Hurricanes and the Goodness of God

For my American readers, this hurricane season will be one that many people remember for decades after the unprecedented flooding that Hurricane Harvey brought to the Houston area. Hopefully, it will also be remembered how people came together to help each other in the midst of a tense period in our national mood, when scenes of cooperation, relief, and unselfish neighbor-love are like balm to a frenzied social soul.

Now with Irma shredding through Caribbean islands and barreling down on Florida, we seem poised to be dealt another heavy blow from weather conditions not under our control. Only time will tell the scale of the damage there. Almost certainly there will be many billions of dollars of damage, countless lives disrupted, and a few ended. For Christians, not only in America but in all the world, we do believe there is One who has power over the weather, a God without whose permission nothing can occur, blessings or tragedies alike. So why does He allow these things to occur?

No Humansplaining

It is always ill-advised and futile to attempt to give narrowly specific reasons that large-scale natural disasters occur. Was Houston being judged for its sins like many claimed or implied New Orleans was in Katrina? Were the 16,000+ killed in the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami disaster more sinful than the rest of Japan or the rest of East Asia? Were the people whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices or who were crushed by a falling tower in Siloam more guilty than the rest of Jerusalem? (Luke 13:1-5, Hint: Jesus says "No!")

In the whatever'th-wave of the feminist movement we're in now, "man-splaining" is criticized as men offering unnecessary or patronizing explanations to which they expect women to listen respectfully. Or something like that. These things tend to be flexibly defined by those who wish to claim victim status, whether they have a legitimate cause for complaint or not. (They might as well lock up all the INTPs now, we love to explain things to anyone willing to listen to that much excited detail.)

But there is another kind of mansplaining, or humansplaining, which I would love to see end, and that is when people with positions of spiritual authority start trying to explain things they don't understand because they feel people expect them to have an explanation. Like the occasional situation in Chinese culture where courtesy demands a response to tourist inquiries of how to get to a place even if the local being asked has no idea, it's not so much about knowing, as feeling that you are in a position where giving an answer is expected and so you come up with a good-sounding one.

As a missionary with a seminary degree, I am sometimes put in this position. While I am not a very worthy example, at least I do try to always say when I don't know something off the top of my head but will go research it and have a better answer later, or else that the Bible doesn't actually give us an answer, so I neither have one nor should you trust anyone who says they do. It may be less satisfying than a pithy response you can copy and paste onto a picture and pass around social media, but I don't dare put words in the Bible's mouth. (If you feel I have done so with this post, feel free to let me know)

When a pastor or prominent Christian or anyone else stands up and says that a disaster happened for positive or negative reasons--as judgment for sin, or to bring everyone together--they are choosing from various possibilities, hopefully biblical-based ones, but they have no possible way of knowing the real reason or combinations. We are not privy to an explanation from God, and be very cautious about anyone claiming that they are.

But if we can't known the specific reason, then on a more basic level, why would a good God allow disasters like Katrina, like the Tohoku Quake, like the flooding in Houston, like the crises which you didn't even know were claiming lives every day in less-reported areas of the world, to happen? And can we answer that question without "humansplaining" or adding purely speculative ideas to scripture?
I think we can, and this is my attempt to do so.

A hurricane season that will be long remembered...

Why God Lets Hurricanes Strike Major Cities

I. Because when ocean water reaches a certain temperature, and seasonal wind patterns...

We know this reason, or at least learned it in high school or saw it on the weather channel at some point. This is what people call the scientific reason, and what atheists tiresomely pretend makes God unnecessary until you bring up that this is not the Why at all, but the How. Personally I find it fascinating, how the unbelievable amount of energy representing in a raging hurricane is all the result of a positive feedback loop that can emerge from the tranquil, sun-warmed ocean when conditions are right. But that's wandering from the thrust of our topic.

As I have blogged previously, the ancient Greeks spent some time thinking about why things happen, and came up with the brilliant idea that every event had multiple causes, as seen from different perspectives.

For a simple example, a crystal goblet dropped on a stone floor shatters into scintillating shards. Why? Well, 1) because someone dropped it. But also 2) because it's crystal. If it was rubber or wood, it mostly likely would have survived the fall. Also 3) because the floor is stone. If it had been thick shag carpet, the goblet probably also would have been fine, though my allergies might not. Also 4) because in some humanly incomprehensible way, the shattered goblet fits into the vast and mysterious unfolding of all things, under God's authority and obeying His will. When we ask "why did this happen" we are usually speaking more to the that last category. What was the ultimate purpose?

I am not here suggesting the Greek causal categories are comprehensive or even correct. But their reminder to us that there is not merely one reason for things to occur is important.

So for our damaging hurricane, we could come up with a similar set of explanations. "Why did a massive hurricane strike a populated area with lethal results?":

1) Because of a set of natural phenomenon which to some extent can be traced back in chains of cause and effect to the beginning of the universe. Energy was transferred and the earth went around the sun and the ocean sloshed around for millennia and the hurricane was always going to happen at that time, unless you want to go really deep into arguments about human free will and chaos theory, and suggest the sinking of some Carthaginian trireme during the Punic Wars was just enough energy disruption to butterfly effect the hurricane into being thousands of years later. Perhaps so, but even that can be described precisely by physics, if we had access to the data.

2) Because people decided to build a city there. Actually there are lots of big coastal cities, and hurricanes have a very wide track. Sooner or later every city near the coast will be hit, it's just a matter of time. If we didn't build any major cities within 50 miles of the coast, hurricanes would rarely ever threaten them seriously.

3) Because people build communities out of materials which can be affected by storms. I live in Taiwan, where cities are dense and built mostly out of concrete and steel. Here in the capital metro area, even supertyphoons are mostly just a day of missed work or school, while eating instant noodles you bought at 7-11 before the storm got too intense to carry an umbrella, and listening to the wind howling past the windows. People who live in the mountains are at greater risk of mudslides and flash flooding, however, because of the nature of their environment. Our choice of living space and way of life does render us more or less vulnerable to nature's occasional fury, and like New Orleans, deciding to live in low-lying coastal areas is simply accepting the risk that sooner or later there will be tragedy.

4) Because God did not prevent it. I say it in this way, because when people ask the question in other way (If God is good, why does He send hurricanes) they are implying that a hurricane wasn't going to happen, and God "incited" it. But it was, as we explained above. Given scientific superpowers, we could trace the unbroken chain of cause and effect and energy transfer and weather patterns all the way back to the Creation event. This is important. God's creation is real. It is broken by sin, but it still functions according to knowable and consistent physical laws. Now the Bible certainly does speak of God causing disasters specifically as punishment for sin, but it also certainly does not say that every natural phenomenon which humans are caught up in and suffer is a punishment from God.

So we live in the kind of world where hurricanes happen, we have built cities in their path, and we haven't built those cities to be hurricane-resistant. Yet knowing all this, God doesn't stop them. Why? This brings us to the second part of what we mean when we ask why a disaster occurred:

II. Because God did not interfere in the Natural Order on this occasion

We spoke of the unbroken chain of cause and effect which proceeds forth from the creation event: God can and does interfere with this when He decides to, but this is a specific and special event, what we call a miracle. Even in the Bible, which being concerned with God's salvation plan for humanity and interactions with us mentions miracles and direct acts of God very frequently, we still read of a natural world that is God's creation and functions more or less as it was designed to, a world where the sun is a light-emitting object that God placed in the high heavens for the benefit of earth (a different kind of geocentrism -- the sun doesn't revolve around us, but it's there for us and not we for it), yet not a world where the sun is a little god in a chariot that rides around the sky every day but might choose not to do so tomorrow, or might be caught by a hungry sky wolf instead. The very existence and persistence of creation is itself a miracle, to be sure, but to speak as though every single thing that happens each moment is an arbitrary supernatural intervention risks ignoring a default reality the Bible itself assumes, the blessing of being able to take reality for granted, a core component of a scriptural worldview that all modern science is based on and to which it testifies.

So science is true and godly in the sense that it measures this physical world God established to function according to the laws of physics, neither arbitrary nor pantheistic. Yet if we believed only in this, we would be deists and not followers of Christ. As Christians we understand additionally that the One who set those parameters is present and active, and can always make the call to intervene directly, and does so both unprompted for His own reasons and in answer to our prayers.

So then under what conditions does God intervene? The Bible gives us some general categories:

1) Salvation history - God's interactions with the Patriarchs, miracles on behalf of Israel, through His prophets, in the person of Jesus Christ, etc. The Bible is mostly about this--God's special interactions with individuals and nations in His eternal plan for our redemption, and what happened in history as a result.

2) Judgment for Sin - Both the Old and New Testaments mention specific occasions not directly related to the progression of salvation history, which show God specifically acting to punish special sin. In the Old Testament we famously have Sodom and Gomorrah, but in the New Testament we also have Herod, receiving the crowds' adulation in a blasphemous way (Knowing who the LORD was, he still welcomed the crowds' praising him as divine) and being struck down for it. This is mentioned almost parenthetically as a direct punishment by God, and not as the Spirit-empowered act of any apostle, like the blindness of Elymas. We can assume if God punished both individuals and cities/nations directly, in both Old and New Testaments, for sins other than causing harm to Israel (as in the case of Egypt), then He may still do so today.

3)  As an Answer to Prayer - Whether it is the healings and exorcisms performed by the disciples, or the miraculous answers to prayer the Church has seen from its inception until today, Christians know that God is sometimes willing to intervene dramatically. Testimonies to medical "mystery" cases where tumors vanish and doctors are confused by inexplicable recoveries are so common (even discounting the made-up, "share this post for a blessing" ones) that if modern scientists were as inquisitive as their forebearers we'd have whole fields of research trying to figure out by what means these things are occurring. (expect some kind of quantum energy/power of positive thinking explanations to crop up eventually as a way to get around a Biblical explanation if they haven't already, East Asia is way ahead of the West on that front)
Another specific example pertinent to our topic today: After a particularly severe typhoon here in Taiwan a few years ago, cleanup had just begun and rescue crews were still trying to get to people trapped in the mountains, when another typhoon headed for the island. Many people prayed earnestly, and the typhoon made an abrupt u-turn and headed straight back into the Pacific Ocean where it dissipated. I've heard similar stories in other places, and can't speak to their veracity, but at least I've witnessed it happen once myself in this case.

All this has prepared us to answer the central question: If a hurricane was going to hit a city through natural processes, yet God could directly intervene if He so desired, why didn't He do so?

Let's check our categories of Divine intervention mentioned above:

1) Is the hurricane part of salvation history? By definition, no.

2) Is the hurricane judgment for sin? Possibly. As I said above, it's foolish for us humans to pronounce this without knowing the mind of God (let alone start listing out which sins we guess God is punishing or why it was these people and not other people), but with Biblical precedent we also can't rule it out. I personally don't like this explanation because a hurricane is not really a "black swan" event; they happen every year, some are always more powerful than others, and it's only a matter of time before a large city is affected.

3) Did people earnestly pray in faith for God to send the hurricane somewhere else but He answered no? That's complicated, isn't it? Who would you pray for the storm to hit instead of you? As a Christian I fully believe that if many churches gathered together and prayed for God to make the storm do a 180 degree turn and head back out into the Atlantic, He could and might do that. I've seen a similar thing happen once, as I noted above. Obviously I have no way of knowing if those prayers occurred, though I think people tend to not pray with that kind of real urgency unless there's a special emergency. Sometimes we blame God for things we never really petitioned Him to change, but both scripture and the church's experience of great acts of God suggest that there is power in many people humbly petitioning God that a single person's earnest request does not have. To investigate how that works would both take a longer blog than this, but it can be said that prayer is never a means to manipulate God; we can never discover a formula by which to get consistent affirmative answers to our various requests, the Bible only touches on the topic of which prayers are pleasing to God, while telling us that there are some requests to which we will get consistent affirmative answers (Like James 1:5). (Note: This isn't a question of sovereignty--if God has ordained a thing, He has ordained the means, for example the prayers of many, by which it shall occur.)

III. Because Suffering and Pain is the Default of our World, not the Exception

Perhaps I was the only person who hadn't figured that out, but growing up this was not clear. Life wasn't perfect, but it was alright, and events like serious sickness or car accidents or job loss or natural disasters were tragic intrusions in how life ought to be. Much of the developed world seeks to make this perspective as much a reality as possible--that through use of resources and wise decision making, the suffering of this life may be minimized for as many people as possible. This is not a biblical perspective, but it's a natural human one, that leads to evils as well as good. (Trying to minimize suffering leads to acts of mercy and the alleviation of need, but also to abortion and euthanasia)
Scripture does not describe the world exactly in this way. Rather, a peaceful life free from tragic incidents or societal chaos is a blessing from God, a manifestation of Shalom, something to be sought after not because it is "normal" but because it's what people want and how the world was initially supposed to be. We are all longing after Eden, but sin has turned our quest for it into the welfare state, or even communist regimes.

When man fell, he dragged creation down with him. we have no idea if the world had hurricanes before the fall; although people do like to take one verse and run with it, on this question at least there is biblical evidence to suggest that before Noah's flood the climate didn't allow for that kind of thing. By the time of Noah's flood, not only had the fall taken place, but mankind was so wicked that God initiated a pan-disaster that dwarfs the most furious hurricane the world has ever known. To run the risk of the "humansplaining" I mentioned above, my understanding ("I, not the Lord") is that hurricanes and many other potentially lethal weather events began in the post-flood world as an inevitable result of changed climatic factors. (There is also some biblical evidence to suggest "climate change" in terms not of global warming, which an increasingly small number of people cling to in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary, but of the increasing instability of the climate is also an inevitable result of the fall, and will only get worse until the end.)

I have mentioned in a previous blog how, just as you cannot get the tin out of a bronze-alloy sword without destroying it, our post-fall world is alloyed with sin. God will remove it one day, but in doing so "the heavens will perish with fire" and the "earth shall melt like wax." He delays so that more will know Him, more will fill His tables at the feast and enter His dwellings, before the end comes and the door is closed.

Hurricanes are an inevitable phenomenon in our sin-alloyed world. God does not, except in special cases, intervene to prevent the natural consequences of sin. That is the reality of the messed-up world we inhabit. Yet through common grace, by wisdom and understanding the nature of creation (effective city planning and disaster preparation, science that understands the weather and also stronger building materials, etc), we are free to develop ways to mitigate the destructive power of natural phenomenon, and indeed we have done so to a large degree.

So pray for recovery in Houston, pray for mercy in Florida and the Caribbean, and indeed for western wildfires, violence in Syria and Yemen and Nigeria and Sudan and American inner cities and elsewhere, tensions on the Korean peninsula, and a whole host of situations. But if you are simply praying that God will make all the bad things and the hurting stop, that prayer may arise out of the heart's distress, but it does not correspond to biblical reality. The consequences of human sin will wreak havoc as they do, until the final judgment.

Then, what should we do?

God has entrusted the task of letting the world hear the gospel to us. While movements of the Spirit are bringing millions to His kingdom, they are doing so alongside and through the faithful service of brothers and sisters around the world. We are His witnesses, and that is our constant and joyful responsibility whether or not we see God specifically intervening to do miracles on His own. "He's not a tame lion," but we are no longer languishing in the endless winter of frozen Narnia--Christmas has come, and Aslan has died, defeated death, and opened the way.

Now should we sit and question God for letting nature take its course, a course we chose ourselves in Eden by deciding we had better options than trusting obedience? Not as believers. We are on this earth to proclaim Christ to a world that desperately needs hope beyond this world. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. When confronted with disaster, we have two necessary options:

1. Pray, but don't do it alone. God does listen to our requests made in faith. If He chooses to let nature take its course, that is not being mean or unjust, that is in fact exactly justice. He may rather choose to show special mercy in a specific situation, even in a miraculous way, but my experience at least is that He rarely does so when we are casual about asking. And I don't mean prayer memes on FB, but roomfuls of people on their knees.

2. Go. Help. If you are burdened by a disaster, demanding the government or somebody do something on your behalf earns you zero points. (maybe even negative points, by encouraging a culture of shifting Christian responsibility up the secular ladder) Also you can earnestly request, but are unable to demand God do anything. But you are quite capable of being the body of Christ and bringing love and joy to a broken world. If people need help, you go help them.

And some people already are, as we watched in Houston. But what if, like Paul and his race, the Church was excited and even competitive about this? What if the government complained that so many Christians were already responding that they couldn't get state and federal aid in there? (I'm not talking about interfering with professionals doing their jobs, I'm saying a) that's an excuse when there's so much that can be done, and b) Christians can get access to that training too, yeah?) What if we decided no one would outdo us in showing charitable love and being first on the scene to bring mercy and relief in times of disaster and hurting?

I guess, in that situation, the Church might even look like salt and light to a hungry and darkened world. Pray for Florida, pray for Houston, pray for God's mercy on those involved in these and other disasters nationally and globally. Then recognize that God might be prompting you to be one of those expressions of His mercy that you were praying for, and go help someone.

Triple Peanut Teleology

1. A Perfectly-timed Triple Peanut - Miracle or Statistical Inevitability?

The other night, I was eating some peanuts as a late night snack. They were the kind that comes in the shell, and I was enjoying the process of popping them open one by one as I worked on the computer. I have frequent sleep issues and that night I was starting to worry that my brain wanted to pull an all-nighter, when I realized the little bag of peanuts was empty except for the last one. I got it out, popped it open, and lo and behold it was a triple peanut. Not especially uncommon, but the only one in that bag.

For reasons that are more or less impossible to explain but some of you will immediately understand, the fact that the very last peanut in the bag was a triple peanut, and the only triple peanut in the bag, meant that I wouldn't have insomnia that night. It was that mysterious and elusive sense of conclusion my brain demands to feel before it will sleep, unexpectedly encountered in peanut form. One thought immediately came into my mind: "Thanks, God." The incident had very much the feeling of a little favor you do for someone that you love, a little thing that yet means a lot because it's something only someone who truly understands the recipient would know to give them.

This is one of the uncountable number of incidents, big and small, pebbles and boulders, that provide anchors for my faith in God. Sometimes it's not the big dramatic things, it's the times when something you need is provided in such a random but chronologically charitable way that you know it's not an accident. 
 Now, at this point, your average internet atheist is raising an eyebrow or possibly even formulating a response hee* fancies clever, that involves the flying spaghetti monster and/or invisible unicorns. 

(*- he and only he, if you don't get it see iff)

You fool, he will explain, the peanut was at the bottom because having three nuts inside made it heavier than the other peanuts, and it gradually shifted to the bottom during packing or transit. Since triple peanuts are less common than the other types, and given the variety of sorting and packing machinery out there, there is some reasonable chance that only one would be in the bag, and a very high chance that it would then end up at the bottom. That's why, he will summarize, there was just one triple peanut at the end, and not because of some kind of divine intervention. If he's had some schooling he may invoke Occam's Razor* to suggest this is a much simpler explanation than "coming up with a deity," as if you are the first to propose God exists and are boldly attempting to shoehorn Him into the universe.

(*- With some historical irony, as Saint William of Occam/Ockham would consider this an invalid application of the principle -which he did not call a "razor" but frequently used, so that later it became identified with him- and would himself certainly not be on the atheist side of this kind of argument.)

There are various possible arguments in response to this attempt to explain away the event, for example recalling the fact that when I got down to the last several peanuts I could easily have grabbed that one at any time, or that it's not so much that there was one triple peanut as the fact that it came at exactly the right time to negate my insomnia, or that I bought the peanuts rather randomly that night and hadn't done so in a very long time, so however you look at it, it was a pretty exceptional event, and in the context of a world where we already believe there are no pure coincidences, I could argue that the evidence suggests this wasn't one.

But all that would be missing the point, because 1) likelihood isn't a good argument regarding something that already happened*, and 2) it fails to recognize the deeper difference is one of teleology.


(*- This is why scientists laugh when people invoke the "tornado through a junkyard" analogies popularly used by Christians to cite the improbability of evolution occurring. For most scientists, evolution is taken totally for granted as what did in fact happen and continues to happen, so discussing its improbability is irrelevant as far as they are concerned. It's like arguing the odds are against your tire being popped by a particular piece of metal on the interstate as you are getting the spare out of the trunk. Also in reality the odds of a tornado assembling a [whatever the version you heard is] from a random junkyard are incomputable, as Spock might say. I imagine it was originally meant just as a picturesque analogy of something extremely unlikely, and either way is not suitable for an actual debate or serious discussion about probabilities)

2. Teleology and Causes

Teleology is not a word you hear every day, but it's one of those helpful terms that captures an important and profound concept, so it's helpful to know it. Put simply, teleology is what people are invoking when they ask "why did this happen to me?" It is the "why" that is furthest from "how"; a question about the significance or role events play in the bigger picture. It is also a question of faith: one cannot ask "why did this happen" in the teleological sense without believing there is a(n Extrinsic -I won't really go into that here) Purpose that transcends the meaning you yourself might assign to it, which directly implies the existence of God in some form.

When asking Why in general, one is asking for the cause of something. Invoking Aristotle, we can say there are 4 types of causes. The 2 most relevant for our discussion today are the Efficient Cause and Final Cause.

I was not the efficient cause of this helpful image; thank you to whomever was.

The Efficient Cause would include things like the Laws of Physics, and is typically the only cause a modern materialist would recognize. This is a "why" that draws near to a "how." For example, one sometimes encounters questions like "why do things always fall down?" where the answer might be "because of gravity."

A Christian would (typically, and hopefully) have no problem with this answer, because gravity is indeed an observable part of Creation. Yet recognizing the presence and activity of God, we recognize there are answers on another level as well. So the stereotypically mocked answer of "because God made it fall," is actually no less correct an answer than gravity, the difference is in which kind or level of Cause is being invoked.

But while various debates rage in the Church regarding the extent to which God is the efficient cause, most Christians could certainly agree God is the agent of the Final Cause, (The telos, from whence "teleology"). Why the rock fell is, in light of the Final Cause, connected to the question of why the rock exists in the first place. For Christians, this question has an answer, though one to which our limited knowledge does not extend. "There is a reason for everything," we believe, because the God of scripture is a reasonable God. Even when He is doing things in the Old Testament that distress His own prophets, I can't think of a scriptural example when He does not also explain why the thing is happening; every specific action of God we see in Scripture has a Purpose.

So we believe that the Efficient Cause of the rock falling is gravity, and the Final Cause is known to God as part of His hidden will. Even without going into questions of to what extent God's sovereignty controls what occurs, I think more or less all Christians would agree, and could agree that scripture observably teaches, that a rock does not ever fall for reasons that escape God.

For the atheist/materialist, there is no Final Cause. In fact, there cannot be, or else God. In the words of an atheist on Reddit (Yes random, but he put it well and succinctly): "Final causes are an incoherent concept, and if we accept them, them we accept teleology, and if we accept teleology, then we accept either an infinite regress or a first cause. Not sure how [one] avoids deism with that." (Here deism means admitting the universe implies an initiator God of some kind without going into what that God's attributes might be, so nowhere near Christianity but taking the first step towards Romans 1 and making atheism untenable in the process)

Some subsequent commenters brought up some objections to his claim that final causes are incoherent, and he retorted that purposes are not inherent but must be assigned by a mind. Since he denied God, he considered this a rebuttal (no mind to do it, except humans), but for us it's the other way around; God possesses a mind external to the universe, therefore its purpose can be assigned by Him. The argument requires the assumption of no God to be evidence against God. (This is yet another demonstration of how atheist arguments are ultimately always circular: No God, because No God)

Now to return to my blessing in peanut form, the important thing here is that the atheist's "rebuttal" and my claim are actually distinct; he is trying to impossibly attack my final cause with an efficient cause, like claiming a car does not exist to be driven but because a factory built it. This is an extremely common mistake atheists fall into, and Christians tend to feel instinctively that something is wrong about the argument but aren't sure how to articulate it. (I hope this post is helpful along those lines)


In fact, I can agree with everything my hypothetical antagonist says regarding how I ended up with that particular peanut at that particular time, because I acknowledge both efficient cause and final cause. He is forced to deny the possibility of the final cause, or else God. (Yet, poor soul, he will probably insist that my "religious" mind is the narrow and shackled one.) In any case, the efficient cause is doubtless similar to what he has described. I'm not suggesting there was a flash of glorious light and the peanut was created ex nihilo in the bottom of the bag. God can do that if He wants, and there are mountains of evidence even beyond scriptural accounts (which by faith are enough) that miracles do happen. So sometimes the efficient cause is a testimony to God as well, since it's inexplicable. I think of miraculous healings, for example. In those situations, skeptics will simply speak from their standpoint of unbelief and say they're sure there must be a natural explanation. (Of course... because if there isn't, even once, then God. Do you begin to see where the burden of proof lies now? I believe this is one reason Paul can say they are "without excuse." All roads lead to admitting God's existence except the one whose primary objective is not to lead there. That is called "willing unbelief")

So, although I don't see any evidence for divine intervention in the efficient cause of my peanut blessing, my faith can still be strengthened. How? In that the final cause in this context was the rectification of my insomnia on a particular night, and because none of the humans involved in the process of the peanut reaching me had the knowledge to extrinsically cause this, and it goes without saying that a peanut cannot seriously be argued to have the intrinsic cause of insomnia prevention, therefore God is the only possible agent. An event occurred in which the means were ordinary but conspired to produce a result which could have only been from God. Distinguishing between Causes allows us to articulate more clearly how this can be the case.

I have found that Christians often fight to attribute the efficient cause to Divine intervention when the case is sometimes a little shaky, opening themselves to sometimes (not always) valid criticism from skeptics who demonstrate persuasively the natural means by which the event could have occurred, and feel confirmed in their unbelief. I think that's because the Christians in those situations know, deeply, that something is of God, and want to demonstrate that, but aren't familiar with this tool for seeing that the supernatural element is still there, but is better expressed in terms of teleology.

Teleology is the basis of the Intelligent Design argument,
often introduced rhetorically via the Watchmaker analogy

3. Practical Applications of Final Cause/Teleology for Christians

Some of you may find your eyes glazing over when things turn philosophical, some may not even have made it this far. But I want to point out a few extremely important and relevant issues which stem from this concept.

1. Final Cause means There is a God, and vice versa

One can't logically derive our Triune God, that knowledge comes from the special revelation of scripture. But that the existence of a Final Cause necessitates Divinity in some reasonable and personal-ish form, as I mentioned above, even atheists recognize. They will respond rhetorically various ways to the accusation that they say people have no Purpose, recognizing that sounds bad, but in general they would challenge the very concept of Purpose, because to really admit Purpose is to admit God. (That's one of the various reasons there have never been all that many real atheists... the concept of Purpose is too obviously valid and real for normal people to seriously pretend it doesn't exist)

The flip side, that the existence of God allows a Final Cause, should be encouraging to us as believers. We don't get to know what it is, we may see things we don't understand, but we know that God is, and that He is good. If we see evil and suffering, we should recall that other sentient beings besides God exist and may possibly have played a role in the mess we see every time we take a look at the news. (Yes, this leads directly to arguments about sovereignty... and they are good and necessary arguments to have. It's a worthy topic to ponder and wrestle with, and as long as we're doing so in the love of Christ and not to divide up His body the Church into rival camps, God is glorified in our pursuit of understanding regarding Him. That He is beyond our understanding doesn't mean we can't seek to know Him better.)

2. Christians need to bear in mind that many people avoid Teleological thinking

Christians understand the language of Purpose and we very frequently invoke it and think in terms of teleology, even in the negative sense: after a major disaster, Christian often wonder why God allowed it to happen. "What good purpose could there possibly be in this," we ask ourselves conflictedly, and atheists ask mockingly, suggesting the answer is, "there isn't, because there is no God and nothing has a Purpose." They're attacking the very concept of a Final Cause. (As stated above, they have to, because otherwise, God)

In many cultures and subcultures, teleological concerns are simply perceived as less compelling than pragmatic ones. The ultimate purpose behind things happening is seen as unknowable, so the focus is on dealing with things as they come and their ramifications. In that context, Christians trying to get a conversation about God going through discussing the ultimate purpose behind this or that may not get far. Many people simply aren't interested in thinking teleologically, as subtly demonstrated by the fact that popular media often portrays it happening in conversations between people getting high ("Dude, like, what's it all mean?"), or Eastern-type advice from a guru figure ("Find your Purpose deep within yourself"), or negatively, as those unwelcome thoughts which come on sleepless nights ("What legacy will I leave behind?"). Rarely is it ever portrayed as a necessary aspect of life for ordinary people to consider and factor into their plans and actions. When a scriptural worldview is not actively maintained, that attitude can unconsciously creep into the Church as well.

3. Remembering Teleology prompts us to live according to our Purpose

If there is a Final Cause for all events in our lives, how much more is there a Purpose for each of us? And that purpose is not a trick question on the exam of existence, which we must figure out or be condemned to a fruitless life and God's displeasure, but neither is it a pleasant unspecific thought which can encourage us but carries no responsibility. Scripture does not teach us to be either anxious or agnostic about our purpose. You have one, and it's both a responsibility and a joy, but not a trap.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism famously asks "What is the Chief End of Man?"
The answer is "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever." 

One way of glorifying God in this life (not to mention obeying Him) is to actively seek to live in a way that reflects the Great Commission of Christ, the instructions He left the incipient Church, a command which we have inherited. That means, in the words of the Gospel of Matthew, making disciples, baptizing them, and teaching them to obey everything He commanded (which necessarily includes the Great Commission itself).

Believers, then, must think about what responsibility they have regarding this mission. No one outside of the Church can do it; the task was given to us. For many of you, that task may not be packing up and moving to another country and/or culture (Though maybe it is; it was for me), but it must be said, that also doesn't mean living each week considering that you've done your Christian duty by sacrificing a couple hours to attend church. If we have a Purpose, it comes from God. God is real, and that has real implications for your life; faith is attempting to live according to that fact, not merely intellectual assent to it.

If you believe that this God from whom springs forth your purpose for existing is real, you will live that out. Not living it out doesn't necessarily mean you don't believe, but it might mean that, or merely that you are being disobedient and should repent. And as James wrote, that's a dead sort of faith anyway; why should you remain in a situation of arguing that you have faith despite no obvious evidence of living it out? Show your faith by how you live it out. You'll find joy shows up in the process.