Earthquake theology

Various Christian theologians and preachers have confidently pointed to earthquakes as signs of God’s judgment, warnings from God to shake humans out of their sin, and the ultimate sign of God's wrathful intervention. (James Wood, “Between God and a Hard Place,” New York Times, January 23, 2010)

That abruptly began to change in 1755 when on November 1, All Saints Day, an earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, destroyed thirty churches, killed fifteen thousand people, and injured another fifteen thousand. Many of the killed and injured were attending Mass when the earthquake struck. Why would a good God permit or cause such tragedy and suffering?

Some Roman Catholic preachers attempted to justify the calamity as God's judgment on the vice then flourishing in Lisbon. Unfortunately, the quake seemed to afflict the devout and the impious, the saintly and the flagrant sinner, indiscriminately. Protestant clergy explained the earthquake as God's judgment on the Roman Catholic Church for the evils that Church had inflicted on humanity.

Skeptics cited the quake as evidence that God did not either exist or intervene in earthly affairs, unable to reconcile the notion of a good God with the widespread suffering that the quake caused. The earthquake also led to widespread skepticism about the odds that the world was progressing toward a more perfect condition. (Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization: The Age of Voltaire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965), pp. 719-726.)

More generally, the indiscriminate destruction and suffering caused by natural disasters raises the theological problem known as theodicy: how to reconcile the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent good and loving God with the prevalence of evil. Although history offers numerous diverse suggestions for solving that conundrum, no one approach has achieved anything like majority support, let alone a consensus view.

The view that God is perhaps not omnipotent has gained traction in the last few centuries. In creating the cosmos, God necessarily gave up a certain amount of freedom to allow creation some measure of freedom to chart its own course. This view, anathema among theological conservatives, emphasizes God's loving nature, recognizes that God interacts with creation in a limited manner, and acknowledges some measure of human freedom and hence human responsibility for what happens. This approach may better explain human evil such as the holocaust than natural evil such as earthquakes.

Another option, not necessarily incompatible with the first, is that natural evil is an essential aspect of the creative processes that God employed to construct the cosmos. This view implies that God's options for creating are inherently limited in ways that humans cannot presently understand, i.e., that endowing at least some creatures (humans, perhaps others) with a measure of freedom required introducing an element of violent change and chaos into the cosmos. The cost of doing so was the inevitable toll of death and suffering from natural disasters.

At various times I have found struggling with problem of theodicy fascinating and frustrating. More generally, I admit that theodicy represents a question that humans lack sufficient information to answer. My experience of a force, a power, that lies beyond the physical aspects of creation, yet that permeates creation in a benevolent, life giving manner, leads me to affirm God's existence and love in the face of the unanswerable questions of theodicy. Theological honesty, silence instead of speculation masquerading as knowledge, represents the best option in the face of natural disasters and natural evil.

Scientific advances further underscore the need for theological honesty. Plate tectonics and other geological phenomena produce earthquakes and tsunamis. Similarly, science helps to explain the causes of other natural disasters. The timing of those disasters is not a function of human sinfulness or obedience to God but occurs in a largely independent manner. Pat Robertson’s claim that Hurricane Katrina’s destruction along the Gulf Coast resulted from the United States legalizing abortion is sheer nonsense. If abortion is wrong (a false conclusion in my estimation), then did God really foresee the need to bring judgment on the Gulf Coast billions of years ago when the universe, the earth, the Gulf Coast, the United States, and Roe vs. Wade did not exist? If so, why did God not choose to pattern creation differently so that only sinners suffered? Why strike the good and the evil alike?

The important exceptions to the generalization that disaster results from processes independent of human behavior are disasters that result from human ineptitude or disrespect for creation, e.g., wanton discharge of greenhouse gases or building in flood zones. Good theology reviews and revises its hypotheses in light of the best available applicable scientific data.