Do you Consider Certain Recent Events, and their Proximity in Time, to be Acts of God: My Response
My "too long" response to another hubber's question
As a matter of faith, my "denomination" is agnostic, but my practice is daily and questioning and difficult and often very deliberately irreverent, and I go 15 rounds with God on a regular basis and I don't hold my punches. He's God - He can take it.
As a matter of my own beliefs about life on a daily basis as a sentient being, I think everything is "natural" because "natural" in my literal head means "of nature" which I purport to mean "of the universe".
We may not understand all the minutiae of the atomic, subatomic, and infinitely divisible entities therefrom, and their interactions' dizzyingly exponential combinations and permutations, nor could we, by definition of our own bodies' (and planet's!) boundaries, the (maybe even expanding???) vastness of the cosmos and the similarly meta-exponentially vast combos and permutations that happen at the (hee hee) universal scale.
In other words, there is no way and (within our biological limits - particularly those finite ones that pertain to any given person's biological and/or sentient life) and no where NEAR the time to even begin to scientifically test all the possible relationships between each and every climactic or planetary "event". Whether you're talking about earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear erosion (break down?/contamination), human warfare, agro-ecological changes, evolution, et cetera, we are incapable of adequately testing the effects, and certainly of collecting any proportionally adequate data, let alone analyze the stuff!
Even the "global warming" cycle (between ice-ages and ages of temperate climate - yep, I believe it's a cycle - an earthly "heartbeat" if you will - that global "warming" is just a part of how things work, at a scale MUCH bigger than humanity's finite place within history - yes, people will become extinct, too, eventually, and the earth will live on.
So, to answer your question, we cannot answer the question. We are too big AND too small to know. And our biological life is, indeed, way to short - egocentrically/self-preservingly speaking.
I do sincerely believe, and believe in, those people who say that faith is knowing without proving. As for me, however, that whole "we're not supposed to eat of the tree of knowledge" thing - I completely stomp on as garbage.
To believe or not to believe - that IS the question. And it's one that I (and I dare say we) cannot answer. But since I cannot KNOW....see???....another person's mind - I cannot with certainty whether another person can "know" something unproven.
I just think it is impossible, at the intellectual, and thus conversational and sentient level, for we mortal humans to adequately test ANY theory - scientific OR theological.
Since I cannot "prove" any answer I would give to your question, I must default and say 'no'. Because I, nor any of us, will ever be able to prove whether acts of God exist, and which events in our small lives are among them. I cannot assume that God is behind all of the going's on - at least at our puny little earthly and daily level.
I just can't take that leap of... ...faith.
