Talking about the elephant in the corner
Let’s start with this admission: there is no satisfactory answer – religious or otherwise - to the problem of so-called “acts of God.” That’s the ironic term insurance companies use for floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and so forth.
Recently thousands of people have been killed by earthquake in Morocco and over ten thousand died in floods in Libya. Earthquakes happened earlier this year in Turkey and Syria. There was a horribly devastating Tsunami in Asia in 2004. Recently, crazy weather in the US has snuffed out lives through rain and flooding, especially on the east coast. On and on it goes.
Here’s the problem. Lots of religious ideas revolve around questions of good and evil, so when we perceive what we deem to be massive evil, we become confused. What do we say about God in this instance? For atheists it’s easy: there is no God. Not so easy for those who believe in a God of love and justice.
When bad things happen at an individual level – the murder of a friend, say – we blame the perpetrator as a responsible moral agent. This exonerates God in lieu of the perpetrator, so to speak, but the problem of large disasters remains. It’s the elephant in the corner, the problem you cannot ignore eventually.
When natural disasters occur, the question arises: how could a just and loving God have said yes to such incredible destruction and devastation both material and human? Philosophers and theologians have pondered this question for millennia.
The assumption seems to be that a loving God would not permit “bad things to happen to good people.” The late Rabbi Howard Kushner wrestled with this in his popular book of that name. But perhaps there is more to this than a simple question of God/no-God.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th Century Swiss Philosopher, wrestled with the problem of the Lisbon earthquake, a massive natural disaster in his time. Rousseau wrote that neither God nor nature was the culprit, but that people should not have settled in great numbers in the city, and if the population had been better dispersed the damage would have been far less. I have heard people suggest that greed was at the heart of the recent Libyan flood because the government spent little or no money on infrastructure that would have allayed and perhaps even prevented the disaster. This was essentially Rousseau’s argument four centuries ago.
There are multiple reasons for “acts of God,” not least of which would be human error, miscalculation, and downright ineptitude. Natural disasters are not “evil,” because evil acts require intentionality and responsibility. But they are disastrous because they result in human misery and suffering. The only response we can make to such events is our compassion, assistance, and our ongoing vigilance against human error. This does not address the question of God’s place in these events, but there is no satisfactory answer to that question. Maybe the appropriate question is, what can I do in the wake of such tragedies?
No proofs for the existence of God prove anything. The concepts we learned –omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence (particularly the latter) - are philosophical and don’t work. Stay with Job, whose suffering was inexplicable and whose friends tried to convince him to “curse God and die.” Job could not comprehend what had happened to him but in the end, he remained faithful, despite lack of understanding. We are left with mystery. This will not satisfy those who have decided that there is no God, but it will have to suffice for those of us who know there is a sacred Presence to the universe that’s beyond our comprehension.
Fr. Gabriel Rochelle is priest emeritus of St. Anthony of the Desert Orthodox Church. Contact him at gabrielcroch@aol.com.
This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: Talking about the elephant in the corner
