Spoiled by choice? Gerald Drewett’s Thought for the Week
‘Unconditional love can only be achieved through the exercise of freewill.’
Did God invent Covid 19? My first thought is to say ‘What a stupid question’. But if God was responsible for the big bang, the act of creation, then isn’t God responsible for everything that follows, whether directly or indirectly?
Did the big bang create a universe that is imperfect, or did it create the only possible universe that could evolve into unconditional love?
The author of Genesis – perhaps Ezra in the sixth century BCE – had a limited scientific understanding, and relied on folklore handed down through the generations. He wrote a mythical story about a perfect land called the Garden of Eden, which Adam managed to foul up. In the Genesis story that’s why humankind is saddled with an imperfect world. In the last four centuries the scientific approach has been moving us away from myth to fact, while acknowledging there are always questions it cannot answer. Every scientific fact is as much a provisional statement as any spiritual revelation. Both are ongoing, and some would see both as directly related.
We know there was a big bang, and that subsequent evolution has been an engineering miracle, or a trillion miracles. Evolution, or God’s Holy Spirit in action, is moving creation by degrees towards a future described in Revelation as ‘a holy city, the new Jerusalem’. Time may eventually recreate the Garden of Eden, the place of unconditional love where God is. But the journey to unconditional love is only fulfilled when everything in creation makes the right choices, choosing ‘life not death’. Everything must possess the unconditional right to choose, and wrong choices are made. If humankind chooses to exploit animal life we get death, or Covid 19. Covid 19 was not in God’s plan.
Unconditional love can only be achieved through the exercise of freewill, choosing the path of love. But humans on our evolutionary journey are still immature, and choose to trash nature and natural law for selfish, thoughtless ends. Hence in unhygienic markets where live and dead animals are sold for human consumption, viruses cross to the human world, which has no immunity. Some viruses have a low death rate, some have a high death rate, but the potential to decimate humankind is there. We have known for some time that this was a possible outcome.
God didn’t invent Covid 19, humans did. All we can do from here is choose more wisely.
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