Naturally Optimized

Why We Can Be Grateful for “Natural Disasters”

With all the suffering, devastation, and death caused by hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, droughts, wildfires, and other natural disasters, many people question a Creator’s existence, and especially his power and goodness. After all, they argue, God could have created a realm for us that’s free from such nightmares. He could have created a universe with different laws of gravity, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism, and with different nuclear forces and physical laws.

Different Physics to Come

According to the Bible, a disaster-free, wholly good, perfectly wondrous creation is exactly what God has planned for humanity’s future. The apostle John writes in Revelation 21 that in the new creation, death, mourning, and pain will have no part—which implies nothing will decay or wear out. Thermodynamics will no longer be in effect. He adds that light will no longer come from astronomical objects like the Sun and other stars. Instead, God’s glory will illuminate everything. Therefore, light in the new creation will not be electromagnetic radiation. John’s depiction of a cubical or pyramidal structure of enormous size implies the absence of gravitational forces. How can we infer this? Gravity would force any body of comparable size into a spherical shape.

In this new creation, no need exists for thermodynamics, electromagnetism, or gravity because the risk that anyone living there will exercise free will for any purpose other than good is now gone. In other words, the possibility of anyone’s choosing to sin or do wrong will have been eliminated.

But what about now?

One of the ways God is working today to bring about an end to sin and evil is by allowing humans to experience thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and gravity. These laws of physics serve as a deterrent from, and limitation on, the damage caused by sin. They guarantee that as we humans commit evil, extra pain, work, and time will be needed to repair the damage. The more sin humans commit, the more pain, work, and time is required for repair and prevention.

God designed humans with an aversion to extra pain, work, and wasted time. This aversion is strong enough that parents, teachers, and governing authorities use it in their efforts to discipline children, students, and adults for their other-than-good attitudes and actions.

At the same time, the laws of physics serve to help expose our inability to be and do good perfectly and consistently. All who long for goodness come to recognize their lack of it. Those who seek to find it come to realize that the Creator, the source of all love and goodness, would not have left them without hope. Jesus of Nazareth, the only perfectly good human, identifies himself as “the way, the truth, and the life” on our behalf.

Remarkably, the laws of physics that both train us and restrain us must be exactly as they are to make possible our deliverance from the consequences of our incapacity for goodness. Jesus took on himself all the consequences of our lack of goodness. He suffered and died in our place. However, he didn’t stay dead. He arose, bodily, from the grave.

As Jesus explained to his disciples before his execution, “In this world you will have tribulation [thermodynamics, electromagnetism, gravity, and ongoing exposure to sin and evil], but take heart; I have overcome the world [with all its physical limitations]” (John 16:33, ESV).

Optimized Physics, Optimized Earth

In this world, the laws of physics and countless physical characteristics of Earth serve to ensure that hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, ice ages, floods, droughts, diseases, parasites, wildfires, etc. are set at the optimal frequency and intensity to benefit humanity’s well-being while minimizing the devastation caused by such things. For example, too few hurricanes, or hurricanes of lesser intensity, would reduce the input of sea salt aerosols and bacterial and viral particles into the atmosphere. A reduction would lead to decreased rainfall over landmasses and would thereby limit food production.

Hurricanes and, to a lesser degree, tornadoes function as global thermostats. Hurricanes prevent tropical and subtropical ocean temperatures from rising to levels deadly to fish and other ocean animals and plants. Hurricanes and tornadoes lower dangerously high temperatures on landmasses. Hurricanes deliver chlorophyll to continental shelf ecosystems.

Plate tectonic activity, which produces earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, and geysers, plays a crucial role in building islands and continents. Without strong, continual plate tectonic activity, all Earth’s landmasses would eventually erode into Earth’s oceans. Instead, Earth’s plate tectonic activity remains at a fine-tuned level that compensates for Earth’s erosion. Thus, the percentage of Earth’s surface covered by landmasses is steadily maintained at an optimal level for both terrestrial and marine life.

Volcanic eruptions can be catastrophic to people and animals living nearby. Nevertheless, many people choose to live near volcanoes because volcanically enriched soils produce nutrient-rich bumper crops. Likewise, geysers can cause serious injury and even death. However, geyser basins also are valuable assets. They help heat homes, buildings, and farms and produce low-cost electricity. Iceland, for example, fulfills nearly all its space-heating needs and draws 26 percent of its electricity from geothermal power plants.

Earth’s plate tectonic activity drives the silicate-carbonate cycle, whereby silicates in Earth’s landmasses plus carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere are converted into carbonates and sand. This cycle transforms an economically low-value material, silicates, into industrially high-value carbonates and sand.

An invaluable byproduct of the silicate-carbonate cycle is the ongoing removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, its removal via the silicate-carbonate cycle helps keep Earth’s surface cool. Over the past 3.8 billion years, this ongoing cooling process has perfectly compensated for the Sun’s increasing brightness. Thanks to just-right levels of plate tectonic activity throughout Earth’s history, the warming of Earth’s surface due to the Sun’s gradually increasing brightness has been balanced by the cooling of Earth’s surface due to carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere.

Earth’s steady, strong plate tectonic activity has maintained several other life-essential cycles. Carbon, water, and oxygen are continually cycled through Earth’s atmosphere, crust, asthenosphere, and mantle. Three past tectonic events in Earth’s history dramatically accelerated Earth’s deep oxygen cycle. These events raised the oxygen content in Earth’s atmosphere from less than 0.001 percent to its present 21 percent.

For the past 200 million years, plate tectonic activity has kept Earth’s atmospheric oxygen level at a steady 21 percent. Birds and mammals thrive at this level. This quantity of atmospheric oxygen also makes wildfires possible, and soil studies reveal how crucial wildfires are for civilization.

Forest fires regularly remove dead vegetation on forest floors—vegetation that inhibits tree, shrub, and grass growth. Burning off this organic litter gives seeds and seedlings access to minerals in the soil. This burnoff also stimulates nitrogen-fixing microbes, thereby enriching soils with essential nutrients for growing food. Wildfires also deposit charcoal into Earth’s soils. This charcoal injects other important nutrients and conditions the soil for superior water retention. Apart from human intervention, the natural wildfire rate is optimal for sustaining large, diverse ecosystems serving complex microbes, plants, and animals.

In Earth’s current ice age cycle, 90,000-year cold periods, or glacials, are interspersed with 10,000-year warm periods, or interglacials. During the transition from glacials to interglacials, nutrient-rich dust is blown off Earth’s high plateaus onto Earth’s great agricultural plains, and melting ice left over from the previous glacial period waters these plains. Thanks to this process, humans can grow sufficient food for 8 billion people and all their animals. The interglacial in which we currently live follows the most severe ice age in the entire ice age cycle. As a result, fjords have been cut along high-latitude landmasses, providing humanity with well-protected, deep-water harbors that facilitate global trade.

Every presumed “natural evil,” when properly understood in the context of the present physical laws and space-time dimensions, is a natural phenomenon that has been exquisitely fine-tuned by our Creator for the benefit of Earth’s animals, ecosystems, humans, and civilization. Earth’s “natural evils,” properly understood, are exquisitely designed natural blessings.

Building Our Homes on Rock

The fact that so-called natural disasters have been shown to benefit Earth’s ecosystems and human civilization doesn’t mean we can dismiss the risks and dangers of such events. Nor can we ignore the ways humans have amplified the risks. For example, Native Americans, before the arrival of Europeans, avoided settling along the east coast of what is now Florida because of hurricane risk. Today, many people, including many senior citizens, live in mobile homes on those beaches. Nature’s outbursts would not be so catastrophic if we were to avoid building “houses on the sand” (Matt. 7:26–27).

The Bible reveals a Creator who is all-powerful, all-loving, and all-knowing. He sees everything that occurs. Yet it seems as if he stands by while hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of people suffer or die from the effects of a natural event. This is one of the most familiar and painful challenges raised by those who doubt or disbelieve in God. It must be addressed, but with compassion for those who grieve. No one but the author of life knows the optimal time for any human life to begin and end. We have his promise to know and act on what’s ultimately best for each person—from his eternal perspective.

We must face the fact that no human being is perfectly innocent. All have resisted God’s authority in one way or another, whether visibly (to us) or not. Everyone falls short of God’s moral perfection. So a person may be innocent of a certain offense, especially of one related to the natural disaster in question, but no one is innocent in an absolute sense. No one has the moral standing to convict God of injustice.

To assume that God stands idly by when natural disasters occur is to ignore significant facts. Consider how many people survive nature’s “outbursts,” often against all reasonable odds. We cannot determine how catastrophic any event “might have been” apart from God’s restraining hand. We all know of miraculous survival stories, people rescued from what seemed certain death. Again, the God of the Bible knows and acts according to a view of reality humans do not possess.

If God were to intervene in an overriding way in all natural disasters, he would abrogate the benefits, including the disciplinary and protective effects, of the physical laws he established. None of us would gain the eternal blessing of redemption, the gift of eternal life with our Creator.

With no possibility of sin or evil in the new creation, the current laws of physics will no longer have a purpose. Therefore, there will be no natural “disasters” there—no more decay or darkness, sadness or death, only life as yet unimaginably glorious.