Thoughts About God, I

The Chilean miners are finally, all of them, OUT! Wonderful news! I can't possibly imagine what they or their families have been though. I don't know what to say about it. I'm profoundly moved by the way the entire world has come together compassionately over strangers locked in a simply incomprehensible situation. These are men, who trapped for weeks in the darkness, not knowing if they had or had not been given up for dead, were at last dragged into the daylight and freedom as a worldwide crowd called out in celebration at their survival under impossible conditions.

That said, this is a story of the profound capabilities of the human spirit. It simply is not at all miraculous. At least in any way that I think the religious would like it to be. This is a story about a group of men, trapped in an impossible and arbitrary situation. It is a story about how not only a nation, but a world came together in concern over the fate of 33 fellow humans lost in the darkness.

Calling this a miracle, diminishes all of that.

As I see it, prescribing miraculous qualities to the cave in that trapped the miners requires an acceptance of one of the following conditions:

1) God caused the cave-in.

2) God directed and managed the response to the cave-in.

or

3) God not only caused the cave-in but also managed the response.

In the first situation, assuming that the faith group proposing it is one assuming a loving and compassionate God, I would guess that the argument would be that God caused the cave-in in order to make us care more for our common man.

Regrettably, this is essentially a political argument delivered via violence. "Be good to each other or I will bury these miners alive" is an argument that assumes that God is willing to resort to the same tactics used by terrorists. There's very, very little space between "be good or I will blow up a mine" and "obey such and such a book or I will blow up a school". I would hope that most people of faith would be willing to reject that as a viewpoint held by our Heavenly Father.

2) In this situation, the mine collapse was somehow out of Gods hands. Perhaps he was resting the day that Eve ate the Apple of Earthquakes. Regardless, it assumes that God was not the prime mover that moved 33 men into two months of living hell.

It does however, assume that God took control of the hearts and minds of the millions that watched and prayed during the rescue and the many that worked and slaved physically and emotionally to see it come to fruition.

The problem is that given an omnipotent God (who somehow didn't see that mine collapse coming), the emotional charity of the people towards the families of the miners, the tremendous efforts of the engineers and diggers striving to free their countrymen from the ground, even the words of the psychologist that spoke to each miner entombed are rendered moot and meaningless, without value on a moral level.

Because every prayer, every effort, every word or act of compassion was ultimately controlled and coerced.

Under this scenario, freeing the miners was not an act of compassion. It was inevitable, as meaningless as the sun rising above the horizon at dawn. Under this scenario, there was nothing to learn. Nothing to gain. It was just another day.

Given this, the third scenario presented through the prism of miracles, emerges as monstrous: God purposely committed an act of violence against thirty-some-odd men to prove a point about compassion that he denied the world from learning by forcing their reactions.

The rescue of the Chilean miners should not be viewed as a heavy handed intervention by the All-Mighty. Rather it should be viewed for what it is: A celebration of human compassion and resiliency in the face of impossible odds.