If all these things do not have such a purpose, what are they there for? To illuminate the love of God?
What I see is that the horrors of this fallen world are “natural selection” at work. Rather than a mechanism that favours diversity, it does the converse, limiting the expression of life.
While organisms exist as individual beings in themselves, they are also components of a larger ecological system. In that light, the concept of natural selection reveals itself to be a distortion of how the world works. This garden, made perfect, has been corrupted by sin, reaching into the depth of its emergence into existence in every moment from eternity. Mankind isn’t some random add-on, but the reason for the existence of the cosmos, and therefore what we have done has affected all of it. I would say this is true to the farthest galaxy, although that reality points to how infinitesimally small we are.
Let’s consider the Galapagos as an example of how diversity happens. There we see tortoises with longer necks and a saddle shaped shell that allows them to reach the fruit of cactuses that grow tall, distinct from those that are found on an island where the plant is short, growing more horizontally. The epigenetics of organisms allows for their capacity to relate optimally within their environment. This ability of a “genus”, which is to say the “soul” of organisms ancestrally linked, is built into living beings that they may better participate in the whole that is the world and to diversify with the ongoing blooming of all creation.
We can break down the physical components of any living being into the atoms and the fundamental properties of nature. Creation as a temporal event required their coming into existence prior to that of beings that could reproduce themselves and order the basic material substances that are taken from what is outside, to give themselves a physical form. Left to the inherent properties of atoms, the entire cosmos is reduced to an empty rock collection. As awesomely powerful as a star going supernova might be as it is known by God, it is amazing that we are able to share its wonder with Him. The order that allows us to do this, that shapes our being, is not emergent from the physical, which merely forms the substrate of our existence in time and space.
Earthquakes and asteroids exist as natural phenomena that reflect the organization of matter needed to construct this world and the physical dimension of who we are. They are laft to impact on us because we have wounded the connection to He who brings us into being. The initial order that existed at the creation of the universe, has been damaged as a consequence of our turning away from Him, putting ourselves at the centre. Viruses, famine and war accompany the disorder. This was not the way it was meant to be and ultimately, in and through Jesus Christ they are transcended, and the world will be whole once more.
