Why Didn't God Create a More Chaotic Environment?
With all the bad things happening in the world, plenty of people find themselves drawn to ask why God created a Universe that can become so chaotic (for example, where volcanos or tsunamis can happen). The answer to that is due to the consequences of Adam and Eve disobeying God and losing the Garden of Eden:
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
Genesis 3:17-19
Thus, some of the difficulties of nature that we have to deal with (such as thorns, thistles, weeds) are a direct result of Adam and Eve disobeying God and therefore having their perfect natural environment fall away. (Although not stated, it is quite likely that this result also extends to other issues of our physical world such as natural disasters). The Garden of Eden certainly seemed to be much more suited to human habitation than our current environment.
However, far fewer people tend to ask the related question: Why didn't God create a more chaotic environment? When we think about it, our living conditions are fairly tightly controlled. Many places on Earth are still very compatible with human life, despite not being the Garden of Eden anymore. Temperatures, while they can range from very cold to very hot, are still within a prescribed range.
Now, God could have made things a lot more chaotic. He could have set up his natural laws to something very unpredictable, such as: "Every other day there is a 'climate swap' where climates around the world are randomly swapped around, thus getting snow in Ethiopia or extremes of heat in Canada'. Or how about: 'Anything humans make themselves become in a perpetual state of self-rearrangement. For example, if your door opened to the front walk yesterday, it may well be located four feet up tomorrow, while windows also move location.' And so on. Not only would the physical toll of this kind of environment be great, but we would have to become much more emotionally resilient as a species to deal with the emotional toll of an unpredictability on this level.
Or for those who prefer a 'harder science' version of a chaotic environment, consider if Earth had a rapid and erratic pattern of orbit around the sun, sometimes coming closer to it and sometimes further away, making temperatures fluctuate suddenly. This orbit would be unpredictable as yet by humans (this also assumes other celestial bodies are nearby complicating the laws of gravity beyond our two-body equations). If Earth occasionally swung close enough to asteroids or other bodies, we would additionally get huge tide surges at unpredictable times. So it is certainly possible we could have had a more chaotic environment.
Take-home message:
If we find ourselves getting angry at God over the physical environment here on Earth, we should equally well give thanks that our environment is not more chaotic than what it is.
If you found this post interesting, you might also like these related posts on this blog:
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
Genesis 3:17-19
Thus, some of the difficulties of nature that we have to deal with (such as thorns, thistles, weeds) are a direct result of Adam and Eve disobeying God and therefore having their perfect natural environment fall away. (Although not stated, it is quite likely that this result also extends to other issues of our physical world such as natural disasters). The Garden of Eden certainly seemed to be much more suited to human habitation than our current environment.
However, far fewer people tend to ask the related question: Why didn't God create a more chaotic environment? When we think about it, our living conditions are fairly tightly controlled. Many places on Earth are still very compatible with human life, despite not being the Garden of Eden anymore. Temperatures, while they can range from very cold to very hot, are still within a prescribed range.
Now, God could have made things a lot more chaotic. He could have set up his natural laws to something very unpredictable, such as: "Every other day there is a 'climate swap' where climates around the world are randomly swapped around, thus getting snow in Ethiopia or extremes of heat in Canada'. Or how about: 'Anything humans make themselves become in a perpetual state of self-rearrangement. For example, if your door opened to the front walk yesterday, it may well be located four feet up tomorrow, while windows also move location.' And so on. Not only would the physical toll of this kind of environment be great, but we would have to become much more emotionally resilient as a species to deal with the emotional toll of an unpredictability on this level.
Or for those who prefer a 'harder science' version of a chaotic environment, consider if Earth had a rapid and erratic pattern of orbit around the sun, sometimes coming closer to it and sometimes further away, making temperatures fluctuate suddenly. This orbit would be unpredictable as yet by humans (this also assumes other celestial bodies are nearby complicating the laws of gravity beyond our two-body equations). If Earth occasionally swung close enough to asteroids or other bodies, we would additionally get huge tide surges at unpredictable times. So it is certainly possible we could have had a more chaotic environment.
Take-home message:
If we find ourselves getting angry at God over the physical environment here on Earth, we should equally well give thanks that our environment is not more chaotic than what it is.
If you found this post interesting, you might also like these related posts on this blog:
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