Friday, January 15, 2010

Sir John Polkinghorne on Haiti Earthquakes

Polkinghorne writes 'Yet if there are tectonic plates, they will also occasionally slip, producing earthquakes and the huge ocean swells that accompany them. You cannot have one without the other. We all tend to think that if we had been in charge of creation we would have kept all the nice things and discarded all the bad ones. The more we learn scientifically how the world works, the more clearly we see that this is just not possible, for fruitfulness and destructiveness, order and chaos, are inextricably intertwined.'

God really couldn't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

People had to die as a result of earthquakes or Polkinghorne's God just wouldn't have been able to make Planet Earth.

What do people think God is, omnipotent or something?

2 Comments:

Blogger Paul S. Jenkins said...

I fail to see how John Polkinghorne can accommodate a coherent thought in his head.

"The more we learn scientifically how the world works, the more clearly we see that God is just not possible, for fruitfulness and destructiveness, order and chaos, are inextricably intertwined and God had nothing to do with it."

4:57 PM  
Blogger Russ said...

Here Polkinghorne admits that his version of a Christian god, though it might be omnipotent now, apparently was not omnipotent when it created the earth and, seemingly out of some measure of gosh awful luck, ended up with jiggly tectonic plates. Somehow Polkinghorne's god was constrained by natural law. Omnipotent means that nothing is impossible, including creating an Earth where earthquakes do not happen.

1:28 PM  

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