"acts of God" (?)
From J. Vernon McGee on the radio on Monday-- in commenting on Job 1...
McGee had a great observation about the phrase "acts of God". Starting with the servant of Job who attributes one of the disasters to "the fire of God" (1:16), McGee notes that it is interesting to hear secular society use this phrase at all. Beyond that, it's interesting that the disasters are attributed to God-- rather than Satan. McGee recommends "acts of Satan allowed by God". It's a bit unwieldy but more accurate within Christian theology.
posted by Eric Schansberg @ 2:57 PM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
Natural disasters are neither acts of God nor of Satan. They happen at random, of their own accord. (Many disasters are predictable: earthquakes happen regularly on various faults.) But most natural disasters are really human disasters. Or as engineers say, earthquakes don't kill people, buildings kill people.
One interesting thing to consider: Our planet is geologically active, and therefore dangerous. But our planet owes its thick atmosphere to volcanism, which is linked to plate tectonics, which in turn is the main cause of earthquakes. So it may be argued that it is necessary for there to be geological disasters for this planet to be habitable. Perhaps this says something about the difficult theological question of the existence of evil. Or perhaps not.
One more thought. I have read that Europeans abandoned the idea of God using natural disasters after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. This was an unspeakable disaster with catastrophic loss of life. Lisbon was a devoutly religious country, and no one could understand why Lisbon deserved such punishment.
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