Why does God allow calamities? Starting with the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, 2005 was a year of disasters, forcing many to ask how God could permit such tragic events. Theology suggests some answers.

The year 2005 may well be remembered as the year of the mega disaster. As the year started, the world was still struggling to cope with and understand the devastation unleashed by the tsunami on Southeast Asia. Since the tsunami that killed at least 216,000 people, other massive disasters have killed thousands and destroyed billions of dollars in property. These included a powerful earthquake in Pakistan that killed nearly 80,000 people and the terrible hurricanes that devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast, shattering lives and destabilizing the nation's economy.

Often, when disaster strikes, people question God. When the waters of the ocean receded in southern India's Tamil Nadu province, an elderly woman was seen amidst the destruction. Like Job, the Old Testament wise man whose faith was tested by God, she was heard to wail, "Why did you do this to us, God?" Her lament was echoed across the world. London's The Guardian newspaper asked, "How can religious people explain something like this?" The Sydney Morning Herald was more pointed. "Waves of destruction wash away belief in God's benevolence," proclaimed a headline in that Australian paper. In the U.S., Arts and Letters Daily, a website published by the Chronicle of Higher Education, declared: "If God is God, he's not good. If God is good, he's not God. You can't have it both ways, especially not after the Indian Ocean catastrophe."

Such a statement is a bald-faced challenge to adherents of the world's monotheistic religions. That monotheistic theology insists on the existence of an all-powerful God who is good, despite the occurrence of horrific tragedies, is viewed by secularists as intellectually incoherent and practically scandalous. It also appears to them, of course, as an irresistible opportunity to point out what they believe are fundamental flaws in monotheistic belief. Using disaster as a means to criticize the faith of believers, though, is little more than opportunistic skullduggery, little different in character from those who sought to link the Asian tsunami to global warming in an effort to advance the environmentalist agenda.

Still, the problem of evil is a vital issue for believers. Allowing nonbelievers to use the concept of evil to diminish God has consequences for all people, especially in what remains of Christendom.

The question of God's goodness in the face of disaster is, therefore, not an idle one. Failure to address these earthly calamities will tend toward the discredit of monotheistic religion. Indeed, as Rabbi Daniel Isaak of Portland, Oregon, told reporters, "It is really difficult to believe in a God that not only creates a tsunami that kills 50 or 60 thousand people, but that puts birth defects in children." Though this is portrayed by the media as typical of contemporary thought, it is not, in fact, typical of mainstream believers. Nor, in fact, is it difficult to believe in God despite the existence of tragedies and disasters. The Old Testament Book of Job tells the story of Job, who did not lose faith despite the misfortunes he suffered. In addition, many eminent theologians and philosophers of the past addressed the question. Their answers suggest that the natural evils experienced in the created world are not necessarily an affront to God.

Punishment for Sin?

The Bible is replete with examples of God's wrath being visited upon sinners, and there fore it has been tempting for some to pronounce any disaster that occurs as being justified as divine retribution brought about in response to modern man's propensity to sin. Several statements to this effect were made following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., on 9/11. Similar statements were made following the Boxing Day tsunami in Asia. "This is an expression of God's great ire with the world," Israeli chief rabbi Shlomo Amar said of the tsunami. Similarly, Muslim cleric Azizan Abdul Razak said the tsunami was God's way of reminding us that "he created the world and can destroy the world."

This is a problematic way in which to address natural disasters. If God is indeed angry with the entire world, then why bother keeping it in existence? Or, if God simply wishes to demonstrate his capacity for punishment, why punish indiscriminately? There are plenty of people who have turned away from God and lead lives of sin and depravity, harming others and violating their rights. Why not just punish the murderers, the rapists, and the thieves? Surely God can differentiate between those who try to live godly lives and those who spurn both God and man alike.

Historically, theology has found the concept of a vengeful God to be an inadequate explanation for the problem of natural evil. Certainly, the concept of a God who commits evil acts may be anathema with monotheistic understanding of the nature of God. St. Anselm of Canterbury, one of the leading theologians and philosophers of the medieval period, provided one of the most rigorous and thought-provoking inquiries into the nature of God. In his famous "ontological proof" of God's existence, Anselm defined God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. If a God capable of perpetrating evil can be conceived, then this hypothetical deity is not God and cannot actually exist. Instead, it is possible to conceive of a yet greater Deity, one who is perfectly good and for whom the commission of evil is impossible. And, in fact, this all-good God must exist, for existence is greater, said Anselm, than nonexistence. Thus, it is necessary that a perfectly good God exist. This, Anselm said, is the Judeo-Christian God.

St. Anselm, it is likely, would agree that God could punish wrongdoing. Nevertheless, following Anselm's reasoning in his ontological proof, it is impossible for a perfectly good God to punish indiscriminately both the guilty and the innocent, especially in the wake of Christ's salvific mission. Still, as the disasters of 2005 readily illustrate, natural evil still affects both the guilty and the innocent. The question then remains: from whence comes this evil?

An answer to this question was provided nearly 2,000 years ago by St. Augustine, the incomparable theologian and Bishop of Hippo. Born in Tagaste in North Africa in 354 A.D., Augustine eventually moved to Carthage to study, then teach, rhetoric. Taught Christianity by his mother, Monica, Augustine grew troubled over the existence of evil in the world. Christianity maintained that God created the world and that it is good. How, then, Augustine wondered, could evil exist? A sect called the Manichaens offered what the young philosopher initially thought was a reasonable answer--until he learned more about it.

The Manichaens followed the Persian prophet Mani, who claimed to have received a revelation from the Angel Eltaum. Manichaeism held, essentially, that two coequal elementary gods, good (or light) and bad (or darkness), have existed for all time. The dark force or god was responsible for the evil inherent in the created world. In fact, the Manichaens thought that all material things were essentially evil. In man, only the soul was good. It was up to the will and intellect of man to spurn the evil of the created world and embrace the good. At odds with the evil force was the good force. According to philosopher and historian Frederic Copleston, "These principles are both eternal and their strife is eternal, a strife reflected in the world which is the production of the two principles in mutual conflict." For the Manichaens, the universe was a battleground between the elemental principles of light and dark or good and evil and all the evil done in the world was fully attributable to the evil god.

The Augustinian Answer

The Manichaen dualist heresy did not long satisfy Augustine. While still in his twenties, the young teacher of rhetoric and admirer of Cicero grew disillusioned with the teachings of the Manichaens. His fellow Manichaens encouraged him to discuss his concerns with the man then known as the greatest of the Manichaen teachers. But this man, Faustus, proved unable to answer Augustine's questions. "With Faustus then, I read whatever he himself wished to read ...," Augustine recalled. "But all my endeavors to make further progress in Manichaeism came completely to an end through my acquaintance with that man."

Augustine continued his search elsewhere for answers, particularly to the problem of evil. He concluded, correctly, that in order for God to be God, He must be completely good. To be less than completely good would mean to be less than God. Similarly, Augustine concluded, God must be omnipotent. A being that is less than omnipotent cannot be God. So, how can this all-good, all-powerful being permit evil? And too, this being is the Creator. If evil exists, did He then create it as well, and if so, how can it be said, as Scripture does, that God looked over all that he created and proclaimed it good? This was a conundrum that frustrated Augustine, it seemed, at every turn:

   Whence, then, is evil? Or,
   again, was there some evil
   matter out of which he made
   and formed and ordered it,
   but left something in his creation
   that he did not convert
   into good? But why should
   this be? Was he powerless
   to change the whole lump
   so that no evil would remain
   in it if he is Omnipotent?
   Finally, why would
   he make anything at all out
   of such stuff? Why did he
   not, rather, annihilate it by
   his same almighty power?
   Could evil exist contrary to
   his will? And if it were from
   eternity, why did he permit
   it to be nonexistent for unmeasured
   intervals of time
   in the past, and why, then,
   was he pleased to make
   something out of it after so
   long a time? Or, if he wished
   now all of a sudden to create
   something, would not an
   almighty being have chosen
   to annihilate this evil matter
   and live by himself--the
   perfect, true, sovereign, and
   infinite Good? Or, if it were
   not good that he who was
   good should not also be the
   framer and creator of what
   was good, then why was that
   evil matter not removed and brought
   to nothing, so that he might form
   good matter, out of which he might
   then create all things? For he would
   not be omnipotent if he were not able
   to create something good without
   being assisted by that matter which
   had not been created by himself.

"These perplexities," Augustine recalled, "I revolved in my wretched breast, overwhelmed with gnawing cares lest I die before I discovered the truth." Though his intellectual journey was far from complete, as his Confessions amply details, Augustine soon discovered what he believed to be the true solution to the problem of evil. God, to be God, must be completely good. It follows that God can only create that which is good. And so it is that God proclaimed creation to be good. As all things that exist are created by God and as they are all created good, then moral evil cannot exist in a concrete sense. "Evil, then, the origin of which I had been seeking, has no substance at all," Augustine wrote, "for if it were a substance, it would be good. For either it would be an incorruptible substance and so a supreme good, or a corruptible substance, which could not be corrupted unless it were good."

For Augustine, then, evil does not have a positive existence within creation; it is but a privation, or an absence of good. But what about evil committed by man against man? Through free will, which Augustine supposed all men possessed, individuals can choose to turn away from God and from that which is good. In doing so, they engage in evil acts. But how does this explanation of moral evil explain acts of nature that harm innocent people? For Augustine, the answer lies with the fall of man as described by the Book of Genesis. By disobeying God, the world, a good but corruptible substance, was corrupted, making natural disasters the result of humankind's fundamental choice to spurn the good.

A "Vale of Soul-making"

There may, perhaps, be yet another manner in which the occurrence of natural acts that inflict harm upon the innocent and the guilty alike may be understood. The poet John Keats, though a critic of Christianity in particular, thought the world a sort of forge in which souls are made. "Man is originally 'a poor forked creature' subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other," Keats wrote in a letter to his brother and sister. These trials and tribulations, he thought, were necessary to the development of the soul. Instead of a "vale of tears," he argued, "call the world if you Please 'The vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find out the use of the world."

Keats, who was not particularly friendly toward theistic belief, perhaps did not know that his conception of the world as a "vale of Soul-making" had already been devised almost 2,000 years earlier by Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons. The date of his birth is not known with complete certainty, but was probably sometime between 115 and 142 A.D. What is certain is that Irenaeus had heard the preaching of St. Polycarp, who was famously and poignantly martyred by the Romans when he would not recant his faith. For Irenaeus and the other Christians of that age, evil, both moral and natural, was all too familiar, and Irenaeus, for one, spent much time pondering its occurrence. In his famous Latin treatise Adversus haereses, Irenaeus argued that God made the world, with its imperfections, "for the benefit of that human nature which is saved, ripening for immortality that which is [possessed] of its own free will and its own power, and preparing and rendering it more adapted for eternal subjection to God. And therefore the creation is suited to [the wants of] man; for man was not made for its sake, but creation for the sake of man."

The disasters of 2005 and other natural evils are part of this creation and provide a context in which moral beings with free will can exist. Man is free to choose to do good or evil and is free in this context to help the disadvantaged, to save those in danger, or to ignore them at the peril of his own soul. Moreover, in facing evil, man can achieve those traits or virtues that are truly noble: faith, hope, charity, and courage. If natural evils, or evils in particular, did not occur, neither would heroism.

Indeed, for Irenaeus, the apparent evils of nature are a sort of metaphysical juxtaposition needed so that man can appreciate and choose the good, in much the same way that Caravaggio, the great Italian artist, used a technique with his brush so that the drama of the juxtaposition of light and dark could be appreciated on the canvas. In this sense, theologians like Irenaeus suggest that even horrible tragedies may have a role to play in the greater scheme of life, even if, in the midst and aftermath of apocalyptic disaster, it is impossible for our finite minds, which cannot possibly know what God knows, to understand how.