May 27 2023
“God does not play dice with the universe”. Albert Einstein.
Einstein believed there are laws governing the universe, including the planet we call our own. Yes, that great scientist, Einstein, believed that Creation was regulated by norms, founded on wisdom. Discarding and disregarding creation laws results in chaos, clearly evident in today’s global weather events, and technological developments: “The leaders of the ChatGPT developer OpenAI have called for the regulation of “superintelligent” AIs, arguing that an equivalent to the International Atomic Energy Agency is needed to protect humanity from the risk of accidentally creating something with the power to destroy”, reports the Guardian.
Now, more than ever, we need proper prayer.
The Lord’s Prayer points to our self-generated planetary phenomena in its very first petition: “Hallowed be Thy name”. This phrase has nothing to do with God’s name. Karen Armstrong in her Sacred Nature, mentions that the Bible has 50 different names for God, indicating that God is beyond names. That line from ‘the prayer Jesus taught us’ means that we have to honour the holiness of God’s signature on every created item. If we fail to do that, we play ‘dice’ with the planet, a place we have populated possibly beyond its carrying capacity.
What’s going on?
There’s a lot happening out there. And by that, I mean that everywhere, in the air, unseen to the naked eye, in the waters, not noticeable at first glance, in the soil, seemingly normal, forces are at work that determine the future of the planet. The Roman Philosopher Lucius Anneaus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was perhaps the first to note the universal trend that growth is slow but ruin is rapid. Everything, everywhere, has become saturated with poisonous, abnormal substances: hence Climate Change, which actually goes far beyond climate: it’s a “everything and everybody” change.
FIRE
Already, we’re into the billions of daily human-caused fires, but it’s when I started looking at engines that the numbers really took off. Globally, we’ve got well over a billion cars, a quarter-billion trucks, 200 million motorcycles, 25,000 passenger jets, and 50,000 ocean-going freighters (a third of which are devoted to transporting more fuel to burn). A single six-cylinder minivan running at driving-to-school speed – 2,500 RPM – will generate around 10,000 combustions a minute, more than half a million per hour. That’s a lot of fires. Add them all up and you get tens of trillions of individual combustions.That, roughly speaking, is the number of fires humans make every day – uncountable as stars in the universe. No wonder the man, Peter, who denied Jesus three times at a crucial moment in Jesus’ final hours, learned his lesson – as we all will do eventually- when he wrote, “the elements will be destroyed by fire and everything will be revealed.”
Today we live by fire: we will also die by fire.
The hour of ‘revelation’ is now upon us.
Bottom line: When you extract, upgrade, refine and burn toxic substances such as coal, bitumen, oil and gas at the rate we are burning them, decade after decade, we’re going to see changes. Atmospheric CO2 levels are now fully 50 per cent higher than preindustrial times, and it affects everything we care about, from fetuses to phytoplankton, from water to winter.
Global heating will drive billions of people out of the “climate niche” in which humanity has flourished for millennia, a study has estimated, exposing them to unprecedented temperatures and extreme weather.
The world is on track for 2.7C of heating with current action plans and this would mean 2 billion people experiencing average annual temperatures above 29C by 2030, a level at which very few communities have lived in the past. Arctic News asserts that all humans will die with 3C increase.
Curiously, the segment of the population that claims to adhere to the Christian Religion, supposedly use the ‘Holy Book’ as their guide in life. If they do, they will discover that 1Thessalonian. 5: 21 urges us “to test everything; hold on to what is good”.
That points to careful thinking and thorough analysis. Karl Barth, wrote that ‘the message of the Bible is that God hates religion”. Religion makes many devout people choose Trump as their favorite: not surprising as religion killed Jesus.
God does not play dice with the universe: We do!
Romans 8 speaks to us today. It confirms Karl Barth’s observation that we must read the news while keeping an eye on the Bible. Look at verse 22: We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Beautiful. Completely applicable to today. Our world is pregnant with the new world to come. The earth is about to give birth. Believe. Celebrate. Rejoice. A new earth is on the way. Praise the Lord.