It's an age-old question that has arisen again, after the earthquake in Japan, in a most unlikely place — a remarkable front-page think piece by Scott Gold and Hector Becerra in the Los Angles Times this past Saturday morning.
Not having the ability to look at the event from the inside, because they weren't on the scene, these two reporters looked at through the eyes of knowledgeable individuals they interviewed about the disaster.
Late in the story the conversation turned abruptly theological:
"The hubris of humanity makes us forget how powerful nature can be," said Bill Patzert, a climatologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. He said this was "not an act of God" — but then he paused and added: "Well, I hope not. I could be wrong."
Theologians were left with ambiguities of their own.
Martin, the Jesuit priest, said that nonbelievers may well have an easier time digesting the disturbing images from Japan than believers, because "the nonbeliever does not have to grapple with: How does a good God let this happen?"
"Most people can make sense of what theologians call 'moral evil' — evil that comes from human decisions," he said. "But natural disasters and catastrophic illnesses really test the believers' faith. There is no satisfactory answer for why there is such suffering in the world on a natural level."
Some faiths — Christianity in particular — are imbued with the notion that God is not impersonal and accompanies humans in their suffering, Martin said.
"But no explanation can fully satisfy that question of why we suffer," he said. "And anyone who says they have the answer is either a fool or a liar."
True. But some have attempted to answer the question of why we have earthquakes. A minister newly made of my acquaintance, Don Baldwin of Grass Valley, who served for three years in the Yosemite Chapel, and who has taken up appearing as John Muir recently, found this quote of Muir's after the earthquake in Haiti last year:
All Nature's wildness tells the same story: the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring , thundering waves and floods, the silent uproot of sap in plants, storms of every sort, each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of Nature's heart.
No mention of nuclear reactors.
http://s.wsj.net/media/swf/VideoMicroPlayer.swf
Speaking of God and earthquakes, forgot to mention the classic work on the subject — Voltaire's lengthy poem on the Great Lisbon Earthquake, which like this recent disaster, also measured nearly 9 on the Richter scale, and killed between 10,000 and 100,000 people in 1755. That was bad enough, but some august figures in the church rashly declared that, in effect, the quake was God's punishment on the city.
Voltaire got mad:
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: "You do but illustrate
The Iron laws that chain the will of God"?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
"God is avenged: the wage of sin is death"?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?
Let us hope that Pat Robertson stays out of this one.
Kit Stolz 