Tower and Town, July 2017 (view the full edition)A Theory Of RelativityThe question is often asked: "Even if we accept that it's good for us to face up to real choices and tough dilemmas, surely God didn't have to make the world so full of extreme horrors? Couldn't He have toned it down a bit?" 
There's no easy answer to this, but perhaps we could try thinking along these lines. Here we are on Planet Earth, and we face - or some of us face - appalling horrors such as barbarous beheadings, senseless slaughter, economic meltdown leading to mass deprivation, disease, starvation and death. Alongside this, however, technical wizardry is advancing all the time, and in due course we discover another inhabited planet somewhere in the universe. By and by we learn that they too are asking the same question: "Did He have to make it so extreme?" However, we discover a startling difference. Within their environment - which is all that they know - their "extremes" consist of things such as the common cold and temperatures that fall all the way to plus 15 degrees Celsius. In every way they feel as hard done-by and fed-up as we do here on Earth, but those feelings are relative to the bounds of their experience. Is it possible that we could view our own environment in this light? In other words, even if God had made things less extreme than He apparently has, those lesser bounds that He had set would still feel "extreme" to us because they would be at the limit of our experience and knowledge. Do we just have to live with the fact that, for us as finite mortals, "extreme" is a relative concept? Hugh de Saram |