Natural Disasters

I went to the Inter Varsity Fellowship meeting tonight - Dr Vinoth Ramachandra, the Sri Lankan theologian who spoke at the Veritas Forum, was back to answer more questions. We got to discuss suffering in greater depth. A girl in the audience asked him, why did God allow innocent people to suffer, especially in cases of natural disaster, where there was no human agency involved?

Dr Ramachandra spoke about how natural disasters were not "evil" in and of themselves - they were simply natural phenomena that God used to bring about ecological diversity. We all marvel at the beauty of the Himalayas, but if there had been no earthquakes, they would not have existed. What is "evil" about natural disasters is the unnecessary loss of life. Why did so many people die in the tsunami? Japan gets earthquakes and tsunamis far more frequently, but people do not die. The people in South Asia died of poverty and corruption. There was no early warning system. There were no preventative measures in place. Most of them had no means to escape. The mangrove swamps and coral reefs, nature's defense, had been destroyed by bad development throughout the years.

In New Orleans, it was also the poor who died in the hurricane. The New York Times has recently reported that House Republicans are going to issue "a blistering report ...that says the Bush administration delayed the evacuation of thousands of New Orleans residents by failing to act quickly on early reports that the levees had broken during Hurricane Katrina."

But you can still ask, why did God allow it to happen? Maybe we were responsible it, but God is all-powerful, why did he have to let the innocent people suffer? Dr Ramachandra pointed out that we sometimes assume that suffering must be punishment, and that only evil people "deserve" to suffer. But at the centre of our faith is an innocent man, the most innocent man who ever lived, the Son of God, who was crucified on our behalves. God does not watch our suffering from afar; he has entered our suffering and is counted amongst the most tragic of victims. And God did not only suffer on the cross. Throughout the Old Testament, the prophets speak of God's anguish: he suffers with a broken and spoilt creation, he suffers the pain of our rejection. In books like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Hosea, the image that comes up again and again is that of God, the faithful husband, and Israel, the faithless bride (in some instances Israel is even accused of "prostitution"). The language is vivid and graphic. God's anger reflects his passionate love for his people, for it is always the ones we love most who hurt us most deeply.

It was extremely poignant listening to Dr Ramachandra discuss the tsunami; Sri Lanka was one of the countries that was the hardest hit. Dr Ramachandra is deeply involved with working with the poor, those who were most devastated by the tsunami, helping them rebuild their lives. He spoke of having to comfort a friend who lost all five members of her family. But at no point did he turn around and blame God. He said that we often blamed God for our mistakes.

Free will gives us the occasion to reject God and choose evil, but it's a mystery why we do in fact choose to do that. Dr Ramachandra spoke about the absurdity of sin: Why do we choose to deny and reject our good and loving God? It makes no sense at all. (See The Veritas Forum at Columbia - A slight diversion: Reflections on the absurdity of sin) When we do indeed make this absurd choice, we find that everything breaks down. If the most important thing in our lives is family, tribe or nation, or wealth, power and acclaim, then we cannot love all groups of people and all persons. We might even harm others in order to further our own interests. But if God is our ultimate joy, we learn to want what he wants, and to love the way that he loves - sacrificially and indiscriminately.

God's answer to irrational rebellion, is not a theological explanation, but the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He bore the weight of the world's evil, the consequences of our sin, triumphing over it on the cross.

The essence of sin is "playing God... acting as if you, and your pleasure, were the end to which all things, God included, must be made to function as a means" (J. I. Packer). You can only explain what is reasonable, but the essence of sin is absurd. Further more, the fact that we, finite beings, cannot fathom the entirety of our Infinite Creator's plan, does not disprove his existence. (See Knowing Enough and The greatest thing you'll ever learn...)

Earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis are amoral natural phenomena.

It seems that it is we who are the natural disasters.