Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Is God Really In Control of Everything?


ABOVE: The 'King of Kings' statue that was incinerated when lightning struck it.

In an earlier post on Quantum Mechanics, I noted that an acausal basis (from the interfering observables in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) suggests God can’t control the cosmos at the atomic scale. In response, I pointed out that if the universe is acausal and indeterminate (as all our experiments show) then it isn’t controllable.

Now a news incident adds more reinforcement to that, as we learn a bolt of lightning (basically composed of quantum level electrical charges) shot out of the sky just north of the I-75 near Monroe, Ohio on Monday (June 14) and destroyed the statue of Christ called "The King of Kings".

The 62 foot tall statue (the attached image shows it partly under construction in 2004) was made of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame. Evidently nothing was left to salvage or even see, according to eye witnesses, as it was incinerated.

The statue, one of southwest Ohio's most familiar landmarks, had stood since 2004 at the evangelical Solid Rock Church along Interstate 75 in Monroe, just north of Cincinnati..

Now, this incident introduces a number of questions.

As we know, the evangelicals are all needling unbelievers to "accept Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Savior” in order to achieve "salvation". This statue, near an evangelical church, was therefore a key prop to sustain the faithful with an iconic image, as it lured the wafflers or those leaning toward “redemption” but still unsure if brainjacked evangelicalism was the correct path.

Given, all this why would the all-powerful God allow it to be destroyed? Especially given its symbolic import according to. the bible punchers.

If God is omnisicent, and knew before all time a lightning strike would be released at that place and time, could he not have redirected the lightning to just strike some bushes or a rock as opposed to this statue of his only begotten son? Inquiring minds really want to know!

Finally, what can we take away from this event? Does it have MEANING, if so what? Or, is it meaningless? If meaningless, bear in mind you evangelicals are then disarmed in terms of reading significance into other events, including in Arkansas 8 weeks ago when a person huddling inside was spared as tornadoes struck.

Maybe there are a few possible answers here.

1. A real God exists, and is getting fed up with the evangelicals’ overbearing, arrogant ways in his name. Perhaps he was trying to send a message by allowing lightning to smack down the largest Christ statue in the country.

2. Some (e.g. Socinian) form of God exists but is unable to control events at the quantum level – including lightning discharges constituted of rapidly flowing electric charges (electrons)

3. No deity of any kind exists, the cosmos is purposeless, and the lightning strike and destruction of the statue was yet one more example that we inhabit a random universe, where random or purposeless events occur at the physical level. A lightning strike can whack a human….or an oversized Christ statue, it makes no sense to reading anything into it. Nor does it make any difference if you're in a church seeking safety or not. Sure, a guy was spared some weeks ago as he huddled inside a church as tornadoes whirled outside, but how come in 1994 seven little girls were killed when the church they were hiding in collapsed when a twister struck in Ala.?

Inquiring and probing minds want answers from the evangelical apologists. But we somehow doubt we'll get any really sound answers.

1 comment:

Caleb Shay said...

Maybe there are three possible answers here.



Don't worry, good ol' pastor Mikey will come up with some far-fetched rationalization so his desperate followers can keep their sanity (or is it insanity?)

He always does!

No matter what happens he either gives some ridiculous explanation to take the heat off him, or no explanation! ("We cannot fathom the Mind or will of God who in his infinite glory sought to destroy that statue. It is not ours to question him, but to accept it")

And his foolish followers will all jump to accept it.

In other words, he gets to have his cake and eat it, while atheists are always left to defend their positions based on whatever events unfold.

Well, I'm sorry but this is ONE event he can't explain, wash away or defend! IF JC is the most important figure in the Evangelicals' missionary armory, and if this figure was destroyed as it stood on the property of an EVANGELICAL chuch (the Solid Rock Church) then he'll have to come up with much better comebacks than it was "God's will and it's not on us to understand".

We'll wait and see. In any case, this ought to be good. I can tell from checking him dumb blog he's strill trying to figure out how to answer yours!