Is God To Blame?

A week is a long time in politics. Thirty seconds was the start of eternity for more than 200,000 people killed in an earthquake measuring 7 on the Richter scale in Haiti on 12 January 2010. Sadly, such massive casualties are not unique. In a matter of minutes on Ascension Day 1902, the entire population of about 30,000 people in St-Pierre, Martinique, died when Montagne Pelée volcano poured a cloud of burning ash and gases across the town. To complete an unholy trinity of earthquake, fire and flood, on 12 November 1970, 500,000 people drowned when the Bhola cyclone hit the Ganges Delta region of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Although seemingly the most mundane of disasters, floods are the world’s biggest killer.

What can we say in the face of such mind-numbing statistics? For Christians, they raise the insistent question of why an all-powerful, loving God can allow such disasters to happen. For secularists and atheists, they challenge the self-confidence that, in this technological age, humankind can control its environment. Despite an explosion in scientific knowledge, the numbers of people affected or killed by disasters is increasing relentlessly. It is likely that before long an earthquake will occur that kills more than one million people. Since 2010, more than half the world’s population has lived in cities, where people are extremely vulnerable to disasters.

We are accustomed to calling such catastrophes ‘natural’ disasters, as if humans play no part in them. Yet once we scratch beneath the surface, it becomes clear that almost always it is the actions, inactions or neglect of humans that turn natural processes into disasters. To this extent, ‘natural’ disasters is highly misleading.

Far from being unwelcome intrusions, earthquakes, volcanoes and floods are essential to the wellbeing of this planet. They are what make the earth a fruitful, habitable place where humans, and indeed the whole biosphere, can thrive. Without them, Earth would be a barren planet without life as we know it.

If there had never been any volcanoes on Earth, then the main geological source of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be missing. The likely result is that the planet would have been frozen for most of its history. Volcanic eruptions - explosively fatal to humans caught up in them - produce volumes of minerals essential for life. Volcanic islands, such as Hawaii, are some of the most biodiverse areas on the planet.

Floods distribute fertile soils. For millennia, it was the annual flood of the Nile that enabled Egypt to prosper. When the Nile flood failed in 1784, one sixth of the population died.

Without earthquakes there would be no plate tectonics or mountain ranges. The continual building and erosion of mountains provides a steady supply of nutrient-rich sediments that allows life to thrive. Mountains also trigger rainfall, which makes the surrounding areas fertile. The Himalayas cause annual monsoons that provide water for one billion people in India.

Although natural processes are beneficial in generating a suitable home for humanity, when humans interact badly with them, an otherwise beneficial natural process can turn into a disaster. Unfortunately, it is often the actions of humans that make the scale of disasters worse.

An identical earthquake to the one that killed 200,000 people in Haiti occurred 20 years earlier in Loma Prieta, California. Yet it killed only 57 people. California had building codes that required buildings to be earthquake-proof. In contrast, people died in Haiti when their poorly built concrete slab houses situated on landslide slopes collapsed on top of them. It is no coincidence that Haiti is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. It could be argued that 99.98 per cent of the Haiti fatalities were due to human factors - largely derived from decades of endemic corruption, misrule and poverty.

In Hurricane Katrina, a disproportionate number of those Americans killed were infirm, elderly or poor. A report by the University of Louisiana concluded that ‘failure of the NOFDS [New Orleans flood Defence System] was a predictable, predicted, and preventable catastrophe’, and that ‘this catastrophe did not result from an act of “God”. It resulted from acts of “People”.’

The common factor in these disasters is that it is the poor and voiceless people who suffer most. That is also true for one of the most pervasive causes of disasters that humans are wreaking on the Earth - global climate change. Many disasters are directly or indirectly related to climate change, including heatwaves, floods, droughts, landslides and changes in weather patterns that have an impact on agriculture and may lead to famines. Those of us in the high-income countries who have benefited from burning cheap fossil fuels - thereby causing global climate change - have a moral duty to help those in low-income countries, who largely are the people who suffer from climate change. At the very least, they deserve our assistance to help them adapt to the inevitable changes that result.

The problem of suffering is one which has exercised humanity from the earliest times. There are no easy answers. But there are some things we can usefully say about disasters that may help us to respond to them. The first is that ‘nature’ is not a force separate from God. As John Wesley wrote when reflecting on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake: ‘What is nature itself, but the art of God, or God’s method of acting in the material world?’ Natural processes occur under the overarching sovereignty of God, and so too must natural disasters.

Some Christians have tried to get round the apparent problem of natural disasters by saying that processes such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and floods did not occur before the Fall, when humans chose to disobey their Creator. But this is not borne out by the evidence. There is no doubt from geological evidence that all those events occurred on Earth long before humans first walked on it. Indeed, it is those very processes that have made - and continue to make - the Earth habitable.

At the Fall, humans chose to put themselves - rather than God - first. As a result, they broke their intimacy with their Creator and spoilt the relationship between themselves and the rest of creation. It became toil to wrest food from the land. In Genesis 1:28, God gives humankind dominion over all living things. He sets humans to rule over the Earth on his behalf. In the present age of environmental degradation, species annihilation, widespread pollution of the sea, land and air, of all the changes wrought by unprecedented rapid global climate change, our misrule is not hard to see.

As we contemplate disasters, it might be helpful to see how God responded to the trials of Job. Job was a righteous man. Yet he suffered grievously at the hands of Satan, losing all that was most dear to him, including his possessions, flocks, family and even his own health. Some, at least, of the disasters were due to natural processes, such as the wind that blew down his eldest son’s house and killed all his ten children (see Job 1:18, 19). Job’s friends tried to rationalise the disasters that had befallen him, as being the result of some sin or failing on his part. Job rightly rejected those suggestions, but still he wanted an explanation from God.

When that day finally came, and God spoke to Job ‘out of the whirlwind’, he didn’t give any tidy explanations. Instead, God spoke majestically of his power over all his creation, the stars, the sea, the weather and all the animals. Perhaps most tellingly, God showed himself to be sovereign over the most fearsome of animals, the Leviathan. Humans could not deal with Leviathan: ‘When it rises up, the mighty are terrified’ (41:25 New International Version). It is likely that the Leviathan represents Satan himself. Yet God had complete control over him. God’s power is unsurpassably greater than that of Leviathan. We can be reassured from the story of Job that God knows all there is to know about evil, that he constrains its reach and is ultimately sovereign over it.

Though God vindicates Job and indeed praises him, Job finally understands that God’s purposes cannot be thwarted and that God’s knowledge and wisdom are far beyond anything to which Job could aspire.

The lesson for us, perhaps, is that this side of Heaven we should not, and cannot, expect to understand all of God’s dealings - but we can, and should, hold on to God’s faithfulness and goodness, however dire our circumstances seem to be. Though we may not understand fully why disasters happen, or what God’s plans in them might be, we can hold on to the certainty of God’s sovereignty over this present world and that in the fullness of time this creation will be renewed.

The Kingdom of God to which Christians look forward is not just a psychological prop or wishful ‘pie in the sky’. It is a reality that can inform everything about the way we live in the here and now, including our attitude and response to the disasters which plague this world. We are living in the in-between times - between the first coming of God to earth as the man Jesus, and his return, when all things will be renewed in a new creation. That is, when he will make this world the place he intended it to be, free from all death and mourning, free from all that has been made twisted and out of order by the rebellion of humankind against its Creator.

It is natural to wish that disasters wouldn’t happen. But humankind has the capability to construct earthquake-proof buildings. We can detect and track storms, typhoons and hurricanes. We can monitor and predict volcanic eruptions. We should be able to prevent the great majority of casualties from these natural processes. It is a sign of God’s goodness that the world is stable and understandable and that we can use the fruits of science and technology for the good of others. We could prevent disasters and alleviate or lessen the harmful effects of some of our actions, such as burning large quantities of fossil fuels. The fact that we don’t do so as much as we could or should is a sign of our selfishness - what the Bible calls ‘sinfulness’.

The Christian perspective sees the reality of the brokenness of this world and the reality of God’s sovereignty over it and of his ultimate plans for a new creation. That does not mean that we need not strive to improve things now. Rather, it should drive us towards a better scientific understanding of disasters, an enabling of communities to build resilience against them and a striving to remove the unjust disparities in wealth and resources that mean it is so often the poor who suffer the most.

Even though we may not be able to prevent every last casualty of the next disaster, there is an enormous amount we can do from our present understanding of natural processes to reduce the impact of disasters.

• Bob White is Professor of Geophysics at Cambridge University and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is also Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Cambridge. His book, ‘Who is to Blame?’, is published by Monarch

UK & Ireland War Cry 12 July 2014