Meteorology--Another look

Yesterday morning, as I normally do, I joined a few men at our church for a weekly prayer time. And we prayed about the recent spate of violent wind storms on the eastern seaboard of the United States. We prayed for the victims. We prayed for our country. We also prayed--actually, I led in this prayer--that if this is God's judgment upon us for any of our country's numerous sins, from our prideful pursuit of financial and material wealth at all costs, including the poisoning of our environment, to our willfulness and ignorance of [as in, willfully ignoring] God, to . . . well, any of dozens of sins that could be chalked up against us . . . we prayed for God's mercy.

And even if these are not God's judgments upon us, still: we prayed for mercy.

As we prayed these things, I got thinking of what I wrote a few days ago about meteorology. I wrote at that time:

When the Bible speaks of the storehouses for rain and snow and wind and the windows of heaven and so forth (Genesis 7:11; 8:2; Job 38:22; etc.) . . . and when it tells us how God controls these storehouses and windows (Job 38:22; Jeremiah 10:13; and so forth), is it not touching on matters pertaining to nature (as well as, on occasion, history)? And assuming this is the case, then when meteorologists speak of high- and low-pressure systems and evaporation and transpiration and sublimation and precipitation, are they not attempting to "disprove the teaching of Scripture or (to have their extrabiblical views) hold priority over" Scripture? If someone wants to say that this is surely not the case, then I would like that person to explain, on Scriptural grounds alone, how and why he or she is right and I am wrong!

And as I thought once more about what I had written, I got thinking that I should come back and say a bit more about this matter of meteorology and science and Scripture.

First: I should confess openly: I have no question God controls the weather. He uses weather to achieve His purposes. And, of course, there are plenty of Scriptures to teach that truth:

• Deuteronomy 28:1, 12, 15, 22-24--"[I]f you faithfully obey the voice of the LORD your God, being careful to do all his commandments, . . . [t]he LORD will open to you his good treasury, the heavens, to give the rain to your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hands. . . . "But if you will not obey the voice of the LORD your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes, . . . then [t]he LORD will strike you with . . . fiery heat, and with drought. . . . And the heavens over your head shall be bronze. . . . The LORD will make the rain of your land powder. From heaven dust shall come down on you until you are destroyed."
   
• Haggai 1:7-11--"Thus says the LORD of hosts: Consider your ways. Go up to the hills and bring wood and build the house, that I may take pleasure in it and that I may be glorified, says the LORD. You looked for much, and behold, it came to little. And when you brought it home, I blew it away. Why? declares the LORD of hosts. Because of my house that lies in ruins, while each of you busies himself with his own house. Therefore the heavens above you have withheld the dew, and the earth has withheld its produce. And I have called for a drought on the land and the hills, on the grain, the new wine, the oil, on what the ground brings forth, on man and beast, and on all their labors."
   
• Genesis 8:1--"And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided."
   
• Exodus 10:13, 19--"So Moses stretched out his staff over the land of Egypt, and the LORD brought an east wind upon the land all that day and all that night. When it was morning, the east wind had brought the locusts. . . . And the LORD turned the wind into a very strong west wind, which lifted the locusts and drove them into the Red Sea."
   
• Exodus 14:21--"Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the LORD drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided."
   
• Amos 4:13--"For behold, he who forms the mountains and creates the wind, . . .--the LORD, the God of hosts, is his name!"
   
• Mark 4:39, 41--"And [Jesus] awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, 'Peace! Be still!' And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. . . . And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, 'Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?'"
   
• And so forth.

But at the same time, I believe there are strong warrants for meteorologists to study the weather, to discover the mediate causes, the means by which God makes the weather do His will.

Further, I don't believe meteorologists are attempting to "disprove the teaching of Scripture or (to have their extrabiblical views) hold priority over" Scripture when they seem, casually, to brush aside the grand statements of the Bible about God's sovereign control of the weather. I have no doubt that some--maybe most; definitely not all--meteorologists deny the sovereignty of God over the weather. But the fact is, their discussions of high- and low-pressure systems, evaporation, transpiration, sublimation and so forth don't prove anything about God, one way or another.

Oh, yes, some atheists are happy to use their sense of knowledge to proclaim the absence of God: "See! It is all perfectly explicable by physical forces! There is no God!"

And, sadly, such "arguments" often do hold sway in many people's hearts and minds.

But as numerous philosophers of science have noted, as soon as a scientist strays into discussions of metaphysical reality--the non-physical realm--he or she has strayed beyond the competency of physical science, per se.

Beyond that, we should probably remind ourselves of the ground on which the modern scientific movement first arose: It was avowedly Christian men who, looking to honor God by "thinking His thoughts after Him," spearheaded the sustained and disciplined practice of what we now call science. (See, especially, Rodney Stark's For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery and Peter Harrison's The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science.)

Why should we permit a few cranks--loud and persistent as they may be--to distract us from the truth that the scientific enterprise, even with its practical, functional, or methodological naturalism, is not atheistic per se but can be greatly used to honor God? We can honor Him by--as I have already noted--"thinking His thoughts after Him" and uttering our awe-filled praise . . . as well as by using the results of scientific researches to bless the people and natural world around us--as per Genesis 1:28.

When we use modern meteorology to predict the weather, are we truly operating "against the gods" (or, rather the God)--as Peter L. Bernstein's fascinating book characterized the intellectual struggle to master the concepts and practical aspects of risk and probability? I believe not! In fact, a proper use of such predictive capabilities may honor God as we save lives--both human and animal--by warning people of coming storms.

We can also honor God, on a very much less practical level by attempting to find out how, in the natural realm, God "does that." (In the same way a fascinated member of the audience at a demonstration of masterful prestidigitation ("magic") will exclaim, "How did he do that?!?" --So may we exclaim and determine to find out, "How does God do that?" We will only get "so far," but, as any member of the modern world will testify, the study can yield astonishingly valuable results.)

Dr. Henry Morris, founder of the young-earth Institute for Creation Research (ICR), once wrote,

Despite the attempts by liberal theology to disguise the point, the fact is that no biblically derived religion can really be compromised with the fundamental assertion of Darwinian theory. Chance and design are antithetical concepts.

--Emphasis mine--JAH

I ran across this statement in an article reprinted by the ICR almost two years ago. I replied on my personal blog. I referenced a previous post in which I interacted with some comments in Perspectives on an Evolving Creation, edited by Keith B. Miller. In his introductory chapter, Miller writes about two strong contributing factors toward evangelical Christians' discomfort with the idea of trans-species evolution: what he calls "God-of-the-gaps" theology . . . and the problem of "chance," "randomness," or "accident."

Concerning "God-of-the-gaps," Miller writes (op. cit., p. 8):

[The perspective] that God's action or involvement in creation is confined to those events the lack of scientific explanation [or that m]eaningful divine action is equated with breaks in chains of cause-and-effect processes . . . [blinds us so that we see] God's creative action . . . only, or primarily, in the gaps of human knowledge where scientific description fails.

With this perspective, each advance in scientific understanding results in a corresponding diminution of divine action, and conflict between science and faith is assured. However, this is a totally unnecessary state of affairs. God's creative activity is clearly identified in Scripture as including natural processes. According to Scripture, God is providentially active in all natural processes, and all of creation declares the glory of God.

The evidence for God's presence in creation, for the existence of a creator God, is declared to be precisely those everyday "natural events" experienced by us all. Thus Christians should not fear causal natural explanations. Complete scientific descriptions of events or processes should pose no threat to Christian theism. Rather, each new advance in our scientific understanding can be matched with excitement and praise at the revelation of God's creative hand.

Amen!

May I encourage you: If you are inclined to buy into the atheists' claim that a full-orbed material or physical description of cause-and-effect eliminates any room for God, don't believe it. It's not true. It's wonderful that meteorologists have been able to acquire so much knowledge. But God is still in control.

I said that Miller writes about two factors that often contribute toward evangelical Christians' discomfort with the idea of trans-species evolution. I mentioned "God-of-the-gaps." Now it is time to talk about the problem of "chance," "randomness," or "accident."

"Many people understand "chance" as implying a purposeless, meaningless, and accidental event," writes Miller.

However, scientifically, chance events are simply those whose occurrence cannot be predicted based on initial conditions and known natural laws. Such events are describable by probabilistic equations. [Emphasis mine--JAH]. . .

The Bible . . . describes a God who is sovereign over all natural events, even those we attribute to chance such as the casting of lots [see Proverbs 16:33--JAH] or tomorrow's weather [the broad mechanisms of which are understood and explained by modern science as related to heat from the Sun interacting with Earth's atmosphere and land formations, its oceans, and so forth . . . causing air and sea currents, certain patterns of evaporation and condensation, etc. . . . But yet see Psalm 147:16; Psalm 148:7-8; and so forth. Obviously, God is in control of the events and conditions that modern science describes--rightly--in terms of "chance" and "probability." --JAH] . . .

Regardless of how one understands the manner in which God exercises sovereignty over natural process[es], chance events certainly [ought to] pose no theological barrier to God's action in and through [an] evolutionary process.

--Ibid., pp. 8-9

The problem is, when we Christians join the atheists in urging that "random chance" is necessarily atheistic, we are obviously forgetting the substance of Colossians 1:16–17 and Hebrews 1:3--that, even in the most "random," unexpected, unexplainable event, God is in control. You may not be able to see His hand at work, but He is there.

As I wrote back in June 2009:

• The Bible says God controls [such things as the outcome of a throw of the dice (Proverbs 16:33)], but, from our perspective, they are "completely random." --They follow patterns. We can predict probabilities. But there appears to be no strong rhyme or reasons by which we could predict what is going to happen at a particular moment.
   
• Pushing forward with the idea of randomness-within-limits (or randomness-under-pattern, or randomness-under-total-control-of-an-outside [sovereign]-power): What about random-number-generators? I mean, even human beings have created such devices or programmed such programs. The [randomness of these generators is] under control; their randomness is within limits. --So what's the big deal about the God of the Bible being sovereign and creating a universe in which he upholds matter (Colossians 1:16-17; Hebrews 1:3) to act regularly and consistently as a cosmic "random number generator" on a cosmic/physicalist level . . . in the same way that human-made random number generators act regularly and consistently to produce mere digits?
  
  What is the problem with God--either directly or indirectly (through the matter that He created and upholds--being able to control events in such a way that they appear to follow regular, and broadly predictable patterns, yet "only" in a probabilistic sense--i.e., so that they appear to be truly random?
  
  Couldn't such an insight be part of what God is referring to in Scriptures like Jeremiah 33:3 or Deuteronomy 29:29 . . . not to mention Job 42:3, Psalm 139:6, or Proverbs 30:18--[passages that] all speak of knowledge that is "too wonderful" for human beings?

I think young-earth creationists cannot legitimately use the issue of "chance" or "randomness" as an argument "from the Bible" against evolution!

Meanwhile, however, I think it would be helpful for the Christian evolutionary community to do more work on the theology of chaos, randomness, and chance--and the implications of such a theology. It would be helpful if they would pursue such work first at the graduate philosophical/academic level and then communicate the results of their work on a popular level . . . for adults and children.