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[Witch Hunt]

Why would God make childbirth life-threatening for women?

[jimwalton]

It's no different than anything else in nature. Life is dangerous, and humans are fragile. Gravity can be life-threatening. So also eating things we find in nature. The ocean waves can be life-threatening. Wild animals. A pond can be life-threatening (people have drowned in them). Disease can be. Of course there are earthquakes, volcanoes, and tornadoes.

We live in a dynamic world, subject to variation and change, with a large number of systems (weather, gravity, water, land, wind) that interact, balance, and even depend on each other. Some systems seem to behave more randomly and chaotically (like the wind and land masses on fault lines), while others act more like order and purpose (the tides). Within these dynamic possibilities come all the dangers that I listed, and more, including childbirth. But ultimately a dynamic world is superior to a static one.

If you have ever tried to balance a salt shaker at a restaurant on one edge, or a chair on one of its four legs, you have discovered you might be able to succeed for a while, but eventually something (a jiggle, a breeze, or even your own movements) causes it to go off balance and fall. This principle was proposed by a meteorologist in the late 1960s who wrote a paper called, "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wing in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" This thought was so significant we now know it as the Butterfly Effect. Even if we had delicate sensors in every square foot of the globe and its atmosphere, we would still not be able to faultlessly (100%) predict the weather. The "Butterfly Effect" would always be present to present a force we had not foreseen or knew nothing about.

Our world seems filled with a liberal quantity of such interacting chaos systems: weather patterns, electrical impulses, the firing pattern of neurons in the brain, ecosystems, etc. They behave occasionally in wild ways (the Zika virus, cancerous growths, plagues of disease). They also result in natural "evil": drought, earthquakes, and volcanoes.
Should God stop all of these phenomena from happening? Absolutely not. Such a dynamic world is essential for life as we know it. God would want to create this kind of world if he were creating the best possible world. For instance, since both our circulatory system and nervous system are beneficial chaotic systems, there is strong scientific evidence proving that dynamical systems are beneficial if not necessary to life. The heart can recover from occasional arrhythmias; the body can create new arteries; our brains can recover from some injuries because neurons can sometimes create new paths. Not only that, but if the brain were static, creativity wouldn't be possible. Natural processes (trees, snowflakes, clouds, shorelines, faces) couldn't produce novel outcomes.

While God might have created a static world, he would have at the same time eliminated all reason, creativity, and scientific inquiry. And if in his sovereignty he overrode all possibilities of evil, he would also be overriding all possibilities of good. As much as we detest suffering, this would not be a desirable world. Natural science, engineering, and education would be nonexistent; courage and excitement would be absent. Careful structural design would be meaningless (no earthquake or tornado would ever be allowed to hit a building, and God would stop any building from ever collapsing on a person). Medical arts wouldn't exist, since disease would never harm or kill.

Therefore, God cannot make a dynamical world in which natural evil such as death in childbirth can't occur. It's self-contradictory and absurd, and ultimately intensely undesirable, if not impossible, as a form of existence.