Civilization The Rest By John Piper Analysis

I do not agree with the whole conclusion that John Piper presents in his blog post about tornadoes being the finger of God. Piper presents God as a God that causes destruction because society refuses to believe him. Well there is evidence to point out that but C.S. Lewis puts it in a good way is that pain and destruction are God’s way of calling us to repent. These events were not cause directly by God but were not stopped neither to have society as a whole think about life and how we ought to live our lives. I think C.S. Lewis explains it the best is that God allows these occurrences to happen because he desires for us to come back to him and that natural disasters humble us before the cross and cause us to seek what is truly wonderful. In …show more content…
Using the God punishes evil people belief as a means of explaining natural occurrences will usually lead to make some political statement about the United States or the world. It is important for society to separate theologian and science in order to produce results that are plausible. The historian Niall Ferguson in his book Civilization: The West and the Rest, concludes that there are six killer applications that allowed for the West to advance and they all play an important role but pertain to different aspect of civilization. Four out of the six are pretty mundane (competition, property rights, modern medicine, and consumerism), but two are important for this topic on Piper and they are science and faith. Science and faith are not two mutually exclusive applications, but have two defining roles to play in an individual’s life and society as a whole. Ferguson explains that science is the explanation of how the world works and how these natural phenomena come to exist. However, faith is the why of certain aspects of life and the reconciliation process of hardships and struggles. One example of this is that science can only explain how a child dies early, but faith is what gives a meaning behind that death of a child and how to overcome that loss. Scientists agree that tornadoes form by …show more content…
A society based solely on religious beliefs will not be able to answer how the world works and how better to prepare for the world. A society based solely on science cannot give meaning and purpose to the world and the individual cannot have any hope for what is beyond the physical world. Pain and evil are byproducts of a sinful world and God uses them as a means of drawing people back to him by calling into question finite nature of life. John Piper is right in the sense he can find God in tornadoes, but I do not and see his commentary as a political statement on the ills of the United States as a