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How can religious people explain something like this?

 

Earthquakes led 18th-century thinkers to ask questions we shy away

from

 

Martin Kettle

Tuesday December 28, 2004

The Guardian

 

The modern era flatters itself that human beings can now know and

shape almost everything about the world. But an event like the

Indonesian earthquake exposes much of this for the hubris that it

is.

 

Perhaps we have talked so much about our civilisation's potential to

destroy the planet that we have forgotten that the planet also has

an untamed ability to destroy civilisation too. Whatever else it has

achieved, the Indian Ocean tsunami has at least reminded mankind of

its enduring vulnerability in the face of nature. The scale of

suffering that it has wreaked - 20,000 deaths and counting - shows

that we share such dangers with our ancestors more fully than most

of us realised.

 

An entirely understandable reaction to such an event is to set one's

face against any large questions that it may raise. But this week

provides an unsought opportunity to consider the largest of all

human implications of any major earthquake: its challenge to

religion.

 

A few days after the 9/11 attacks on New York, I had dinner with the

Guardian's late columnist Hugo Young. We were still so close to the

event itself that only one topic of conversation was possible. At

one stage I asked Hugo how his Catholicism allowed him to explain

such a terrible act. I'm afraid that's an easy one, he replied.

 

We are all fallen beings, Hugo declared, and our life in this world

is a vale of tears. So some human beings will always kill one

another. The attack on New York should therefore be seen not as an

act of God, but as an act of fallen humanity. Then he paused, and

added: " But I admit I have much more difficulty with earthquakes. "

 

Earthquakes and the belief in the judgment of God are, indeed, very

hard to reconcile. However, no religion that offers an explanation

of the world can avoid making some kind of an attempt to fit the two

together. And an immense earthquake like the one that took place off

Sumatra on Sunday inevitably poses that challenge afresh in dramatic

terms.

 

There is, after all, only one big question to ask about an event of

such destructive power as the one that has taken place this week:

why did it happen?

 

As with previous earthquakes, any explanation of this latest one

poses us a sharp intellectual choice. Either there is an entirely

natural explanation for it, or there is some other kind. Even the

natural one is by no means easy to imagine, but it is at least

wholly coherent.

 

The tsunami took place, say the seismologists, because a massive

tectonic rupture on the sea bed generated tremors through the ocean.

These unimaginable forces sent their energy coursing across

thousands of miles of water, resulting in death and destruction in a

vast arc from Somalia to Indonesia.

 

But what do world views that do not allow scientists undisputed

authority have to say about such phenomena? Where do the

creationists stand, for example? Such world views are more

widespread, even now, than a secularised society such as ours

sometimes prefers to think.

 

For most of human history people have tried to explain earthquakes

as acts of divine intervention and displeasure. Even as the churches

collapsed around them in 1755, Lisbon's priests insisted on

salvaging crucifixes and religious icons with which to ward off the

catastrophe that would kill more than 50,000 of their fellow

citizens.

 

Others, though, began to draw different conclusions. Voltaire asked

what kind of God could permit such a thing to occur. Did Lisbon

really have so many more vices than London or Paris, he asked, that

it should be punished in such a appalling and indiscriminate manner?

Immanuel Kant was so amazed by what happened to Lisbon that he wrote

three separate treatises on the problem of earthquakes.

 

Our own society seems to be more squeamish about such things. The

need for mutual respect between peoples and traditions of which the

Queen spoke in her Christmas broadcast seems to require that we must

all respect religions in equal measure, too. The government, indeed,

is legislating to prevent expressions of religious hatred in ways

that could put a cordon around the critical discussion of religion

itself.

 

Yet it is hard to think of any event in modern times that requires a

more serious explanation from the forces of religion than this

week's earthquake. Voltaire's 18th-century question to Christians -

why Lisbon? - ought to generate a whole series of 21st-century

equivalents for all the religions of the world.

 

Certainly the giant waves generated by the quake made no attempt to

differentiate between the religions of those whom it made its

victims. Hindus were swept away in India, Muslims were carried off

in Indonesia, Buddhists in Thailand. Visiting Christians and Jews

received no special treatment either. This poses no problem for the

scientific belief system. Here, it says, was a mindless natural

event, which destroyed Muslim and Hindu alike.

 

A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any

kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do,

however. What God sanctions an earthquake? What God protects against

it? Why does the quake strike these places and these peoples and not

others? What kind of order is it that decrees that a person who went

to sleep by the edge of the ocean on Christmas night should wake up

the next morning engulfed by the waves, struggling for life?

 

From at least the time of Aristotle, intelligent people have

struggled to make some sense of earthquakes. Earthquakes do not

merely kill and destroy. They challenge human beings to explain the

world order in which such apparently indiscriminate acts can occur.

Europe in the 18th century had the intellectual curiosity and

independence to ask and answer such questions. But can we say the

same of 21st-century Europe? Or are we too cowed now to even ask if

the God can exist that can do such things?

 

Martin Kettle

How can religious people explain something like this?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1380248,00.html