Is nature fallen or perfect?

Posted by admin on Oct 29, 2005 in Issues & Ideas | 0 comments

It is helpful for the believer to know that there is a large body of writings in the Bible that affirms nature and does not assume that it is fallen. These include the Psalms, Proverbs, and Job. In many passages in these books, the role of man is merely the observer who has to marvel (Job 38-39, Psalm 8 and 19, and Proverbs 30). Nature is wonderful in spite of man.

Where the problem lies, of course, is with humanity. Let us first remember that God declares all creation “good” (Gen 1:3); promises care in a covenant with all creatures (Genesis 9:9-17); delights in creatures which have no apparent usefulness to humans (Job 39-41); and desires, through Christ, “to reconcile all things to Himself” (Colossians 1:20). The very fact that God declares all creation good is the hard part for us humans to accept. It means that the rain is good, the thunder is good, the tornado is good, and the hurricane is good. In fact, hurricanes have probably been occurring quite naturally for the last 5 million years in the Atlantic basin (since the movement of the North American tectonic plate created the Isthmus of Panama, thus blocking colder Pacific ocean water from mixing with warmer Atlantic seawater).

Because of humanity’s fallen condition, we choose willingly or are sometimes forced by others to inhabit places that should be off-limits to people. A low-lying coastal estuary and river delta below sea level is no place for a city. The natural systems that God has created to act as a buffer between land and sea – where hurricanes make landfall – have been robbed of their ability to carry out their designed function. We see evidence of this sort of human folly day in and day out: landslides caused by undercutting of steep slopes and deforestation, devastating flooding caused by building on floodplains, record drought and rainfall, rising temperatures caused by human greed, and over-consumption of limited resources. There is no such thing as a “natural disaster.”  God’s nature works just as he intended: perfectly.

We can deal with Job 37 in this way: Elihu is speaking and we know that what he has to say is suspect because Job does not respond to his ramblings and in the end he is condemned along with Job’s other two “comforters” when God says, “I am incensed at you and your two friends, for you have not spoken the truth about Me as did My servant Job” (ch. 42). They are condemned precisely because they used the notion of punishment to make sense of his calamity. Knowing this helps us recognize that the book of Job is attacking the tendency that humans have of providing reasons for why things happen.

Searching for reasons is not a bad thing because it is a good teaching tool to drive home a principle (why did we lose yesterday’s game?). But like any good teaching tool, it has to make room for exceptions. I am unconvinced of the usefulness of the “fallen nature” model to “make sense” of natural phenomena. When humans are victims of these, it is largely tied to their socio-economic status. Ask the Thai peasants who could only afford to live in low-lying areas, or Pakistanis who could not afford to earthquake-proof their buildings like the Japanese, or the poorer residents of New Orleans.