Agnostic take on Tsunami. What's the take on the KC view?

[Guest guest]

Is God to blame for this?

 

People may question their faith because of the random death and destruction

caused by the tsunami, writes Kenneth Nguyen.

 

There are doubtless thousands of stories arising out of Sunday's tsunami

that are just like Satya Kumari's. A building worker living on the outskirts

of India's former French enclave of Pondicherry, Kumari saw walls of water

sweep his town, leaving behind a trail of wet corpses. That and grief,

inconsolable grief.

 

"Death came from the sea," he told reporters. "The waves just kept chasing

us. It swept away all our huts. What did we do to deserve this?"

 

It is a pertinent and challenging question for all those who believe in an

interventionist higher being, an omnipotent God. What did the many thousands

of victims throughout Asia and Africa do to deserve their fate? And what

sort of God would sanction such apparently meaningless devastation?

 

After all, scientists who leave God out of the equation have a simple

explanation for the tsunami. A completely random tectonic fissure in the

seabed created jet-speed ripples that ultimately unleashed their energy upon

various shores.

 

For those who believe in an interventionist God, however, there is little

choice other than to come to that difficult-to-face conclusion:

responsibility for the tsunami must be sheeted home to God.

 

The Book of Job, for example, states: "God sends earthquakes and shakes the

ground; he rocks the pillars that support the earth." Similarly, Psalms

104:32 states: "He looks at the earth, and it trembles; he touches the

mountains, and they pour out smoke." From such Biblical material there is

one inference. The destruction, the misery, the shrieks of pain: these

occurred as part of His design.

 

Indeed, on one interpretation of the Bible, the implications of the tsunami

run even deeper: the victims were not simply chosen by God so they could be

delivered to (a potentially heavenly) fate. They might have been chosen

because an interventionist God actually regarded the Hindus of India and the

Muslims of Indonesia and the Buddhists of Thailand as deserving of earthly

suffering.

 

Notably, Romans 8:28 posits that "God works for good with those who love

him". (The truth of Romans 8:28 is said to be reflected in Acts 16:11-40,

where God uses an earthquake to release Paul and Silas from jail in

Philippi.) The flipside to this statement is, of course, that God has the

power to punish those who do not love the Lord.

 

The Romans-derived view that earthquakes are an earthly expression of divine

displeasure has a long history. For example, in the aftermath of the 1755

Lisbon earthquakes, which killed an estimated 100,000 people, Catholic

priests roamed the city, blaming heresy suspects for the disaster and

hanging them on sight.

 

Thankfully, the religious establishment, in its reaction to the Asian

tsunami, has so far shown no similar signs of blaming the victim.

 

In a statement to faithful gathered in St Peter's Square, Pope John Paul

called for prayers for the victims of this immense tragedy and expressed

solidarity with all those who are suffering. But the Pope's statement did

not tackle the tricky question of God's role in the tsunami, nor did it

address why the victims might have been chosen by God.

 

Similarly, on this page yesterday, Tim Costello noted that he had "(no) easy

way of dealing with the question of what is termed an 'act of God' ".

 

We should not necessarily expect all other Judeo-Christian leaders and

commentators to be so reticent or tactful. In the aftermath to last year's

Bam earthquakes, which killed more than 20,000 (mostly Muslim) Iranians,

conservative American rabbi Daniel Lapin argued in the Chicago Jewish News

that God dispatches natural disasters to punish those who have not embraced

Judeo-Christian traditions. Noting that the US had been relatively untouched

by natural disasters, Lapin wrote: "We ought to acknowledge that each day,

every American derives enormous benefit from the faith of our founders and

of their heirs." So goes the pungent logic of one who believes in an

interventionist God.

 

For agnostics, including me, the tsunami has highlighted just how

unpalatable the idea of an interventionist God ultimately is. Of the

thousands killed in the disaster, probably about one-third were children,

too young to have a fully considered view on the existence of God. Did they

deserve to die? And what of the many Christians and Jews, including charity

workers, still missing? Do they, and their family members, deserve their

suffering?

 

The truth is, the random destruction wreaked upon our earth by one tectonic

shift fits uneasily with prevailing visions of an all-powerful,

philosophically benevolent God. Sunday's tsunami broke countless lives,

hearts, communities. It would be little wonder if it ended up breaking many

people's faith too.