NATURAL DISASTERS bring out the best philanthropic instincts in the human soul. Unfortunately they also seem to bring out the most insufferable theological drivel from the human brain. There have been almost as many words written and spoken about God since the tsunami in the Indian Ocean as there have been dollars, pounds, euros and yen contributed to the relief effort. Unlike the money, however, the verbiage is doing little to advance the human condition.

In a state of grief and suffering I can understand that anyone’s faith will be tested. I can only guess at the anger and pain that the bereaved feel and I could not blame one of them for directing it like a guided missile at the very foundation of whatever beliefs they have.

What is harder to take is the smug way the ubiquitous “God is dead” crowd in the media have seized on the tragedy as some sort of vindication of its creed. It is unedifying to say the least to behold scientists and philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic waving the shrouds of hundreds of thousands of victims as a debating trophy.

Even the Archbishop of Canterbury said that the disaster understandably caused people to doubt the existence of God. Since the leadership of the Church of England has generally acted as though it did not really believe in God for most of the past 20 years, perhaps we should not be too disappointed. I am reminded of Benjamin Jowett, the 19th-century Master of Balliol College, Oxford, who once instructed a pupil: “My child, you must believe in God, despite what the clergy tell you.”

But for those of us who consider ourselves theists of a slightly less flaccid sort, this emerging consensus that “God doesn’t exist because if he did there would be no disasters” is rather lame. The tsunami cannot, in reason, have any possible bearing, by itself, on the question of whether or not there is a God. It cannot amount to a revelation, or even a confirmation, that God does not exist. In logic, the poor suffering Muslims in Indonesia who think it was a sign of God’s wrath are less evidently wrong than those who insist that it disproves God’s existence.

We ask: why would God allow such suffering? A perfectly legitimate question, of course. But it seems to suppose that there is an uniquely belief-undermining quality about a human calamity on such a massive scale. Why on earth should that be? We know all too well that undeserved pain, injury, disease, and loss of life are daily facts of life for hundreds of millions of people on the planet. Indeed, presumably in the course of human history, billions of people, rich and poor, weak and strong, have suffered and died from causes not of their own making but as a result of a terrible accident.

We tend to see natural disasters as especially faith-threatening, I suppose, partly because of their scale, but partly also because for most of the first few thousand centuries of human history such events were ascribed to some divine force. It is as though, somewhere in our genes, there is a tendency to take a little too literally the insurance company terminology that describes earthquakes and hurricanes as “acts of God”.

If, then, what the atheists are attacking is the notion of an all-seeing, all-powerful benign deity, constantly engaged in and altering the tide of human events, they do not need a tsunami to prove their point. The knowledge that just one child somewhere was dying of cancer would bring the whole fantasy crumbing down.

As the atheist Ivan Karamazov puts it to his devout brother Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s novel: “Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature . . . in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”

We can stipulate then, as American lawyers like to say, that the tsunami, tragic and horrific as it is, is simply irrelevant, or at least supernumerary, to the question of whether a benign God exists.

This not some idle tilt at the atheists. Putting a natural disaster such as this in the context of the anonymous enormity of human suffering helps us to understand a little more clearly, what it is that believers believe about humanity, and the complex nature of its relationship with life and God.

Put it this way: imagine for a moment, that there were not only no earthquakes, floods and storms, but that there was no innocent suffering and never had been in the history of the earth. Imagine if, every time a faulty gene was on its way to being transmitted to an unborn child, the hand of God dipped in and the gene was corrected. Imagine a God frantically circling the globe redirecting every train headed for a faulty bridge, reprogramming every failed computer in a hospital operating theatre, and printing money every time some undeserving chap got down on his luck.

Imagine, in other words, if everyone since the beginning of time lived to a ripe old age and died in his bed, or at least died a death precisely commensurate with his moral contribution to the earth’s happiness.

Such a fair, challengeless world might be a wonderful place to live. But I don’t think that it would be recognisably human. If we have reason to doubt the point of our existence in this world, surely we would understand it even less in that one. And if I were God, and had created Man, I am not quite sure that I would see the point either.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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