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Don’t blame God if disaster strikes
By McGreevy
Barry Murphy and Eilis Finnegan from Dublin had planned to spend the New Year in New York with her
parents.
They had been travelling around South-East Asia and stopped off in Phi Phi Island, Thailand, to get a boat elsewhere.
Within 40 minutes of their arrival, the tsunami struck. Eilis was running ahead of Barry, fleeing the waves. He went to pick up a child and bring it to the safety. When the waves washed over, he survived. He went looking for Eilis. She was gone, missing presumed dead.
When a disaster like the St. Stephen’s Day tsunami happens, we imagine the grief of those involved.
As I write there are 26 Irish people still unaccounted for. That’s 26 people who looked forward to the New Year, to 2005, to being reunited with their families. They were invariably young, optimistic and adventurous. Death was something that happened to other people, not to them.
That’s also 26 sets of families and friends who have been bereaved.
We cannot imagine what whole communities like those in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India must be experiencing where a way of life has been extinguished forever and a weight of sorrow has been placed on peoples who will never recover.
We live in a century where so many of us have so much. We have conquered disease, flown to the moon and made the world a smaller place.
And then nature has a way of putting us in our place. It’s at times like this that it is easiest to be an atheist.
“Like flies to wanton Gods we are, they kill us for sport”. Except, in the atheist’s world there is no God. We live in a cruel, arbitrary universe. Through reason and science we have minimized suffering, but we face insuperable odds. In such a context, the South Asia tsunami makes sense.
Harder still it is to believe in God and face up to a tragedy like this. When an act of God happens like this, we ask ourselves the same question: why does God allow such suffering?
This is a question that perplexes the believer. It is one thing to believe in God, but even if we do, how can we reconcile the cruelty and suffering of the South Asia tsunami with the cherished belief that He is a benign and loving presence in our lives?
Could it be that God isn’t such a benign presence? It would make more sense of the suffering. Could it be that, even if He exists, He takes no interest in the daily minutiae of human life despite Jesus’ exhortation that every hair on our head is numbered?
Last week a woman named Sue Arnold wrote an interesting article in The Independent newspaper. Pointing out that natural disasters seem to affect those who are impoverished and marginalized, she wrote: ‘Natural disasters are often referred to, particularly by insurance companies, as Acts of God. Was there ever a more cogent argument for becoming an atheist?
‘This is the first Christmas I didn’t go to Midnight Mass. With the benefit of hindsight would there really have been much point?’
Many others will be asking the same question. Desmond O’Donnell, a Redemptorist priest wrote an interesting reply in last week’s Irish Independent to which he provided no pat explanations, but gave much food for thought.
Seeing God’s actions in everything is a byroad to unbelief, he says. We can no more say that something which happens that is good is the work of God anymore than we can say that something bad, like the South-East Asia tsunami, is an act of God.
God, he said, defies our rational analysis. ‘This otherness and this incomprehensibility of God shrinks all simplistic questions about God’s action or inaction in the world,’ he wrote.
‘Faith in God’s action is not because of the evidence; it is often in spite of the evidence.’
‘And in more recent years, Canadian philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan tells us that faith and doubt go together. Faith is not about certainty as usually understood; it is about trust, as Martin Luther reminded us.’
Jesus, he said, trusted in God even as he cried out on the cross: “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me”.
When faced with such a tragedy as last week, we can retreat into cynicism and atheism or we can trust in God knowing that our understanding is as finite as our lives.
Either way, there are no easy answers. That’s the nature of being human.
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