can do that. But will we?
Evolution took many millions or even a few billion years to bring the natural order to where it is today. Evolution has done its part; have we done ours? It is absurd to blame God for natural disruptions which neither nature nor God can avert. But an all-out nuclear war can destroy every living thing, with the possible exception of cockroaches. Then contemplate how long it would take to evolve the planet back to where it is now, depending on the survival of what we in these parts call the palmetto bug. It wouldn’t bother me if Mexican free-tail bats ate every palmetto bug in the Palmetto State as an evening repast, except that they would probably choke on them, because the bats are so small and the bugs are so big.
“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). What a marvelous world we live in! And when troubles come, as inevitably they do, most of the troubles are caused by human beings, not by nature. Nature doesn’t wage war or commit acts of terror or use chemical or biological weapons. Only humans can do that.
And only humans can wonder about whether it is God or nature or humanity which cause certain things to happen. So far as we can determine, even the most intelligent of the other animals besides humans, the dolphins or chimpanzees or orangutans, do not question who makes what happen; they just live with it. But we wonder about it, and it may promote some cerebral gymnastics in us from time to time. Furthermore, only we of all the other species can find ourselves stymied by those gymnastics. All other creatures great and small just get on with their lives, doing what comes naturally, neither sowing nor reaping nor gathering into barns. And if disaster comes, either they survive it and go on or they die and presumably are neither long mourned nor remembered, except by us.
Apparently God expected more of us than of any of His other species. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). The animals do what they can to conserve the planet, but they presumably can’t think about doing it. We can. We are the guardians of nature, its advocates, its adoptive parents. God has never assumed that responsibility as part of the divine job description. He could do it, I suppose, but for reasons only He shall ever fully comprehend, He chose not to. He made humanity and nature equal partners in the care and nurture of this moderately small planet in this probably very small solar system.
Robert Browning wrote that “God is seen God in the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and in the clod.” Not everyone sees God there, and many do not see Him anywhere, because they believe He does not exist and therefore cannot be seen. But we do believe, and so we see Him, in the cobalt blue of the winter sky or the sand of the beach or the lofty pines reaching almost certainly not to heaven but certainly to the sky, or in the busy squirrels, or in the ants, marching in single file to and from their minuscule earthen palaces, clearly knowing what they are doing but causing us to wonder how such tiny creatures can know anything.
Thomas Chalmers was one of the greatest preachers Scotland ever produced. He wrote, “It is truly a most Christian exercise to extract a sentiment of piety from the works and appearance of nature. Our Saviour expatiates on a flower, and draws from it the delightful argument of confidence in God. He gives us to see that taste may be combined with piety, and that the same heart may be occupied with all that is serious in the contemplations of religion, and be, at the same time, alive to the charms and loveliness of nature.”
Fyodor Dostoevski wrote The Brothers Karamazov, which Miss Holstein, our high school senior English teacher, told us is the greatest novel ever written. In it the wise old Russian Orthodox priest, Father Zosima, declares to Alyosha, the most spiritual of the four brothers Karamazov, “Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”
“This is my Father’s world,” the well-known hymn declares. It is a spiritual world, but it is also a natural world. We tend to have a warm and fuzzy view of nature so long as we think it behaves itself. But nature is not an ever-smoothly-running flawless operation. Sometimes it is, as Tennyson observed, “red in tooth and claw.” The hyena kills the rabbit, the leopard kills the hyena, the lion kills the leopard, and the lion, if he had enough members in his pride, kills the cape buffalo. Nothing else kills the cape buffalo, except perhaps a 60 caliber soft-nosed cartridge. And villagers in Nepal are killed by earthquakes, islanders in the Caribbean or the Philippines by hurricanes or typhoons, and fishermen all over the world by perfect storms which descend upon their fragile boats with ferocious fury.
If we live in a physical world, which we do, we are subject to all kinds of physical laws, as well as physical anomalies. Not even God can contravene the laws of nature. Were He to do so, the entire universe would collapse into itself in a black hole so dense nothing could survive within it. Were that to happen, it would be the reverse of the Big Bang.
Having created His universe, and that miniature speck in it known by us earthlings as Planet Earth, God is not about to destroy it or any of us. We shall all naturally die, as the natural universe may also die sometime in the incomprehensibly distant future. But for now, God, nature, human beings and all other creatures and beings in the world and beyond, shall co-exist. God has done His part to create an harmonious universe. It is now up to human beings to continue to augment the music of the spheres.