Could a God of love create cancer cell, rattlesnakes, and earthquakes?

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Please no simplistic, cookie cutter answers! Think about the depth and degree of God’s love before answering. Please don’t casually dismiss, demean or denigrate God’s love.

christiantraditions.webs.com
 
Um. . .yes. Rattlesnake venom can be used for good purposes (not just creating anti-venom to treat bites). Cancer cells are mutations of ‘good’ cells, not a totally ‘new’ creation, and understanding of the cells and their work has led to ways to battle those cells. Earthquakes are a natural product of plate movement and volcanic quakes are responsible for the islands of Hawaii among other things. . .
 
Same reply as I posted on your other almost identical thread! 🙂

God doesn’t create earthquakes etc. The geography and geology of the earth does. The earth has a molten core. The continental plates have edges. And humans have compromised the health of the planet in many ways.

God doesn’t create cancer cells. We pollute our atmosphere, contaminate our food sources, we eat the wrong foods laced with additives and dangerous fats. We succumb to stress, and a whole range of things we do over time can even damage our genes and sometimes we pass on those damaged genes to our descendants.

Rattlesnakes developed their protection against predators and in order to kill prey, as have so many creatures by camouflage, by developing scales, horns etc, by developing poisons (and not only animals but also leaves of many trees)in order to protect themselves from predation.
God doesn’t cause accidents, we do, God doesn’t cause illnesses, but quite often we do, however obscurely.

A great many things that humans blame God for, are caused in some form or other by humans.
 
regreib said:
Please no simplistic, cookie cutter answers! Think about the depth and degree of God’s love before answering. Please don’t casually dismiss, demean or denigrate God’s love.
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Do you wish you hadn’t been born into this world? If you don’t it suggests that the drawbacks you mention don’t outweigh the immense value and beauty of life. Then you have to explain how these drawbacks - and thousands of others - could be eliminated…

We cannot have everything for nothing!
 
Trishie said:
Same reply as I posted on your other almost identical thread! 🙂

God doesn’t create earthquakes etc. The geography and geology of the earth does. The earth has a molten core. The continental plates have edges. And humans have compromised the health of the planet in many ways.

God doesn’t create cancer cells. We pollute our atmosphere, contaminate our food sources, we eat the wrong foods laced with additives and dangerous fats. We succumb to stress, and a whole range of things we do over time can even damage our genes and sometimes we pass on those damaged genes to our descendants.

Rattlesnakes developed their protection against predators and in order to kill prey, as have so many creatures by camouflage, by developing scales, horns etc, by developing poisons (and not only animals but also leaves of many trees)in order to protect themselves from predation.
God doesn’t cause accidents, we do, God doesn’t cause illnesses, but quite often we do, however obscurely.

A great many things that humans blame God for, are caused in some form or other by humans.
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Excellent post Trishie and thankyou for summing up in better words than I could use !
 
Read the Book of Wisdom. God didn’t create death and He takes no delight in the suffering of mankind. End of argument.
 
regreib said:
Please no simplistic, cookie cutter answers! Think about the depth and degree of God’s love before answering. Please don’t casually dismiss, demean or denigrate God’s love.

christiantraditions.webs.com
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The short answer is that God alone is perfect.

Perfection is part of God’s nature. For something to be perfect, it would have to be God. Anthing that is not God must be less than perfect. Less than perfection is in the nature of creation. God created the world “Good” and “Very good” but not perfect because perfection is part of God’s nature alone. Hence we have imperfect things like earthquaqes and rattlesnakes and you and I. Genesis itself bears witness to this…

**Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals that the LORD God had made. (Genesis 3:1)**God created the serpent!

So, creation is not perfection. We need to get over it and realize that unlike rattlesnakes and earthquakes, you and I can choose to move toward God and perfection or away from God and perfection and unlike rattlesnakes and earthquakes, you and I have been given a way to do so.

Mr. Chrsterton, where are you?

-Tim-
 
I think we have a tendency to make God just a bigger version of ourselves. We wouldn’t create a world with cancer, so why should God? If we were running the shows, things would be so much better, right? 😛 However, every day in the world we come across evidence that God doesn’t always think like us.

For example, when preying mantises mate, the female bites off the head of the male and they continue coitus for up to six hours while she gnaws on her mate’s neck. God created that. He thought that was cool. The very thought of that makes our flesh crawl.

We discount the otherness of God when we assume that He could have created the world better. Assuming that God is as far above us as we claim, how likely is it that we have the correct view of what’s “better”? God is, in some ways, like us, but it is ridiculously anthropocentric to assume that he is just a big version of us.

So, too, His goodness is very likely a goodness that we can’t fully understand. If we could understand it, then why would we worship Him? It would just be worshiping something fundamentally like ourselves. We worship God because He is fundamentally other.
 
AdriannaJean said:
For example, when preying mantises mate, the female bites off the head of the male and they continue coitus for up to six hours while she gnaws on her mate’s neck. God created that. He thought that was cool. The very thought of that makes our flesh crawl.
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Your remark that “He thought that was cool” may well give the wrong impression that God deliberately designed every detail of life on earth and enjoys the spectacle of pain and suffering.
So, too, His goodness is very likely a goodness that we can’t fully understand. If we could understand it, then why would we worship Him? It would just be worshipping something fundamentally like ourselves. We worship God because He is fundamentally other.
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God is fundamentally other but He is certainly not evil. He didn’t command us or animals to kill, rape and torture - not because He couldn’t but because He wouldn’t!
We worship Him because He is Love… 🙂
 
tonyrey said:
Your remark that “He thought that was cool” may well give the wrong impression that God deliberately designed every detail of life on earth and enjoys the spectacle of pain and suffering.
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Well, as strange as that may seem, that was my intention. Now, let’s assume for a second that A) God is not a utilitarian (as Christians ought to, meaning that He will not use a lesser evil to cause a greater good) and that B) God created the world (every detail of it, including mantises, but not the individual choices of moral agents). If God is not a utilitarian, He could not allow for suffering in the animal world because it results in a greater good. If God created the world and there is suffering in the world that was not caused by moral agents (humans) then, it follows, that God allows for the suffering in the world, not to protect free will (because that only applies to moral evil (choices) not natural evil (suffering)) but for some other reason. If we also accept that God is not a utilitarian, we must conclude that suffering is not evil, but that it is actually a good that we, in our flawed human perspective, only see as evil. And this also makes sense when we look at scripture. How did God redeem humanity? Suffering on the cross. How did God prove Job’s loyalty? Causing him pain (or allowing Satan to cause him pain).
tonyrey said:
God is fundamentally other but He is certainly not evil. He didn’t command us or animals to kill, rape and torture - not because He couldn’t but because He wouldn’t!
We worship Him because He is Love… 🙂
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I never said that God is evil. I’m saying that His goodness completely transcends our notion of moral goodness and that His love is so much bigger than our notion of love that to try to equate it with human love is to do it a great injustice. We may see little bits of it but we must never assume that we’ve seen the whole picture and to assume that God’s love is like our love is to do just that.

To get around the fact that God created a world with predation and cancer (while trying to say that God intended neither of those things) we have to do some pretty crazy mental backflips. However, if we accept that our notion of goodness and love are either flawed or limited, we no longer have to pretend that God ought to play by our rules.
 
Your remark that “He thought that was cool” may well give the wrong impression that God deliberately designed every detail of life on earth and enjoys the spectacle of pain and suffering.

Well, as strange as that may seem, that was my intention. Now, let’s assume for a second that A) God is not a utilitarian (as Christians ought to, meaning that He will not use a lesser evil to cause a greater good) and that B) God created the world (every detail of it, including mantises, but not the individual choices of moral agents). If God is not a utilitarian, He could not allow for suffering in the animal world because it results in a greater good.
Sure the greater good is that the vast majority of animals enjoy being alive and do not suffer very often. The alternative would be not to create the universe at all. This implies that we shouldn’t have children because we know they may have to endure suffering.
If God created the world and there is suffering in the world that was not caused by moral agents (humans) then, it follows, that God allows for the suffering in the world, not to protect free will (because that only applies to moral evil (choices) not natural evil (suffering)) but for some other reason. If we also accept that God is not a utilitarian, we must conclude that suffering is not evil, but that it is actually a good that we, in our flawed human perspective, only see as evil. And this also makes sense when we look at scripture. How did God redeem humanity? Suffering on the cross. How did God prove Job’s loyalty? Causing him pain (or allowing Satan to cause him pain).
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If suffering is never evil why is it wrong to cause unnecessary suffering? Have all the philosophers and theologians - like St Thomas Aquinas - been mistaken in attempting to solve the Problem of Evil?
God is fundamentally other but He is certainly not evil. He didn’t command us or animals to kill, rape and torture - not because He couldn’t but because He wouldn’t!
We worship Him because He is Love… 🙂
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I never said that God is evil. I’m saying that His goodness completely transcends our notion of moral goodness and that His love is so much bigger than our notion of love that to try to equate it with human love is to do it a great injustice. We may see little bits of it but we must never assume that we’ve seen the whole picture and to assume that God’s love is like our love is to do just that.
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If God’s goodness completely transcends our notion of moral goodness there is no way in which we can distinguish His activity from that of Satan! He must have the right to torture His creatures unnecessarily…
To get around the fact that God created a world with predation and cancer (while trying to say that God intended neither of those things) we have to do some pretty crazy mental backflips.
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What is crazy about believing that the world is not directly controlled by God but is subject to the laws of nature He has created? Why would God create disease and deformities and cause disasters if they weren’t necessary?
However, if we accept that our notion of goodness and love are either flawed or limited, we no longer have to pretend that God ought to play by our rules.
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If there are no limits to the suffering God can inflict on us how can He be a loving Father? It contradicts the fact that the Son of God healed the sick and alleviated suffering when He was on earth…
 
Dear OP,

Some questions:
  1. What is there about Love that would exclude any one of your list or anything else of any sort in Creation?
  2. Why do you think that God is separate from Creation?
  3. Do you equate Love with feeling “good” and evil with suffering?
  4. Why are pain and suffering distinct from each other, and how?
  5. Other than the standard rote acceptance of ideas about God and Man, what is your actual relationship with God, The Son, and existence, as such?
  6. Why do you think, or not think, that there is a religious answer to your question? Why do you think religion, any religion, can give you answers?
  7. What is the differences among faith, belief, and knowledge? The similarities? Are they ever confused?
  8. Do you understand the word “anthropomorphize” and its relation to religion and beliefs in general relative to human nature?
  9. When and how did you acquire your faith, from whom, and how did they acquire it? Is it absolutely certain that they made no mistake whatsoever in learning and transmitting that faith? Ever? Any of them?
  10. How did you come to question what God could create? Why does it matter you you?
  11. What if God (or Love) is not what you think or what you are told? If not, then what?
  12. If you or anyone backed off the planet and had no prejudice about belief systems, what would become apparent? If you had access to all of history and discovered that some things were not reported accurately, or in a misleading way, what then?
I ask these questions having no doubts myself about God or about Love. but you ask questions that may bring a different light on your experience than the ordinary range of common reference, though many have asked such questions. So be careful. One man said “The pursuit of Reality is the most dangerous undertaking. It will destroy your world.” The other side of that coin is “In the twinkling of the eye, all things shall be made new!” But there is that time while the coin is in the air, and the eye hasn’t yet twinkled. It may not be easy, and you may be surprised by what you find. It will certainly be different from what you believe and what you’ve been told.

Love is ALL.
 
This is just a tentative theory and I may be writing a dissertation on it if it’s viable:

I believe that all things were affected by the fall including cancer cells, rattlesnakes, and earthquakes by God substituting an alternate time span before the fall which became affected, in a sort of time paradox.
 
asker42 said:
This is just a tentative theory and I may be writing a dissertation on it if it’s viable:

I believe that all things were affected by the fall including cancer cells, rattlesnakes, and earthquakes by God substituting an alternate time span before the fall which became affected, in a sort of time paradox.
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No matter how long the time span may have been it wouldn’t alter the fact that cancer cells, rattlesnakes and earthquakes had natural causes regardless of human decisions.
 
Evil is not a thing, so it cannot be created. Evil is an absence of the goodness of God. There is a continuum that ranges from evil to perfection. God is the nth degree of perfection. (That is one of St. Thomas’ proofs for the existence of God.)
Sickness came into the world as a result of original sin. We would have been immortal if Adam and Eve had not sinned. As it is, we have to be separated from our bodies until the Second Coming of Christ, when our body and soul will be reunited.
Pope John Paul II wrote a beautiful encyclical on suffering called Salvifici Dolores. He says that suffering brings out love, so it is not all evil. Catholics believe in redemptive suffering. That is, our suffering can be offered up for the salvation of others. Christ allows us to participate in His mission of salvation. “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24).
 
@ Bettyg51: Yes, while there is merit in what you say about evil there is also evil from misconception, as in getting the way wrong message from a partially overheard conversation or thinking that a stick is a snake and jumping a way and hurting yourself. There is also evil from ignorance: in the middle ages if you drank water instead of beer you got sick and died. In fact beer was served after mass in many places. And you may have even exceptionally good intentions about doing something and because there is something about that scenario you don’t know, you might do harm. There may be a rationalization that these are instances of the goodness of God, but one might guess that the contrary situation would be omniscience, which the first parents probably didn’t have even in Eden, as witnessed by eating the fruit of the tree. And they did that without knowing good or evil, so there is that question too: if they didn’t know good and evil, how were they to blame? There would have been no distinction for them between obedience or disobedience in terms of being aware of consequence. There may be a theological explanation for that, but I haven’t heard it.

I would submit as well that many things that are indifferent as to moral value we take personally and make them evil because we don’t like them. Those might include avalanches, ships sinking, the bad weather that caused that, circumstances of any kind that are beyond our control, etc. God made those things. They are His thoughts. We make them evil by prejudicially favoring only good consequences for ourselves, even devastating things we bring about on ourselves…
 
Tonitz said:
@ Bettyg51: …There may be a rationalization that these are instances of the goodness of God, but one might guess that the contrary situation would be omniscience, which the first parents probably didn’t have even in Eden, as witnessed by eating the fruit of the tree. And they did that without knowing good or evil, so there is that question too: if they didn’t know good and evil, how were they to blame? There would have been no distinction for them between obedience or disobedience in terms of being aware of consequence. There may be a theological explanation for that, but I haven’t heard it.
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Yes, ignorance is an excuse, because one has to give full consent for something to be a mortal sin. However, on one thing we disagree. The reason Adam and Eve were punished severely was that, before they sinned, they had infused knowledge, but chose to disobey anyway. We do not normally have infused knowledge unless we have an extraordinary grace, so our sins are passed only to the third and fourth generation, not to all mankind as the sin of Adam and Eve was. What we lost besides infused knowledge was also immortality, immunity from suffering, and immunity from the onslaught of the disordered passions of the sense appetites. It was not evil for us to lose those gifts because they were supernatural; that is, above our human nature.
 
Here are my personal thoughts - I hope they are not ultimately ill-considered or offensive
Cancer is a byproduct of the amazing will in life to go on and modify and evolve. Species dont stand still - life goes on.
The fact that it can have deveastating consequences on the human body is a result of course of Man’s (or Adam and Eve’s) decision to reject God’s plan of paradise for us. In that moment, long long ago, we(our patenernal and maternal ancestor) sided with the flesh and we reap the consequences.
 
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