🌪 Tornado Simulations, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and God's Existence 🌌

Introduction

For nearly all my life, I've had a fascination with the physical sciences. Meteorology and astronomy were two of them that always caught and kept my attention as a kid. In my teens was when I started to focus more on information technology, and in my twenties I was drawn to defending the truth of the Christian worldview through science, philosophy, and other knowledge disciplines. Living in Oklahoma, the weather is always in the news, and being that I frequent philosophical and scientific sites, popular astronomer Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson comes across my screen once in a while as well. In the last year, a few different articles have shown up from the meteorological, astronomical, and philosophical worlds, which the combination is what caught my attention. Today, I want to take some time to show how technology, being used to simulate natural phenomena, can be used to show that God exists, and I will address a popular naturalistic alternative explanation that was proposed by Tyson (and others). Let's start with the weather and super-computers.

Is Animal Death Really Evil?

Introduction
Within Christian circles a large debate is taking place regarding the age of the earth. One of the contentions that young-earth creationists (YECs) promote is that millions of years of animal suffering and death before sin entered the world (The Fall) is incompatible with Christianity because animal death is evil and not compatible with God's declaration that the creation was "very good.". A while back I wrote a post explaining that too often man anthropomorphizes animals, and that is the source of our belief that all suffering of animals is evil. In that post I explain that what could ground the idea that the animals suffering (over millions of years before man came on the scene) was evil was if animals were moral beings (via being created in the Image of God). Since they are not moral beings, they cannot commit moral (evil) acts. Since they cannot commit morally evil acts, suffering of the animals as the result of other animals was and is not morally evil.

However, that is only part of the story. I did not speak much on natural evil or man's treatment of animals as moral or natural evil. Recently a commenter asked that I speak to these issues to help further show logical compatibility of my old-earth creation (OEC) view, with biblical Christianity.

Of Tornadoes, Flat Tires, and Moore

The Recent Tornadoes In Moore, OK
Many of you are aware of the recent outbreak of violent tornadoes in the middle of the United States in late May of this year. Three tornadoes struck extremely close to home for me. The first took out my wife's parents' place, and the other two (one being the EF4 on the 20th) was about one mile from our house. As I drive to work every day, I see the physical devastation. When I speak with my in-laws, I see the emotional devastation. When I heard the news of the children who lost their lives...there just are not words to describe the pain and emotions of that news. When we experience tragedies such as these, it is sometimes difficult to see that a loving God, who has our best interest in mind, could cause or allow this level of agony. The Friday after the first tornado outbreak a peculiar series of events took place that eventually ended in God making the answer to my questions very real to me.