Some weeks are not good on a personal level. I am stuck in one of those weeks, in such a month, in such a quarter, amidst a year that apexed early and is now all downhill. Sans skateboard, it's quite a scabby ride, which makes for moments like the past few days where the reality of the local (my life) rather transcended the reality (the wider world) that we like to blab about here on BALT.
And what happened while we were away? Well, the South African golfer Retief Goosen accused Tiger Woods, winner of this year's U.S. Open, of being an empty suit via the faking of an injury. Tiger would go on to cancel the rest of his season due to that "faked" injury.
Which reminds us of a certain type of golf fan who, after acknowledging Tiger's "okay-ness," will use every moment to drop the name Nicklaus, or point out that Tiger has a bad attitude, is too corporate, or lacks the style of players from the olden days. In other words, everything but the golf forms their opinion and the reasons given for the dislike, easily duplicated in more than a few other players, seem irrelevant at best.
Well we will see a lot of that type of attitude in politics, as people who normally vote Democrat for the issues look for every other reason to find fault with Obama and stick it to themselves via supporting a Republican. You will find the same faults, or larger, in the opponent, but Obama will be the recipient of sudden grave concerns that have nothing to do with really running the government and crafting the type of sound policy that won't land us exactly where we are today.
In the same way people find really stupid reasons to knock Tiger Woods and ignore his relevant achievements, so to with Obama, using this and that to mask deeply held biases that they dare not express outright (and barely realize they hold inside).
Of course there was more to the past few days than golf (or a South African golfer sounding like Hillary Clinton). Our heartland continued to suffer from the type of flooding that should certainly affect food prices in an unappealing manner. More importantly, one wonders how the people in Iowa will live, and where.
Some of this reminded me of a debate a friend and I were having about God and the existence of evil.
The general answer to the question of why evil is permitted was that removing evil from the world would demand violating man's freewill in ways large and small, significant and insignificant. God would be running round playing superman, making people eat broccoli or not drink or any number of things; he would be using all his energy to keep us from messing up our own futures. But such control creates men that are not truly free, and thus God does not get what he wants: free men who truly choose his company and want to be with him.
But, said my friend, "How do you explain natural disasters? That is not man's choosing." '
The floods in Iowa brought that back to mind, atop the earthquake in China and other disasters. My conclusion was that freewill is not linear, and static in time. You may in fact be living in the town on the banks of a river where your father chose to build his home, and despite his knowledge of what might happen periodically every fifty years. Even scientifically (and avoiding a Biblical drift), man moved out of Africa, choosing to relocate and set up house around the world, facing and embracing nature as he went.
The assumption by man in most cases is that weather and nature is a type of fixed force, like gravity, that must be navigated and that it can kill you. It is not in our control like our wills, but neither is gravity, and in the same manner that we avoid situations that make gravity most effective (like trying to leap from one building to another), we avoid weather if we know it to be harmful. It is not a surprise and is akin to confronting a wild animal. We know what happens when we encounter one and seek not to have the encounter. Nature runs hot and cold, automatically.
"Yes but that does not explain every natural disaster"
But we must go back to the idea that freewill is not linear, and the actions of a man today can affect the life of a person tomorrow. A pregnant mom using drugs today impacts the life of another in the future via her freewill.
That is why the decisions we make today in how we treat people and the world are so important. It is why the admonition "Love Your Neighbor" is somewhat the antidote to evil. To the extent that applies in ever wider circles, the level of evil (negative freewill) decreases.
"Yea but still, what if you get hit by lightning?"
My friend, ever wise, was arguing on behalf of a friend of his who saw her son die in a car accident. She was not fully grasping the freewill argument, and thought that acts of nature rather negated the freewill thesis.
My tendency is to avoid nature question because so many natural disaster end up being disasters due to choices by men (in location, housing construction, in monitoring or not monitoring weather). But there are other ways to look at it that don't lead back to freewill.
Of course, if God cannot possibly exist because of evil, or because of destructive weather, then we must ask, in what circumstances can that "ideal God" exist? Sometimes the better answer is revealed by flipping the observation.
The answer to that is that a perfectly benign natural world would prove the existence of God for those people who would disappear God for a harsh natural world. That is the God people are really asking for if they dislike a God who allows nature to occasionally take its destructive course.
But if nature must be reversed, and held in check, would the world even function as it does? More and more we discover that many elements in the natural world are interrelated. If all the bees in the world start getting sick, it has an effect beyond bees. Stop a bee sting by getting rid of a bees, or relegating bees to walking like the ants, and that has a massive impact on the plant world, and the world beyond that.
In essence, God would have to "recreate" the earth, that same earth that we know and love. Now we often imagine that God can easily just stop this or that, but the likelihood is that the science that we use and understand today is merely the far fringes of the "magic" of God, and that there truly is process involved. God creates, he does not do magic, and making the natural creation less harmfull would involve rebuilding the earth and the natural relationships from the ground up.
Thus, for God to stop evil, both manmade and natural, it would involve a combination of enslaving man and remaking the world we have grown used to. Kiss that honey goodbye. Turn that sunset (skin cancer) off. Stop that rain so those rivers don't flood and remove the plates from beneath the surface of the earth so we don't quake.
Or leave us with our reality: you can be God, allow man to choose you or not via freewill, and hand him the beauty of nature (and all that entails) and also hand him a way of living so that freewill is reinforced by love.
In looking at my own recent escapades it would seem that I am my worst enemy, and my will my greatest evil, boomeranging me constantly with my shortsighted intent. I suffer, as do those impacted by my choices, but that is hardly God's doing, nor will he cease to exist for not directly coming to my rescue thus far.
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