Follies of the wise: the human penchant for disastrously confusing fantasy with fact is most plainly seen in the impulse to ascribe one's own concerns to divine powers and then to harden one's heart against unbelievers

On the day after Christmas 2004, a major earthquake and tsunami devastated coastal regions around the Indian Ocean, killing as many as 300,000 people outright, and dooming countless others to misery, heartbreak, and early death. Thanks to video cameras and the satellite transmission of images, that event penetrated the world's consciousness with an immediate force that amounted, psychologically, to a tsunami in its own right. The charitable contributions that then poured forth on an unprecedented scale expressed something more than empathy and generosity. They also bore an aspect of self-therapy--of an attempt, however symbolic, to mitigate the calamity's impersonal randomness and thus to draw a curtain of decorum over a scene that appeared to proclaim too baldly, "This world wasn't made for us." No greater challenge to theodicy--the body of doctrine that attempts to reconcile cruelty, horror, and injustice with the idea of a benevolent God--had been felt by Western pundits since the great Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of November 1, 1755.

On that earlier occasion, mainstream Catholic and Protestant faith received a lesser blow than did Enlightenment "natural theology," which, presuming the Creator to have had our best interests at heart when he instituted nature's laws and then retired, made no allowance for either Satanic influence or divine payback for wickedness. God's indifference, it then suddenly appeared to Voltaire and others, was more complete than any deist had dared to conceive. As for the clerics of the era, they welcomed the disaster with unseemly Schadenfreude as a useful topic for sermons. "Learn, O Lisbon," one Jesuit intoned, "that the destroyers of our houses, palaces, churches, and convents, the cause of the death of so many people and of the flames that devoured such vast treasures, are your abominable sins, and not comets, stars, vapors, and exhalations, and similar natural phenomena" (Wieseltier 2005, p. 34).

The same opportunity was seized in early 2005 by Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and even Buddhist fear mongers, and they were joined by, among others, Israel's Sephardic chief rabbi, who proclaimed, "this is an expression of God's great ire with the world" (Wieseltier 2005). But two and a half centuries of increasing scientific awareness had made for a significant difference in lay attitudes. Now the rabbi's callous words--Leon Wieseltier rightly called them "a justification of the murder of children"--met with widespread revulsion. By 2005 only an unschooled person or a blinkered zealot could fail to understand that a thoroughly natural conjunction of forces had wiped out populations whose only "sin" was to have pursued their livelihood or recreation in lowlands adjacent to the ocean.

Theodicy, in this altered climate of opinion, would have to take a subtler track. Just such an adjustment was made with considerable suavity by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in a Sunday Telegraph article of January 2, 2005:

   The question: "How can you believe in a God who permits suffering
   on this scale?" is ... very much around at the moment,
   and it would be surprising if it weren't--indeed, it would be
   wrong if it weren't. The traditional answers will get us only so
   far. God, we are told, is not a puppet-master in regard either to
   human actions or to the processes of the world. If we are to exist
   in an environment where we can live lives of productive work
   and consistent understanding--human lives as we know them--the
   world has to have a regular order and pattern of its own.
   Effects follow causes in a way that we can chart, and so can make
   some attempt at coping with. So there is something odd about
   expecting that God will constantly step in if things are getting
   dangerous (Williams 2005, p. 22).

Thanks to the Sunday Telegraph's provocative headline, "Of Course This Makes Us Doubt God's Existence," Williams's opinion piece raised many an eyebrow, enhancing the archbishop's well-cultivated reputation for theological brinkmanship. On a careful reading, however, his essay appears in a truer light as a traditional exercise in Christian damage control. "Doubt God's existence"? Hardly. It sufficed for Williams that "we are told" about the Lord's plan to allow the world "a pattern of its own"--one that, if it occasionally puts us in harm's way, does so only because the fashioning of a law-abiding cosmos struck the Almighty as the best means for us humans to achieve "productive work and consistent understanding." A more complacent expression of anthropocentric vanity would be hard to imagine.

Having made a conciliatory feint toward heretical thoughts, the prelate went on to slam the door on unbelievers by suggesting that only "religious people" can care about the loss of individual lives within a mass die-off. Through their prayers, Williams related, pious folk "ask for God's action" to assuage the suffering of the maimed and the bereaved. Wait--hadn't the writer just conceded that it's useless to plea for any intervention against nature's laws? That point, we now realize, was only a rhetorical stratagem for exempting the recent tsunami from inclusion among motivated supernatural deeds. The God who had been paring his fingernails when the hundred-foot waves came ashore was now presumably back at his post and ready to be swayed by spoken and silent prayers that would waft toward heaven, even though they lacked any known physical means of doing so.