Truth
Tsunamis in God’s perfect design
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 06 February 2005
Tsunamis in a Perfect World
What did the terrible loss of hundreds of thousands of people in the Indian Ocean tsunami tell us about God? Christians prefer to avoid such questions because there is no answer that puts God in a good light, a shocking conclusion when God is supposed to be perfectly good. Christians can do nothing but wriggle on this hook, but let us be kind to them and draw slightly different conclusions from the obvious ones that God cannot exist or is indifferent to the loss of human life if He does.
Christians today have fallen back to Paley’s argument for Nature being designed by a designer—none other than their own perfectly good God. But an almighty and perfect God, if He is also the designer of the world we live in, must also be a perfect designer. How, then, are the manifest imperfections in God’s design of the world, so far as we are concerned, explained? The tsunami killing off myriads of people utterly randomly cannot be intentionally part of God’s perfect plans… Can it?
Clarence Darrow, the famous US lawyer addressed the question in a chapter of his autobiography, written in 1932. We are the inconsequential inhabitants, along with the rest of life on earth, of an inconsequential fleck of matter in some inconsequential corner of the universe. We live here for a moment in time, fighting desperately to conserve that inconsequential moment. Our sheer insignificance is what many of us cannot comprehend, so we react against the obvious by allying ourselves with a protector bigger and more powerful than the universe itself.
Well, not all of us, but those who say they are religious do. Being religious means for most of them, like our own religionists, the Christians, that they feel safer in their brief moment of life, and readier to face inevitable death by maintaining the pretence of an absurd eternal extension of their inconsequential lives.
What it really signifies is that we all have an instinct to to preserve our moment in the sun—our lives. Our instinct to cling to life is so strong, we would rather manufacture in our own hands a mirage of life that matches that of the universe itself personified as an almighty father. It is this pathetic hope that generates faith. Faith is a psychological callus that protects our delicate understanding from hard reality. But the reality remains. We die all too soon, and our only good is to make life better for our successors.
These were Darrow’s conclusions after he had considered the whole qiestion of design in the light of reality—reality like the Asian tsunami. A world designed by a perfect being as the home of His most favoured creation is curiously full of horrors for perfection. Yet Christians are fond of relating the “perfect” harmony of things natural—not as wonders in themselves, but as the wonder of God’s imagined “design”. The argument in favour of a perfect God based on His design of the world for His favourite depends on it being perfect for us. Plainly, it is anything but perfect for the majority of people, and perhaps for all of us. The lion will lie down with the lamb, we are told when kingdom comes. Why, then, in the interval has God designed lions to eat herbivores like lambs? And, if they and we can live forever without eating other animals, what is God’s perfect purpose in making us kill each other in the meantime?
An Imperfect and Absurd Design for a Perfect Designer
God’s designs seem not just imperfect but absurd, and they are certainly often obviously imperfect even when Christians praise them for their perfection. The eyes of free-swimming molluscs in the oceans are better designed than those of God’s pet animal. Why has God given the lowly relatives of slugs better eyes than popes and saints? Fundamentalist Christians refuse to consider the answer. It is that life has imperfectly evolved, not been perfectly designed. It has not been made according to God’s best plan but has slowly adapted from previous forms. Evolution does not necessarily yield perfection. It’s very point—adaptation—implies the need to change. Successive life is constantly changing according to the circumstances, but even when the circumstances remain unaltered for long periods, life continues to change according to the random loss of genes from a population—genetic drift. So these designs of God’s seem strangely malleable for perfection.
What, too, do Christians mean when they fancy they see signs of perfection? They tell us the signs of it are order and harmony… like the products of the tsunami? There is order and harmony in the universe, and there is disorder and chaos too. If anything, the overall trend is to disorder and chaos, measured by scientists as a quantity called entropy. Entropy is increasing as time continues, but a local source of energy can counter this tendency, and create order. So God must be divided into batteries of lesser designers each one responsible for the bit of the cosmos it has the energy to create. It does not sound too monotheistic.
But, if order and harmony signal the work of God then what god do disorder and chaos signal? Christians have to take care here to maintain their pretence of monotheism. If disorder and chaos are the work of the Devil, then Christians are admitting that Christianity is dualistic. It has two gods, a good god and an evil god who are fighting it out for the world. This is the basis of Reagan-Bush-speak of “evil-empires”, “evil-axes” and battling evil. But since Christians talk of God—the good one—as the author of everything—He is The Almighty—you have to wonder why The Almighty choses to pussyfoot around with his feeble enemy causing so much trouble and anguish in the world. Of course, if God is not almighty because His enemy is just as powerful, you then have to wonder which one is Bush’s God. We only have the President’s own word that his God is the good one, but when the President is the face of the US Straussists who openly admit to using lies as a tool of political control, his word is more than slightly suspect.
Why is the Universe not Obviously Perfect?
Clarence Darrow wondered why the almighty designer did not design the universe to be obviously perfect. The astronomer, Ptolemy, thought the heavenly bodies traversed perfect circles, but they do not. They traverse imperfect circles like ellipses and other conic sections. God could have made the planets describe perfect circles, or better still, being God, He could have made them traverse perfect squares or triangles, as Darrow suggested. It would have been all the more obviously designed and all the more difficult to explain by natural laws.
Is it the a sign of a designer that we live on an insignificant planet in the solar system which is itself on the spiral arm of an innocuous looking galaxy in no particularly prominent position in the universe. Other planets in the solar system are bigger and more magnificent looking. Is God hiding the earth from the Devil in the choice of obscure cosmic positioning He has given it?
Is the Devil prowling around trying to find which obscure little planet God has hidden His pet creation on? If this is the scenario and the Devil has not yet found us then the world should be perfect. The wicked god has not yet had the chance to spoil the good creation. Since the world is not perfect by any means, the Devil must have found us and begun to spoil the good creation. God’s plan of hiding us behind the gas giants away from the Satanic malaise has failed.
Then again, Christians might say the gas giants serve the function of sheltering the earth from Satan’s bombardment of comets launched from the Oort sphere towards the sun. Thank goodness for that! But it shows that God is not almighty for if He were He would simply stop all the comets without needing to resort to planetary barriers. Moreover, this protection is manifestly all too fallible because comets still get through, and they did frequently in the early billennia of the universe, as the scarred face of the moon shows.
It might be, that God is throwing flares to the Devil to distract him from God’s true pets who are well hidden elsewhere. Human beings then are just decoys. So much for Christian smugness.
In fact, the solar system shows every indication of having condensed from a globe of gas and dust whose momentum led to it forming a disc of matter around the sun from which the planets themselves eventually condensed. An earlier hypothesis of the formation of the solar system, cited by Darrow, proved faulty when tested mathematically and was discarded, illustrating how science progresses by hypothesising and testing.
If all of us had believed in the truth of the Christian hypothesis that we learn only when God reveals something to us, then we should have still been in the Dark Ages. Science became possible when the Church stopped being strong enough to impose its dogmata. Only 500 years ago, Galileo was obliged by the Church to retract his novel ideas contradicting Christian bigotry, but despite its victory over Galileo, the Church was already losing its grip on the European mind. Since then, we have learned far more for ourselves than God had revealed in the whole of previous history.
Yet Christians think God has chosen white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or Catholics, or Zulu Zionists or Pentacostalists or… whichever of the splintering Christian sects on earth, to act on His behalf in the whole of the universe. Poor people of the Andromeda nebula who will never know of God’s sacrificing His only begotten son on their behalf. They cannot be saved according to the last but most respected though least reliable of the Christian evangelists, John, who wrote with revealed assurance that people can only be saved through Christ—God in human form! Doubtless the Andromedeans do not count as being people, no matter how intelligent or pious they might be in their own way. They are sure to be classified in Bush xenophobiglottia as part of the the evil axis. Science demostrates the absurdity of the Christian delusion that they are God’s chosen.
Which Species is the Perfect World Designed for?
Darrow brings us back to earth where the recent tsunami is hard to forget. How does the earth upon which we live show any of God’s purpose of providing a place for His chosen tribe of Christians? As for all life, the earth has offered formidable obstacles for unwary humanity, the tsunami serving as a typical if severe example. Human beings have constantly altered the environment they lived in precisely because they wanted it to suit them better. It shows it was not designed as an ideal place for us. Ah! Suffering, say Christians, is all part of God’s plan. It is good for the soul. Human have learned how to relieve suffering because they have suffered! God must have deliberately made the world uncomfortable to make lazy people work hard to change it for the better!
If we were to look at the earth and decide which species God had designed it for, we might plump initially for fish or dolphins because deep oceans cover most of its surface. Then we might reconsider and say insects because there are so many of them. Human life has hitherto been confined to two dimensions on the surface of the land until recently when we used the scientific method to fly aeroplanes and go beneath the waters in submarines. Only in the last 100 years have we enjoyed the third dimension like many insects, fish and birds, except when we fell out of trees or tall buildings.
God, Christians lead us to believe, created these spatial dimensions, but designed human beings that could only use two of them, and a third a bit. Fish, birds and many insects had the use of all three dimensions in their world, and so did bats and whales, evidence that mammals could evolve to use them. Humans never did it until they discovered the scientific method. But many Christians, often the ones who are most certain they feature large in cosmogony as God’s chosen pets,, do not think science is any part of God’s plan. They are against it as the Devil’s own work meant to lead humanity into vanity, pride and hubris, sins that Christians cannot imagine they have—except in negligible ways, small and easily forgiveable.
A gnostic interpretation of the Christian scenario is that God is trying to show the truth about the world, but the believers are so enthralled by Satan that they cannot appreciate it. The Judaeo-Christian God is Satan, and, in his scheme, the true God, whose pleas they have been taught to ignore, is denigrated as the Devil. Christians’ propects if this is correct are that they will discover the truth and have their own selfishness and greed demonstrated to them both at the same time—the moment of their permanent extinction.
The natural habitat of humanity is the woodlands of the continents which themselves are less than a third of the earth’s surface. Most of the dry land is too frozen or too arid for people to live in comfortably. So, God plainly designed much of the earth not for mankind but for penguins, camels or reptiles. Christians claim that human beings have the stewardship of the planet because God granted them it, and the consequence has been that the deserts are growing and fertile land is disappearing because of the greed and selfish mismanagement of the land by God’s pet and, we are assured with His approval. It does not need a degree in quantum physics to deduce how it will end. So God’s or the Devil’s ultimate joke is that His elect will be praying for salvation as the melting glaciers meet the encroaching deserts swallowing up human conurbations.
That might be just fine. God did design the world for His favourites but they were indeed dolphins, penguins or crabs. In the meantime a parasite, Homo sapiens, temprarily infected the world claiming God’s approval. God made them self-destruct thus saving His actual favourites!
Delusion
The truth is that the illusion that the world is perfectly designed to realise God’s purpose of saving His pet humans is actually a delusion. It is a delusion of soft-headed no-marks too stupid to realise their smugness will be their destruction. Earthquakes have often killed innocent people by the myriad, but now we know that melting icecaps and rising seawater can alter the pressure on geological faults triggering earthquakes and tsunamis. If these things are “designed” at all, they are “designed” by those who will not cease their exploitation of the earth under the pretence that it is a stewardship granted by God. Otherwise they are the natural tremors of a world that is far from a perfect design, and an impossible design by a perfect and almighty designer.
The earth is shaking and shivering like a giant jelly when viewed on the geological timescale that Christians think is God’s. God seems to have designed the earth to shake any life on it off it! Continents have divided and moved apart only to collide again having travelled round the globe.The coast of California is not attached to the north American continent. It is sliding off into the Pacific ocean, and before long a lot of Christians in San Francisco or Los Angeles will know about how perfect God’s design really is. The prospect is that the innocent deaths by the thousand will be in the US not in distant Asia.
Neither God’s purpose or His design is evident to anyone who is not intent on self-delusion. However, plagues and parasites are not uncommon. Did God send plagues of locusts to punish impious farmers quite indiscriminately, or is His purpose to provide for hungry locusts by sending farmers to grow choice foods for them. Has God promoted humanity as a suitable way of melting icecaps to give a bigger environment for His truly favourite species of intelligent whales that will emerge once the pollution in the water has followed the disappearance of the people. The Greek philosopher pointed out that horses would depict their gods as horses, and doubtless the god of whales is a whale. Maybe the world of 60 million years hence will have been designed by the whale god, and whales will be whistling in undersea temples his praises as the Creator. The god of the whales would be certain to make a better job of the world than the God of the Christians.
