{"id":2824,"date":"2023-07-24T07:48:09","date_gmt":"2023-07-24T11:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=2824"},"modified":"2023-07-24T07:48:09","modified_gmt":"2023-07-24T11:48:09","slug":"living-on-the-fault-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2023\/07\/24\/living-on-the-fault-line\/","title":{"rendered":"Living on the Fault Line"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to this reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>.
\u00a0
There\u2019s something about the earth\u2019s most dramatic geological events \u2013 earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis \u2013 that make people want to fire God.
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A few weeks after the December 2004 earthquake that sent mountainous walls of water crashing onto beaches around the Indian Ocean, taking more than 225,000 lives, Ron Rosenbaum of the New York Observer<\/em> didn\u2019t mince words: \u201cIf God is God, he\u2019s not good.\u00a0 If God is good, he\u2019s not God.\u00a0 You can\u2019t have it both ways, especially after the Indian Ocean catastrophe.\u201d\u00a0
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When an earthquake rocked Lisbon, Portugal on November 1, 1755, multiple tsunamis raced ashore.\u00a0 Resultant fires destroyed most of the city and killed as many as 100,000 people.\u00a0 One immediate outcome was a crisis of faith across Europe.\u00a0 If God allowed the indiscriminate deaths of so many people \u2013 and on All Saints Day, no less \u2013 how could he ever be trusted?
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It seemed wiser to conclude, as did the French philosophe Voltaire, that the God worshiped by Christians could not possibly exist.
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Those clinging to faith felt that God had some explaining to do.\u00a0 Surely a beneficent deity could have and should have prevented disasters like the apocalyptic explosion of Krakatoa in 1883, as well as the earthquakes that crippled Haiti in 2010 and brought Japan to its knees in 2011.
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In begging God to eliminate volcanoes and earthquakes, however, it\u2019s clear that we really don\u2019t know what we\u2019re asking.
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By honoring such a request, God would undermine the essential structure of our planet and ultimately make it uninhabitable.\u00a0
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Geologists have learned a great deal about the Earth\u2019s crust over the past six decades.\u00a0 In 1963, when a Canadian researcher submitted a paper documenting the evidence for \u201ccontinental drift\u201d to the venerable Journal of Geophysical Research<\/em>, he was rounded jeered: \u201cSuch speculations make interesting talk at cocktail parties, but it is not the sort of thing to be published under serious scientific aegis.\u201d\u00a0 This is the kind of rejection letter that comes back to haunt an editorial board.\u00a0 \u00a0
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A few years later, the highly regarded textbook The Earth<\/em> declared that so-called plate tectonics was a physical impossibility.\u00a0
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Now we know better.\u00a0 Today there is consensus among scientists that the Earth\u2019s surface is a bit like the shell of a hard-boiled egg that\u2019s been dropped on the floor.\u00a0 There are 8-12 large crustal slabs or plates, with 20 smaller plates interspersed among them.\u00a0 The shocking and unexpected discovery is that all of these pieces are moving on something like \u201cconveyor belts\u201d of molten rock \u2013 some comparatively quickly, others rather slowly, and none of them in precisely the same direction.\u00a0 The average plate crawls along at about two inches a year, roughly the same pace your fingernails are growing.
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What does all this have to do with the world\u2019s most dangerous geological events?\u00a0
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They almost always happen at the places where the plates are rubbing against each other, or where one is slowly plunging beneath another \u2013 a process called subduction.
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Geologists were just getting used to the idea that the continents really do drift when they began to realize that tectonic theory might help resolve some of the most vexing problems in geology.\u00a0 Why, for instance, do the world\u2019s oceans not become exceedingly salty, like the Dead Sea?\u00a0 Salts of all kinds routinely find their way down to sea level, yet ocean salinity (while increasing slightly) has remained at a relative state of equilibrium for centuries.\u00a0 Scientists now believe that a generous portion of oceanic salt is returned to the Earth\u2019s crust by means of subduction.\u00a0
\u00a0
A 2016 article in Scientific American<\/em> suggests that plate tectonics, \u201cwhich acts as a global thermostat,\u201d might be \u2013 and here the author uses a rather dramatic word \u2013 our \u201csavior.\u201d\u00a0 This happens by means of the recycling of carbon dioxide in a process that takes millions of years.\u00a0 The relentlessly slow movement of the plates \u201chelps keep Earth\u2019s temperature stable enough to support life.\u201d
\u00a0
Tellingly, the same article reports that astronomers are finding little evidence of plate tectonics operating anywhere else in the observable universe.\u00a0
\u00a0
It just may be that the bumping and grinding of our planet\u2019s crustal plates is one of the \u201cjust right\u201d features associated with Life\u2019s only currently known galactic address.
\u00a0
But what about the eight billion human beings who must live atop those plates, and who face potentially catastrophic quakes, lava flows, and towering tsunamis?\u00a0 Doesn\u2019t God care?
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God does care.\u00a0 God cares enough to have created a planet that is uniquely engineered to provide a stable place for human life to flourish. \u00a0And he has endowed us with sufficient intelligence to puzzle out some of the Earth\u2019s most significant geological realities, along with sufficient wisdom to respond to what we learn.
\u00a0
For instance, we now know it\u2019s vitally important to accommodate ourselves to the Earth\u2019s tectonic \u201cdanger zones.\u201d If sizable populations happen to live in those areas, we know how crucial it is to provide substantial warnings and protections \u2013 and to help as many people as possible relocate, if they choose, to safer ground.\u00a0
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Most of all, we know how to come alongside, more quickly than ever, those whose lives have been shattered by natural disasters.
\u00a0
As recently as 200 years ago, people had little idea what was happening on the other side of the planet.\u00a0 Sunsets in Europe may have turned beautiful shades of red, but no one suspected it was because a volcano had erupted in Indonesia.\u00a0 Crops may have failed in India, but no one knew it was connected to a bitter winter in North America.\u00a0
\u00a0
Today\u2019s interconnected world suddenly feels very small.\u00a0
\u00a0
Trained disaster relief teams can reach any spot on Earth in less than 24 hours.\u00a0 Our prayers, our resources, and our hands-on efforts in Jesus\u2019 name can arrive while there\u2019s still time to dig through the rubble and weep with those who weep.\u00a0
\u00a0
Disasters are tough.\u00a0 And they always will be.
\u00a0
We may even be tempted to fire God.
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But the irony is that such events turn out to be the very moments when God is most committed to enlisting us<\/u><\/em> in his efforts to reveal his deep love for the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to this reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here.\u00a0There\u2019s something about the earth\u2019s most dramatic geological events \u2013 earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis \u2013 that make people want to fire God.\u00a0A few weeks after the December 2004 earthquake that sent mountainous walls of water crashing onto beaches around the Indian Ocean, taking more than 225,000 lives, Ron Rosenbaum of the… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2825,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[217,613,351],"class_list":["post-2824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-creation","tag-geology","tag-providence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2824"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2826,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2824\/revisions\/2826"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}