Why does God allow Natural Disasters?
At the heart of
Evil has always been
a thorn in the side of those - of whatever faith - who believe in an
all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God. As the philosopher David Hume (echoing
Epicurus) put it in 1776: "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he
both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"
Faced with this
question, Archbishop of York John Sentamu said he had
"nothing to say to make sense of this horror", while another
clergyman, Canon Giles Fraser, preferred to respond "not with clever
argument but with prayer". "I have nothing to say that makes sense of
this horror - all I know is that the message of the death and resurrection of
Jesus is that he is with us"
Perhaps their stance
is understandable. The Old Testament is also not clear to the layman on such
matters. When Job complains about the injuries God has allowed him to suffer,
and claims "they are tricked that trusted", God says nothing to rebut
the charges.
Less reticent is the
American evangelist Pat Robertson. He has suggested
And even were it
true, it wouldn't obviously meet the challenge. Why would a loving deity allow
such a pact to seem necessary? Why wouldn't he have freed the Haitians from
slavery himself, or prevented them from being enslaved in the first place? And
why, in particular, would he punish today's Haitians for something their
forbears putatively did more than two centuries before?
So what should
believers say? To make progress, we might distinguish two kinds of evil:
·
the
awful things people do, such as murder, and
·
the
awful things that just happen, such as earthquakes
However that debate
turns out, it's quite unclear how free will is supposed to explain the other
kind of evil - the death and suffering of the victims of natural disasters.
Perhaps it would if all the victims - even the newborn - were so bad that they
deserved their agonising deaths, but it's impossible to believe that is the
case.
Or perhaps free will would
be relevant if human negligence always played a role. There will be some who
say the scale of the tragedy in natural disasters is partly attributable to
humans. The world has the choice to help its poorer parts build
earthquake-resistant structures and tsunami warning systems. But the technology
has not always existed. Was prehistoric man, with his sticks and stones,
somehow negligent in failing to build early warning systems for the tsunamis
that were as deadly back then as they are today?
The second century
saint, Irenaeus, and the 20th Century philosopher,
John Hick, appeal instead to what is sometimes called soul-making. God created
a universe in which disasters occur, they think, because goodness only develops
in response to people's suffering. To appreciate this
idea, try to imagine a world containing people, but literally no suffering.
Call it the Magical World. In that world, there are no earthquakes or tsunamis,
or none that cause suffering. If people are hit by falling masonry, it somehow bounces
off harmlessly. If I steal your money, God replaces it. If I try to hurt you, I
fail.
So why didn't God
create the Magical World instead of ours? Because, the soul-making view says,
its denizens wouldn't be - couldn't be - truly good people. It's not that they
would all be bad. It's that they couldn't be properly good. For
goodness develops only where it's needed, the idea goes, and it's not needed in
the Magical World. In that world, after all, there is no danger that
requires people to be brave, so there would be no bravery. That world contains
no one who needs comfort or kindness or sympathy, so none would be given. It's
a world without moral goodness, which is why God created ours instead.
But there is wiggle
room. Even in a world where nothing bad happens, couldn't there be brave people
- albeit without the opportunity to show it? So moral
goodness could exist even if it were never actually needed. And, anyway,
suppose we agree moral goodness could indeed develop only in a world of
suffering. Doesn't our world contain a surplus of suffering? People do truly
awful things to each other. Isn't the suffering they create enough for
soul-making? Did God really need to throw in earthquakes and tsunamis as well?
Suffering's
distribution, not just its amount, can also cause problems. A central point of
philosopher Immanuel Kant's was that we mustn't exploit people - we mustn't use
them as mere means to our ends. But it can seem that on the soul-making view
God does precisely this. He inflicts horrible deaths on innocent earthquake
victims so that the rest of us can be morally benefitted. That hardly seems
fair.
It's OK, some will
insist, because God works in mysterious ways. But mightn't someone defend a
belief in fairies by telling us they do too? Others say their talk of God is
supposed to acknowledge not the existence of some all-powerful and all-good
agent, who created and intervenes in the universe, but rather something more
difficult to articulate - a thread of meaning or value running through the
world, or perhaps something ineffable. In which case the use of the term God is
probably a misleading one and, as for those who believe in an all-good,
all-powerful agent-God, we've seen that they face a question that remains
pressing after all these centuries, and which is now horribly underscored by
the horrors in Haiti. If a deity exists, why didn't he prevent this?
David Bain is a
lecturer in the philosophy department of the