Is God responsible? The tsunami & other evils

The real horrors usually elude us. Most of our life is spent in a kind of daze. We are distracted by the nice taste of the sandwich we had for lunch, the pleasant conversation, the thriller we relax with in the evening; and then something reminds us that tragedy is built into being: the devastating tsunami of December 26, 2004, or the destruction visited on the Unites States on September 11, 2001; the news that we have an inoperable tumor; the death of a child, husband, wife, or friend.

How should we take this in? Can we? In the wake of the horror visited upon the people who live around the Indian Ocean, several newspaper articles and Internet blogs took up the theme of how difficult this must be for those who proclaim belief in a benevolent, loving God. The general tone was, "They have some explaining to do."

They do indeed, but they always do. A few things must be said first: the tsunami impresses us because of its scale, the heartbreaking photographs of dead children and weeping parents, the terrible extent of the destruction--described, frequently, as being "of biblical proportions."

But when a child you know or anyone you love dies, it also strikes you as infinitely terrible, even if it is only one child. The death of a child by flood is no more horrible than the death of a child by random gunshot in a drug-infested neighborhood, or by cancer. It is crushing for the parents, and they will never be the same. Years ago the son of a couple I am related to through marriage was struck on the head by a falling limb as he played in his grandparents' backyard; since then, he has lived in a semicomatose state. My baby sister died at the age of eighteen months when her fever went up to 106. All these things pose a problem for people who believe in a benevolent God.

It is surprising that this comes into sudden focus only with events like the tsunami. The ancient Hindu epic Mahabharata includes a riddle: How is it that, although people see others dying around them every day, it comes as a shock to them to know that they must die? Why should it take a tsunami to raise the question about God's goodness? Why isn't everyday life, the horror of ordinary daily suffering, enough? Every day babies are born without brains and beloved parents fade into Alzheimer's disease and kind men and women are diagnosed with ALS. Every day children drown, buildings collapse on construction workers, grandmothers suffer paralyzing strokes. Life is horrible enough without tsunamis; historic catastrophes provide a sharp reminder of something that is always with us. They rip the mask off and bring us up sharply against the way life is all the time for millions of people every day.

Part of our reaction to cataclysmic horror is a residue of the idea that God uses these enormous tragedies to punish us. Wars and earthquakes and floods are God's scourges, signs of his displeasure, his way of punishing us for our disobedience. Most of us rightly find repellent the idea that the children washed out to sea were being punished for my sins, or yours, or the sins of their parents.

The argument that the tsunami poses a new challenge to those who believe in God's goodness is hardly new. It was raised after the earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, when Voltaire asked if the people of Lisbon were really that much more wicked than the people of Paris. For those who believe in the God of the Bible (even as they resist "biblical proportion" metaphors), the problem at one level is quite obvious: we profess to believe in a God who created the world as a good thing, who loves the world, and who is all-powerful. Such horrors as the genocides that marked the twentieth century are mysterious enough, but they incline some of us to lose faith in humanity rather than in God. When the evils we suffer come from nature itself, not from evil human beings, what does this say about creation--it was supposed to be good, after all--and the God responsible for it, who is supposed to be good and all-powerful?

Paul writes in Romans that "sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned." In both the Old and New Testaments even natural evils were often seen as somehow connected with sin, with a primordial catastrophe that has wounded all creation. We sense that it is not meant to be this way. If one thing can be said to unite all religious perception at its base it may be here: Things are not the way we know they should be. That sense of a catastrophe is central: the sense that the world, or our understanding of it, or both, are seriously clouded or distorted or blighted. And the responses are varied. Buddhism says that existence is suffering and builds from that point. Gnosticism says that there is a good God, but that God is not responsible for the mess we endure, which is the creation of a demiurge or evil god. Liberation means escaping the bonds of the evil of matter. Judaism and Christianity say that the world is good--but that sin has somehow torn it away from what it was meant to be by introducing death and all the suffering that attends death.