Fr. Dwight Longenecker has written a post in reply to something I come across pretty often, people essentially excusing themselves by complaining that it is wrong for God to not bring everyone to Heaven.
Perhaps what lies at the heart of the error these people make is their notions of Heaven and Hell; they think that Heaven is “owed” to them, that Hell is not the result of ruling out love of God.
Fr Longenecker says:
Now my problem is this: I do not see evidence of a loving, omnipotent God all around me. Yesterday a hedgehog drowned in my goldfish pond. It joined billions of other creatures who have died in agony despite the existence, it is said, of a God able to prevent such suffering and who is all loving. This, I hear you say, is not the fault of God, but of humans who have rejected his love, introducing original sin into the world, and disordering creation. The problem with that is that there is incontrovertible evidence that billions of creatures died in agony before there were people on the planet. You can see their fossilized death throes entombed in limestone and tar pits around the world. In answer to this I have been told things like: suffering is not bad, and ‘it’s a mystery;, Well, I disagree about suffering. It is bad. And if it is a mystery, at the least we should stop asserting the opposite of the plain evidence before our eyes. I may deserve hell. But the dead hedgehog did not deserve to suffer and die, and neither did all those creatures whose agonies predated humanity on earth, and must therefore have predated original sin.
Werahiko, evolution is only a theory. Piltdown Man and other purported human skeletal findings proving evolution have been shown to be hoaxes. Personally, I do not believe in evolution and many other Christians don’t either. I find it extraordinary that God Who is all powerful would have wasted time with evolution, and if we are descended from monkeys then why is there still a monkey species? Why did only one species of monkey evolve? So I believe that God created Adam and Eve and through their fall original sin came into the world.
God gave free will to mankind and animals are subject to man. Man and beast are subject to natural events Only if we pray to God can suffering and hardship be averted or diminished. If you had not had a goldfish pond or at least put a fence ariund it then the hedgehog would not have drowned, so why blame God for your own actions?
You are indeed surrounded by a loving, omnipotent God: He gave you life; He gave you good parents and a family; He puts food on your table; He gives you sunlight, rain, the sea, all the beauty of nature. It is man that spoils all these things, not God. Be grateful for every breath you take because it is a gift from Him.
Gnostics came up with numerous fantabulous ‘explanations’ for why God can’t be all-loving-all-powerful AND all-good. Job railed against the injustices done him and his snide ‘friends’ simply told him he must have ‘deserved’ it. Christ disabused many Jews of the idea that people suffer injustices in this small life because they are worse than others. The point is this life is small – we have lost our sense of eternity – the Saints of old knew it. St John Fisher, amongst others, kept a skull on his desk to remind himself of the smallness of mortality and the bigness of eternity, everyday. When he would not renounce the teachings of Christ to please Henry ate, his head ended up on a pike beside the Thames for weeks as a warning against those who prefer heavenly justice to earthly justice. Job came to understand – we are small and this world is finite – but an infinite mysterious Creator/Redeemer/Sanctifier loves us and rescues us from the place made for us in hell by an immortal ingrate (creature though he is – as we are creatures) who hates everything – even the free will a loving Creator gave him. Can’t remember who said it, but someone said, ‘if it has an end, you can withstand it’. We here need not choose an end that cannot be withstood. Passio Christi Conforta Me.
Teresina, evolution is a fact. All living things share genetic material such as dna. This material is passed on by descent (apart from rare cases of no relevance to this argument). Therefore living things are relaed by descent. Therefore species evolved. That is a fact, just like gravity, or tsunamis, or light are facts. The ‘theory’ of evolution is not a ‘speculation’ that evolution happens. That is a fact. It is a theory about how evolution happens. There is nothing in any theory of evolution that I have heard of that suggests that the evolution of a new species is dependent on the extinction of the species from which it evolved. Your question about monkeys is therefore not one which requires and answer. Dogs evolved from wolves. There are still wolves. Kea evolved from kaka but there are still kaka. Goldfish evolved from wild goldfish but there are still wild goldfish. Cows evolved from aurochs but until the 1700s there were still aurochs. North American Bison evolved from European bison but there are still European bison.