Leviathan

Pastor’s Epistle—July A.D. 2014 A

Damn the Mosquitoes!

Just what the heck did God make mosquitoes for anyway?

Such was the angry thought on my mind this morning as I attempted to walk my dogs through a biblical swarm of bloodsucking bugs. I may have broken the second Commandment a few times—and may or may not have condemned all mosquitoes to eternal damnation (as if I had that authority)—but even after returning home and taking a hot shower, the question retains a certain validity. Why does Nature make us suffer?

It’s relatively easy for us to understand moral evil. Human beings have free will, and are ultimately responsible for our own choices and actions. We often choose poorly. But natural evil is a bit more problematic. Our world is full of parasites and predators, earthquakes and tornadoes. Why did God set up Creation to allow for natural disasters and unavoidable suffering? Why are we afflicted by diseases and mutations and freak accidents? Just what the heck did God make mosquitoes for anyway?

Presumably God could have set up a perfect world. And perhaps He did, in the beginning. We understand the Garden of Eden to have been a terrestrial paradise, a place wherein God, Man, and Nature lived in perfect harmony. Adam and Eve chose to break that harmony—to abandon their posts as the stewards of Creation—and thus was Eden lost to us. We were cast out by our own choices into the wilderness, where hardship has been our lot ever since. In some mysterious way, it seems that we broke the world.

And yet, no matter how we interpret the early chapters of Genesis, it appears that the world has been full of natural disasters and cutthroat competition for a very, very long time. Thomas Aquinas pointed out that Man was not made in perfection: Scripture states that we were formed from base earth and only later placed in Eden. The rest of the world seems already to have contained natural evil; it was already imperfect. Jewish thinkers tell us that this was, in fact, the point: that God made the world “not quite finished,” and gave us the task—as His stewards, His sub-creators—of perfecting it. In Hebrew the term is tikkun olam, which refers to our human responsibility of building a better world.

Christian thinkers point out that a flawed world allows for weakness and suffering, which, oddly enough, have always been essential to bringing out the highest and noblest virtues in humanity. When we move beyond our baser needs for worldly pleasures, ego-satisfaction, and even societal contribution, we seek instead a spiritual fulfillment that natural evil cannot harm. Not only Christians, but also Hindus, Buddhists, and Greek philosophers agree that the world pushes us to this. And it’s true. But we have to be careful that in pointing out the good results which God may extract from natural evil, we do not credit God with creating said evil. When accidents occur, when loved ones die, when cancer is diagnosed, we cannot say “God caused this for your own good.” What sort of God would that be? Certainly not the One Who wept with us, bled for us, and died for our sins on the Cross.

I think it truer to say simply that the world has a freedom of its own. If human beings have free will, Nature can claim free process. This is not to say that Nature chooses good or evil, as we may choose, but that she contains within her a certain wild freedom, a chaos both violent and beautiful that cannot quite be tamed. We see this free process at work in everything from natural selection to quantum mechanics.

This is backed up not only by cutting edge science, but by the Bible itself. Our world is neither deterministic nor chaotic, but a strange blend of the two that we call probability. And what is probability, really, but chaos with limits? In Genesis God does not dry up the waters of chaos but gives them bounds and says, “This far, and no farther!” So it is with the orbits of electrons and the chaoplexity of the subatomic world. Yes, there is order, but there is also just enough randomness to keep us hopping. Think upon Leviathan, the chaos-monster, whom God created “to sport in the waters.” Nature is neither God nor Man, but her own beast. And when we refuse to live in harmony with her, as we were built to do, she may yet remind us of her power.

Someday our intended harmony will be restored. Someday God, Man, and Nature will live in perfect balance, as in the days of Eden. Until then we must suffer the disasters of disharmony, trusting not that it is God’s will that we suffer, but that even the most terrible chaos can be calmed and raised to new life by the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.