Monday, March 14, 2011
The problem of tsunamis for believers
The horrific scenes from Japan bring to mind a conversation we had on MoJ in the wake of the 2004 tsunami. Earthly suffering often is mitigated by God's comfort; that comfort, at least for me, is more elusive in these settings. Back in 2004, I asked:
Clinging to a belief in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good deity appears hopeless in the wake of these deadly waves. Invoking human free will offers little help, as the earthquake (unlike all war, much famine, and many diseases) is not causally related to any human act or omission. Chalking it up to the mystery of God is understandably seen as a cop-out. Another common response is to insist that creation fell along with humanity, and this world is obviously not as God desired. But why would God have wired the earth itself to unleash death and destruction once humanity rejected Him? Murder is a human creation; plate tectonics are not. Is not God culpable for earthquakes? And if God is culpable, is not the entire Christian worldview proved to be the illogical relic portrayed by critics?
It seems to me that if we want a moral anthropology rooted in the Incarnation to be taken seriously, we must try to offer an explanation of a world in which tsunamis rip children from their mothers' arms. This is an age-old question, but it must lie at the heart of any effort to engage a culture made skeptical of our "Catholic legal theory" project, at least in part, by pervasive human suffering seemingly caused by the God we embrace.
Amy responded ("Part of God's invitation to us is: will you walk with me even if you don't understand.") as did Rick, who also linked to other responses around the web.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/03/the-problem-of-tsunamis-for-believers.html
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Rob,
I highly recommend "Tsunami and Theodicy" by David Bentley Hart - http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/01/tsunami-and-theodicy. I think the approach he outlines there, fleshed out in his book, "Doors of the Sea," is one of the few coherent responses that a Christian thinker can give to horrors on this level.
It is a potent reminder of the nature of evil, and how claims that God is somehow responsible for evil are dangerous, and how claims that evil is "necessary" in some way are hollow and fly in the face of what Christian's think of as the nature of God.
His final paragraph:
"As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, 'Behold, I make all things new.'"