When Scripture interprets them that way in those specific cases, we see no reason for not accepting those interpretations. We can understand, too, that special modern calamities are ascribed, in the subjective opinion of people of faith, to specific present-day sins. They may be right or they may be wrong. But when someone declares that the regular heat and drouth of the Sahara is because of Adam's Fall, we demur. Or if someone declares that the act of a wolf eating a jackrabbit is a cruelty which entered the world because Adam fell, then we again demur.
Men wish to study the relationship of men to trouble.
There is much trouble in the world. That trouble consists partly in men's sins. That trouble consists partly in natural circumstances. We believe a more careful cosmology should be accepted, a cosmology which would not conspicuously violate Descartes's simple and understandable rules.