Is God Angry?

We know that early cultural tribes often prayed to multiple Gods - often having Gods that represented different aspects of life: war, love, justice, etc.   or in other cases represented the spirit within various aspects of nature: mountains, the ocean, trees, etc.   But under either of these schema natural disasters were viewed as a sign that the God's were angry.  In fact even after cultures increasingly went to Monotheism, the belief in one God, it was believed that God was mad when an earthquake or hurricane or a plague came.   I mean think about it, before one understood what germs were or how they spread how do you make sense of a plague coming to a town and wiping out most of the population?   It would seem arbitrary and cruel...like someone was trying to punish.   Before one could know about the plates underneath the earth shifting and causing earthquakes this too would seem arbitrary and mighty in its power to destroy.   Before one could understand conflicting hot and cold fronts and how they effected water bodies a hurricane would seem crazy - normally the water has predictable tides and now it has risen up in a destroying rage.

By the time we have reached the 21st century, science has become such a force that it can explain many if not most things.   It has increasingly shaped how humans understand our environment and the way our universe works.   It is taught in our schools around the developed world.  It binds us to a common understanding of the world even across language barriers.   In fact some sociologist have postulated that the waning of both church attendance and church influence in certainly the US is because of the rise of science - a fact that has made many fundamentalist churches actively hostile towards science.   Well that and the fact that the religious texts of most religions, written 2,000 some years ago reflect the scientific understanding of that era about the earth, and thus stand in opposition to certain current scientific findings like that humans evolved from apes, and that the earth was not created in 7 days.  Some sociologists argue that religion is simply a system by which humanity explains reality, which is increasingly being replaced by a new system for explaining reality: science.

So we stand in a curious time where many Americans have abandoned religion altogether as not a reliable source of truth - a sort of quaint mythology of the past.   At the same time that many religions cling stubbornly to their holy books claiming them as a more accurate source of truth than science and fight to keep science out of the school or even out of court cases.  So we have a battle in the US right now about what is the more accurate source of truth: religion or science.   (Just as several centuries ago the battle of European society was over whether the Bible or the clergy was the more accurate source of knowing Truth.)   No where can this disputes difference be more clearly seen than in US response to climate change.  While at first a non-partisan issue, the Republican party has increasingly made it matter of doctrine within the Republican party that all "true" party members reject the truth of climate change by pretending that the 97% agreement among scientists means there is not scientific agreement about climate change being created by human activity.  The party has actually refused to support financially members who will not embrace this orthodoxy.  (Just as the church of  a previous era persecuted those who subscribed to the idea that the world was round.)

I read something recently that startled me.  It pointed out that for the percentage of the world population that is not literate (~14%), they mostly do not even know the word climate change, much less what it means.   It was a shocking idea thinking of people facing tsunamis and droughts with no understanding of why it is happening.  Will they again believe that the God(s) are mad?  But then the thought occurs to me that if one does not believe in science then again how does one explain all these catastrophes that are coming with increasing frequency.  Is God mad at us?  

And if you believe in both science and God as the vast majority of Americans do - so science explains to you what is happening in regards to climate change - that begs the question of how God feels about climate change.  If God is the creator/designer of all life on this planet through mechanisms exquisitely described by science - how would God not be ....well if not quite angry than certainly heartbroken over what this one species of creation has done to all the rest of creation?  I have heard human's very cynically say that if we destroy all life on earth than we will get what we deserve - that we will destroy ourselves, but that the planet will go on without us.   This I think is hubris of a different sort and a falsely comforting notion.  It denies what happens to a planet if you make its ocean dead, and somehow justifies the destruction of every other species.  In science systems have feedback loops, those carry both information and consequences.  It is time for us to start listening to the increasingly urgent messages of the planet: earthquakes, droughts, hurricanes, forest fires, and tsunamis and hear the Creator's voice begging us to protect creation.   It is time for people of faith to rise up with one voice in moral indignation at what we are doing to the planet.