: Is it abhorent to you that God could have orchestrated a tsunami or a 9/11 for some
: greater goal for his creation?
Not necessarily. But you may have heard about the mudslide here in North Vancouver that wiped out a couple houses and killed at least one of its residents just the other day. To me, the tsunami is just another incident like that, only bigger. So unless you are prepared to read divine significance into ALL natural disasters, no matter how few or how many there victims might be, I don't cotton to the idea that we should ascribe divine significance to the disasters which happen to be hyped by the media.
Question: If we cannot know "the big picture" i.e. whether some natural catastrophe is a part of a judgment of God, a "double effect" i.e. God setting a bone (to use Iconoclast's phrase) couldn't we also say that God had absolutely NOTHING to do with said event? If we look at the "cosmic chess game analogy" according to Meph Man from the PBS Faith and Doubt thread:
So for any lost piece, we just must surmise that somehow, in the parameters of that particular game and the moves that were made, that any given sacrifice of a piece was NECESSARY...for if he COULD have spared the piece, he WOULD have.
Doesn't the necessity cancel out any chaos or randomness? In other words, how does randomness figure into this? If there are parameters, within those parameters there is a lot of allowance for freedom for randomness and chaos. Therefore, "any given sacrifice of a piece WOULD NOT be necessary."
Meph Man? Tom? Pizza Face (whoever that is)? 