Jan 16, 2005
Where was God when the tsunamis hit?

By Chua Mui Hoong

When bad things happen, we start reaching for moral, or spiritual answers.

So it was with the undersea quake and tsunami on Dec 26 that has killed over 150,000 people, many of them poor folk in coastal villages across Asia.

Why them? And if there is a God, how can He allow this to happen?

The so-called problem of suffering is one of the oldest and thorniest in philosophy and theology.

The "Why?" question is tough to grapple with when life deals you a blow, whether it's losing a loved one or being stricken by a serious illness.

The Book of Job in the Bible is one classic which deals with this issue: The story of a good, innocent man who loses his health, property and family for no seeming reason.

Then there's Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, in which Ivan the atheist articulates the challenge that innocent suffering poses to belief in God.

Put simply, there are three responses.

One is the atheistic response: Since suffering exists and is incompatible with a good, powerful God, God does not exist.

Two: Since God is good and powerful, those who suffer must have done something wrong to deserve it (either in their current lives or past lives, or perhaps through the taint of original sin).

It is true that some people's behaviour brings suffering to themselves. But unless you believe in sins from past lives, suffering visited on the innocent, say, infants, does not square with our sense of justice.

The third approach: God is good and powerful, and there must be a purpose to suffering, but we can't see it because of our finite human comprehension. What's important is how we respond to the pain and make something out of it.

Personally, I am inclined towards the third response. But it begs the question of why anyone would want to cling on to a belief in God when it appears irreconcilable with the fact of suffering.

My answer is simple and non-rational: I believe because I need to, because the implications of living in an amoral world of meaningless suffering are too horrendous for me. At an experiential level, I also believe because I see God in my daily life.

Faith can never be circumscribed by logic. And so millions hold on to what Karl Marx considered an opiate and Buddhism considers an illusion - the idea of a supreme spiritual Being who loves, consoles and redeems.

For me, the starting point is what God is. And God is omniscient (all-knowing) and omnipresent (everywhere). But I no longer think He is omnipotent (all-powerful).

There are at least two limitations to God's power and they explain why suffering takes place. The first is free will, and the second is the set of natural laws He has set in place.

God's will ends where our free will begins. God can do anything - except force a free human being to believe in Him, or stop man from doing what he wants.

So you have the Holocaust, murders, abuse of innocent children by their own parents, and a host of other truly evil deeds - because man chose to exercise his free will to do evil.

The second limitation to God's power is natural laws. God could conceivably turn water into wine, raise the dead. When He does, which is seldom, it's called a miracle.

Most of the time, God allows things to happen in accordance with the laws of Nature. So tectonic plates shifted and tsunamis lashed shores.

Is God then a bystander watching from afar when His natural laws wreak havoc on man?

Christian theology teaches that God is here, with the suffering. The story of Jesus is precisely that: of the divine Being made incarnate, who suffered with man, for man.

There's a tale about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was asked where God was in the horrors of the Holocaust. The German Lutheran pointed to Christ on the cross and said: God is suffering there with you.

You don't have to be a Christian to see the ethical challenge in that. A suffering God challenges humans to act in community with others who are suffering. Bonhoeffer's famous line puts it thus: 'Man is challenged to participate in the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world.'

To paraphrase that, I would say: Man is challenged to participate in the sufferings of others in a world seemingly without God.

For it is only through man's compassion that God can be seen in suffering and tragedy.

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