Creator God, Evolving World

Chapter 5

83 ChaPtEr 5 human Freedom and God’s Providence r obin Ryan, in the introduction to his book on God and suffering, recounts the story of a couple he calls Mary and John.1 Mary told him how, six months previously, John had been in a severe car accident. Driving in the dark on a wet and winding road, John had encountered a car coming at him at a high speed. The head-on collision left the other driver injured, though he did survive. John’s car was completely demolished but John walked away without a scratch. The policeman who came to the scene was incredulous, even calling John’s survival a “miracle.” In gratitude that his life was spared, Mary and John told this story over and over in the subsequent months, highlighting the way in which God had saved John’s life. Then, three months after John’s accident, the teenage daughter of some close friends was killed in a car accident. Mary and John surrounded them with love and walked closely with them through their grief. But Mary and John, while still grateful that John’s life had been spared, felt that they could no longer talk about John’s escape from harm as a matter of God’s protection. If God’s providence had been at work in John’s accident, what were they to say to their friends—that God had not been provident when their daughter was killed? These are the issues we need to explore in this chapter. In chapter 3 we considered the relationship between God and creation in terms of the classical understanding of God as a transcendent and necessary cause of all that exists. In particular we noted how an understanding of God as primary cause, or cause of being, gave full scope for science to understand creator god, evolving world 84 the universe, leaving divine agency at a different level of explanation. We further explored this in terms of God’s sovereign election or choice of our world, our universe, from all possible universes, choosing ours to exist, to be, to be real. The act of election is a single act that encompasses the totality of our existence, from the beginnings of the cosmos in the Big Bang, to the final fate of that same cosmos, whatever that fate might be.2 God’s act is outside of time; it is timeless, but it creates space, matter, and time. Further, this stance is fully congruent with the way in which modern science views space and time. This is, of course, a big claim and it raises some very difficult questions for believer and nonbeliever alike. Mary and John’s experience raises questions about whether God is good and, if so, how God seemingly fails to act when tragedies occur. If God chooses this universe, in all its details from beginning to end in a single act, why does God allow there to be suffering and evil? Why does God choose a world in which suffering and evil occur? And is God then not responsible for suffering and evil? Such questions are not abstract ones. When we look at recent human history there have been unimaginable horrors, both humanly created, such as the Holocaust, and naturally occurring, such as recent tsunamis in Asia. At a more personal level, we all know friends and loved ones who have suffered and died from causes both natural and unnatural . Should we lay all these at the feet of God and demand an explanation, like Job railing against God? As we have seen in chapter 3, some of the theologians who have objected to the classical understanding of God have done so precisely in order to absolve God from responsibility for such horrors. More significantly, for some people these horrors are proof that God simply does not exist. How can an omnipotent and loving God allow suffering and evil to occur? Either God is not omnipotent, unable to eliminate them, or God is not loving, unwilling to eliminate them. The Christian God is then viewed as internally contradictory and hence nonexistent. This is a common, and some find powerful, atheist objection to God’s existence. We do not claim to have a complete response to these difficult questions, but we hope to provide ways of thinking about them that at least lessen their power. A second set of issues arises for believers around the question of how God acts in the world. If God...