http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1380248,00.html
Martin Kettle
Tuesday December 28, 2004
The Guardian
The modern era flatters itself that human beings can now know and
shape almost everything about the world. But an event like the
Indonesian earthquake exposes much of this for the hubris that it
is.
Perhaps we have talked so much about our civilisation's potential
to destroy the planet that we have forgotten that the planet also
has an untamed ability to destroy civilisation too. Whatever else
it has achieved, the Indian Ocean tsunami has at least reminded
mankind of its enduring vulnerability in the face of nature. The
scale of suffering that it has wreaked - 20,000 deaths and counting
- shows that we share such dangers with our ancestors more fully
than most of us realised.
An entirely understandable reaction to such an event is to set
one's face against any large questions that it may raise. But this
week provides an unsought opportunity to consider the largest of
all human implications of any major earthquake: its challenge to
religion.
A few days after the 9/11 attacks on New York, I had dinner with
the Guardian's late columnist Hugo Young. We were still so close to
the event itself that only one topic of conversation was possible.
At one stage I asked Hugo how his Catholicism allowed him to
explain such a terrible act. I'm afraid that's an easy one, he
replied.
We are all fallen beings, Hugo declared, and our life in this world
is a vale of tears. So some human beings will always kill one
another. The attack on New York should therefore be seen not as an
act of God, but as an act of fallen humanity. Then he paused, and
added: "But I admit I have much more difficulty with
earthquakes."
Earthquakes and the belief in the judgment of God are, indeed, very
hard to reconcile. However, no religion that offers an explanation
of the world can avoid making some kind of an attempt to fit the
two together. And an immense earthquake like the one that took
place off Sumatra on Sunday inevitably poses that challenge afresh
in dramatic terms.
There is, after all, only one big question to ask about an event of
such destructive power as the one that has taken place this week:
why did it happen?
As with previous earthquakes, any explanation of this latest one
poses us a sharp intellectual choice. Either there is an entirely
natural explanation for it, or there is some other kind. Even the
natural one is by no means easy to imagine, but it is at least
wholly coherent.
The tsunami took place, say the seismologists, because a massive
tectonic rupture on the sea bed generated tremors through the
ocean. These unimaginable forces sent their energy coursing across
thousands of miles of water, resulting in death and destruction in
a vast arc from Somalia to Indonesia.
But what do world views that do not allow scientists undisputed
authority have to say about such phenomena? Where do the
creationists stand, for example? Such world views are more
widespread, even now, than a secularised society such as ours
sometimes prefers to think.
For most of human history people have tried to explain earthquakes
as acts of divine intervention and displeasure. Even as the
churches collapsed around them in 1755, Lisbon's priests insisted
on salvaging crucifixes and religious icons with which to ward off
the catastrophe that would kill more than 50,000 of their fellow
citizens.
Others, though, began to draw different conclusions. Voltaire asked
what kind of God could permit such a thing to occur. Did Lisbon
really have so many more vices than London or Paris, he asked, that
it should be punished in such a appalling and indiscriminate
manner? Immanuel Kant was so amazed by what happened to Lisbon that
he wrote three separate treatises on the problem of
earthquakes.
Our own society seems to be more squeamish about such things. The
need for mutual respect between peoples and traditions of which the
Queen spoke in her Christmas broadcast seems to require that we
must all respect religions in equal measure, too. The government,
indeed, is legislating to prevent expressions of religious hatred
in ways that could put a cordon around the critical discussion of
religion itself.
Yet it is hard to think of any event in modern times that requires
a more serious explanation from the forces of religion than this
week's earthquake. Voltaire's 18th-century question to Christians -
why Lisbon? - ought to generate a whole series of 21st-century
equivalents for all the religions of the world.
Certainly the giant waves generated by the quake made no attempt to
differentiate between the religions of those whom it made its
victims. Hindus were swept away in India, Muslims were carried off
in Indonesia, Buddhists in Thailand. Visiting Christians and Jews
received no special treatment either. This poses no problem for the
scientific belief system. Here, it says, was a mindless natural
event, which destroyed Muslim and Hindu alike.
A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any
kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do,
however. What God sanctions an earthquake? What God protects
against it? Why does the quake strike these places and these
peoples and not others? What kind of order is it that decrees that
a person who went to sleep by the edge of the ocean on Christmas
night should wake up the next morning engulfed by the waves,
struggling for life?
From at least the time of Aristotle, intelligent people have
struggled to make some sense of earthquakes. Earthquakes do not
merely kill and destroy. They challenge human beings to explain the
world order in which such apparently indiscriminate acts can occur.
Europe in the 18th century had the intellectual curiosity and
independence to ask and answer such questions. But can we say the
same of 21st-century Europe? Or are we too cowed now to even ask if
the God can exist that can do such things?
[email protected]
I'm an atheist myself, and I would like to hear your explanations
as to why an all-powerful, all-loving God would choose to kill so
many innocent people (including babies and children) and cause so
much suffering.
