John Polkinghorne on Japanese tsunamis
John Polkinghorne explains why Japanese people have to die.
'O.k. you might say, wouldn’t it have been better for God to have created a world with a solid crust, in which there were no tectonic plates. The answer is no it wouldn’t, because not only do tectonic plates slip, but also in the space between the plates mineral resources well up from the interior of the earth and replenish the surface resources of the earth, and that is absolutely essential in the ongoing history of life. If that wasn’t able to happen, life would very soon, in evolutionary terms, die out on the surface of the earth.'
'O.k. you might say, wouldn’t it have been better for God to have created a world with a solid crust, in which there were no tectonic plates. The answer is no it wouldn’t, because not only do tectonic plates slip, but also in the space between the plates mineral resources well up from the interior of the earth and replenish the surface resources of the earth, and that is absolutely essential in the ongoing history of life. If that wasn’t able to happen, life would very soon, in evolutionary terms, die out on the surface of the earth.'
posted by Steven Carr at 3:11 PM
4 Comments:
Right, because an omnipotent god can't replenish minerals without deadly quakes.
Mind you, Polkinghorne's god could have changed all that water into wine, so at least people could have had a decent drop of claret as they were dying.
There are some miracles Polkinghorne's god can do with water, but saving drowning babies is perhaps not as important on the agenda as getting some free wine for a wedding Jesus was attending.
I like how any reasonably intelligent person can figure out how the world could have been created in a better way to reduce suffering, but God lacks this kind of imagination. I don't know if there is a less convincing rebuttal than saying, "God created things as good as they could possibly have been to also allow x, y, and z."
It would have been more impressive if the tsunami had reared up at the beaches (like the waters of the Red Sea reared up either side of the Israelites) and then returned to the sea.
What a great bit of PR that would have been.
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