〔印度洋海啸如同1775年的里斯本大地震一样，在西方世界引起了一些神学的和哲学的反思。当年的康德硕士在《1775年底震动地球一大部分的那场地震中诸多值得注意的事件的历史和自然描述》中说：“像上一次灾难在我们的同胞中所造成的如此之多的不幸者，他们的境遇应当激起我们的仁爱之心，使我们感受到他们如此严酷地遭受到的厄运的一部分。但是，倘若有人把诸如此类的命运在任何时候都视为施加的惩治，这种惩治是蒙受蹂躏的城市因其罪恶而遭受的；如果我们把这些不幸者视为上帝复仇的目标，上帝的正义将其所有的愤怒之碗都倾倒在他们头上，人们对此是极为反感的。这种判断方式是一种不可原谅的冒失，它自以为能够认出天意的意图，并且按照自己的认识来诠释它。”－－哲学在线〕

Tsunamis and Theodicies: A Philosophical Reflection

January 21, 2005
by Dr. Paul Herrick
Philosophy News Service

Traditional theists, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, believe that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. But an event such as the recent Tsunami in Southeast Asia inevitably causes thoughtful believers to ponder the following very troubling (for theists) argument: 1. An all-good God would prevent any evil that it could possibly prevent. 2. An all-powerful God would be able to prevent any evil. 3. An all-knowing God would know about any evil occurring. 4. It would seem to follow that if God exists, evil does not exist, since God, being all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing, would not allow any evil at all to occur. The Asian Tsunami reminds us, if we need reminding, that the world does contain evil, i.e., suffering, indeed it contains great evils (such as tsunamis that kill hundreds of thousands of people). It would therefore seem to follow from the above, with strict logical necessity, that God does not exist.

This argument leads us to picture God and evil as two opposites that cannot co-exist at the same time. If one exists, then the other doesn’t exist; no possible universe has room for both. Once this is granted, the presence of evil in the world is proof positive that God does not exist. Since arguments in philosophy are usually named after their key idea, the general line of reasoning here is called the "Argument from Evil." It is also often called the "Problem of Evil."

It is probably this argument, or a closely related one, combined with the awful fact of the Asian tsunami, that prompts Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to (publicly) question his faith. (PhilosophyNews.com, January 16, 2005). I respect the man for both his honesty and his sensitivity to the philosophical burdens inevitably bound up with serious religious belief.

An argument against the existence of God, that is, an argument for the conclusion that there is no such being as God, is called an "atheological" argument. The Argument from Evil is the most important atheological argument in the history of philosophy. As sketched above, it is clearly a deductively valid argument, that is to say, if its premises are true, then its conclusion must be true. The substantive question is: Are its premises actually true?

Critical Responses

In response, many philosophers have asked: Why should we accept the first premise? Why believe that an all-good God would prevent any evil that it could possibly prevent? What if God had a perfectly good reason not to prevent evil? A reason compatible with being perfectly good? Is that at least logically possible? Such a reason, if it existed, would be a "morally sufficient" reason for allowing something evil to occur.

After all, there are cases in everyday life where very good people allow an evil to occur for a morally sufficient reason. For example, loving parents sometimes allow their child to fail at something (and thus resist bailing the child out) reasoning that only in this way will the child ever mature into a morally autonomous being living its own chosen life. The question is therefore a serious one: Is it at least possible that God has a morally sufficient reason for allowing or not preventing evil?
 

A theodicy is a theory that claims to explain why God would allow evil or suffering. By articulating and defending a reason why God would allow evil to occur, a theodicy aims to explain how it is at least possible that God and evil both exist. If just one theodicy (many have been put forward) is reasonable enough to be rationally acceptable, then there is a morally sufficient reason why an all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing God would allow evil, and the Argument from Evil loses its first premise, for an acceptable theodicy would give us reason to reject the claim that "an all-good God would prevent any evil that it could possibly prevent."

In the Christian tradition, the idea of theodicy was given its first systematic expression in the writings of Saint Irenaeus (c.130-c.202). This is the "Soul Making" theodicy that has been defended in contemporary times by the philosopher John Hick. Saint Augustine (354 - 430) developed the second historically important theodicy, the "Free-Will theodicy." I shall start with Augustine and end with Irenaeus.
 

Augustine and Evil

Saint Augustine was both a Platonist and a Christian. (More precisely, the Bishop of Hippo was most influenced by Plotinus, the founder of Neo-Platonism, but that is a technicality to ignore in an essay this brief.) As a Christian, Augustine accepted the following argument:

All things were created by God. So, all things are good, since God, being perfectly good, only creates that which is good.

But this left Augustine with the philosophical question: Where does evil come from? If all things were originally created wholly good by an all-good God, then how does evil get any foothold in reality? How does evil rear its ugly head in a primeval sea of goodness initially created by an all-good God?

The solution Augustine eventually reached, his famous theory of the "privatio boni," was inspired by his Platonism. As a philosopher in agreement with Plato on many things, Augustine identified being with goodness. To have being, i.e., "to be," to exist, to be real, is in itself an intrinsically good thing. (Think of it: Isn’t there something intrinsically good about sheer existence? Is existence like a gift?) But being/goodness comes in degrees, for observation reveals that some things have more being or reality than others. For example a picture of the moon, being dependent for its existence on the prior existence of the moon, has less reality than the moon itself which is independent of the picture (as far as its existence goes). Or: the shadow of a cat is not as real as the cat itself, since it is dependent on the cat (and on the Sun) for its being. If the cat moves or the Sun goes down, the shadow may disappear while the cat yet remains in existence. (Like Plato and Aristotle before him, Augustine identified being with independence: the degree of being of a thing is a function of the thing’s ontological independence.)
 

At the top of the pyramid of being or reality is God, the one most real being, dependent (as far as being goes) on nothing, pure immutable perfection occupying the summit of being called by Plato the Form of the Good. And as in Plato’s system, Augustine held that being/ goodness flows ("overflows" would be a better word) from the top down, from the most real being at the summit down to the least real beings at the bottom of the "Great Chain of Being" we call the universe. Each successive level below the apex of being at the top is occupied by beings with less and less reality (independence) or goodness. However, since being is goodness, to exist at any level of the Great Chain of Being, i.e., to exist to any degree at all, is to participate in goodness to some extent.

So, where does evil come from? Augustine’s ingenious answer was based on this Platonic backdrop and it had two parts: First, if being is goodness, then it follows that evil is non-being. That is, evil is not itself an existent reality at all; it is the absence of being, that is, the lack of goodness (the "privatio boni"). Hence, no level on the pyramid of being is labeled "evil."

Thus, if we were to make a complete inventory of the contents of the universe, our list would include planets and stars and lakes and people and cats and dogs, but it would not contain something that is purely and only "evil."

On Augustine’s theory, evil is like a donut hole. The donut is made of flour, oil, sugar, and so on, but the donut hole is actually not itself a "thing" at all—it is nothing, it is just the absence of donut! Likewise, evil is the lack of being, that is, the lack of goodness.

Ignorance is perhaps a better analogy. What is ignorance? It is nothing more than the absence of knowledge. Notice that knowledge is the positive reality (the good) against which ignorance is contrasted and defined. Likewise, weakness is not anything on its own, it is merely the lack of power-with power being the real thing against which ignorance is to be contrasted.

So no level on the Great Chain is marked "evil." Does the theory of the "Privatio Boni" then mean that evil is an illusion? No. The second part of the theory finishes off the initial question. First of all, love, if it is genuine love, must be freely given not forced. Love is a form of freedom. Second, love is diffusive—it tends by its nature to go out to another, to a separate existence. In addition, real love is also wanted back; however, it must be freely returned or it is again not genuine love. Now, according to Augustine’s arguments, God’s essence is so full of overflowing love and being that God, in a supreme act of love, created a world out of sheer nothing for the purpose of sharing love and being with separately existing creatures. (Thus creation as a voluntary outpouring of being and love.)

Since love is wanted back, and since love must be freely returned if it is real love, God gave part of his creation freedom. Creaturely freedom is an independent power to accept or reject God’s love. Now for the conclusion of Augustine’s solution: Evil originates when a free will, itself a good thing created by God out of nothing, rejects its creator and of its own power turns away in rebellion. Evil comes into the picture when an initially good thing turns of its own power away from the highest good. Rather than seek the light, the creature in rebellion turns toward darkness, toward nonbeing. This is the origin of evil, according to Augustine.

In reply, one might ask: But what causes the will to turn from God? Isn’t the action of the human will itself merely the final result of numerous pre-existing environmental conditions, external circumstances, and genetic predispositions? And on Augustine’s view, isn’t God—as the supreme sovereign of the universe—supposedly the ultimate author of all conditions in the universe? In which case it would seem that God is ultimately the cause or author of evil.

Augustine’s answer to this excellent question is fascinating: First, he argues, if a human will is caused by pre-existing conditions to turn from God toward nonbeing, then that person is not responsible for the turn and cannot be blamed or held accountable. The turn is not the person’s own action. Rather, God is the cause of evil, and is responsible for evil, if God is the cause of the will’s every turn. Yet, argues Augustine, a person is to be praised or blamed for his or her free choices; people are morally responsible. In other words, people have genuine ownership of their free choices. Therefore, it must be that nothing causes a free will to turn from goodness. Rather, what happens is that a free will turns itself; it moves under its own power, it causes itself to move. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a free will. What sometimes happens then, is that a free will, under its own steam, turns from the perfect to a lesser good. The direction of the turn is not ultimately caused by pre-existing conditions or external circumstances or genetics—or it would not be a free choice; the turn is self-caused.

Thus, in Book 2 of the dialogue De Libero Arbitrio, Augustine says to Evodius:

"But perhaps you will ask, `Since the will is moved when it turns away from the unchangeable good to a changeable good, where does that movement, which is clearly evil even though the free will must be counted as good, ….come from?’"

And Augustine answers:

"Perhaps you will be disappointed if, when you question me this way, I reply that I don’t know. I will, however, have replied truly, for what is nothing cannot be known… Therefore, since the movement of turning away, which we agreed is sin, is a defective movement, and since every defect is ex nihilo, from nothing, see where it belongs and you will see, no doubt, that it does not belong to God. Nevertheless, since this defect is voluntary, it has been put in our power."

But Evodius asks again:

"I still want to know why the [good angels] did not sin and why the [evil angels] did sin…If there was no cause, there would not be this distinction among rational creatures. What distinguished them? Don’t give me the answer: "An act of will," for I am looking for the cause of the act of will itself."

Augustine insists on this answer:

"Since an act of will is the cause of sin, and you’re looking for the cause of the act of will itself, if I were to find this cause for you, wouldn’t you then ask for the cause of the cause I found for you? What limit is there to the inquiry; what could bring an end to our examination and inquiry? You must not look for anything beyond the root."

In other words, the "root," a primal act of will, has no cause beyond itself. It is the first step in a series of causes and effects pointed away from God, a series initiated by a free will. Thus, in The City of God, Augustine writes: "To want to find the cause of [a will turning from God] is like wanting to hear darkness or see silence."

Thus, says Augustine, the free will is itself good (since it was created by God). Evil enters the universe de novo when a free will is misused, that is, when it freely turns from God and points in the direction of empty nonbeing. One philosopher has summed up the theory as "Evil is a nothing where something should be." Thus Augustine thought he had explained evil while holding on to both the idea of God’s complete goodness and the original goodness of all creation. Evil is a free will turning away, under its own steam, from God; a will aimed by its owner toward the darkness of nonbeing, toward the nothingness that exists "outside" the pyramid of being. The responsibility thus rests on the creature, not on the creator.

As we saw, theodicy begins with the idea that an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing being might allow evil to exist if it had a morally sufficient reason. According to Augustine’s theodicy, freedom is that overriding reason. God creates through an act of love, but only free creatures are capable of returning that love.

Two Problems

Others have asked: If God is all-powerful and all knowing, wouldn’t he look into the future when he creates and then create only those free creatures who will always pursue only the good? After all, Augustine himself believed that heaven is populated by just such beings: free creatures who never turn away and who freely love only God and each other forever. Why wouldn’t God make only such people?

In the theory of the Great Chain of being, Augustine had an answer of sorts to both of these difficult questions. All levels of being below the summit are imperfect and hence involve, to varying degrees, limited goodness, i.e., evil to some degree. To want all existence to be purely good, with no evil at all, is in effect to want the summit alone to be the whole of reality. This is to want God to be the sole reality. But (fortunately for us) God’s love is so supreme that it overflows the summit and reaches down, bringing all possible levels of being into existence, including the level we inhabit—a level where imperfect creatures have the power to seek the good and the real power to actually turn from it as well—and do. To want all creatures on our level to have both powers and yet to never exercise both is to want them to be other than they are, which is a self-contradiction. There may be such creatures—beings possessing both powers and yet who freely only pursue the good--but if they exist they exist on another ontological level. And Augustine would say that it is unreasonable to demand that creatures on a lower level (ours) should exercise the level of being appropriate to some higher rung on the great chain of being.

But Augustine’s theodicy faces another challenge, one directly relevant to the recent Asian Tsunami. Philosophers distinguish two kinds of evil:

1. Moral evils are those evils that are due to the actions of human beings.

2. Natural evils are things such as earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and diseases that are due to the operation of nature and not to the actions of human beings.

It would seem that Augustine’s theodicy accounts at most for the existence of moral evils; it seems to have nothing at all to say in the face of natural evils, since natural evils such as tsunamis are not caused by human beings. Does Augustine’s Free Will theodicy explain why a good God would allow the occurrence of something as horrible as the recent Asian tsunami? I wonder what Augustine would say if he were around today.

It’s Not Easy Making Souls: The Irenaean Theodicy
 

The second theodicy in the Christian tradition, often called the "Soul Making" theodicy, originated in the writings of Saint Irenaeus (c.130-202), the Bishop of Lyons. Unlike Augustine’s, this theodicy offers a reason why God would allow natural as well as moral evils.

Irenaeus's fundamental idea is this: Human beings, at least as we know them, enter the world as ignorant, immature, undeveloped but free creatures who have a lot to learn and a lot of growing up to do before they are eventually capable of entering into a mature loving relationship with God. (Analogously, a little boy has a lot to learn and a lot of growing up to do before he is capable of entering into a mature loving relationship with a woman.) Our world is a school and life is a series of lessons. But a human being only learns and grows by confronting and overcoming challenges and hardships. Only through struggle does a human soul truly develop itself. Thus, the world is not a soft, easy place; it is (to use a modern term) "boot camp" for eternity, preparation for an eternal life with God. And as such, it is full of challenges to overcome, it is full of dangers, it contains evils to fight, and it is full of lions and tigers and bears. But the severity of the learning process is an indication of the greatness to come—a future greatness that will overshadow it all, redeeming every sorrow and every pain. One doesn’t train for the Olympics by running around the block a couple times on a comfortable breezy day. However, as we confront the many hardships and evils of this world, we grow, we mature, and we prepare ourselves for the life to come. The struggles and challenge of this world are a process of moral and spiritual development, a school semester that is itself a necessary preparation for a higher life to come.

The poet John Keats (1795-1821) gave literary expression to this idea when he called the world a "vale of soul making":

How are souls made? ...How but by the medium of a world like this... I can scarcely express what I can but dimly perceive [but] I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will call the world a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the human heart the hornbook used in that school. And I will call the child able to read, the soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you see how necessary a world of pains and trouble is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways.

Of course not all find this theodicy satisfying. One common objection goes like this: Let us grant that intrinsically valuable spiritual and moral qualities (such as courage, compassion, charity, etc) develop out of a process of challenge and obstacles and struggle. But if God is omnipotent, then God should be able to simply build these qualities into people before birth–just as God puts eye color or musical talent into a person before birth. If people were simply born with these desirable qualities, then nobody would ever have to suffer or confront hardship, and the world would be a much more comfortable place. Surely a perfectly good God would prefer to bring about goodness and spiritual development in the most painless way, and this would be to simply build them into people at birth along with eye color and the genes for things like male-pattern baldness. Since the higher moral and spiritual qualities aren't built in at birth, we cannot be the creation of a loving and all-powerful God.

If this objection is correct, then the Higher Qualities theodicy fails to explain why God would allow the hardships and suffering and challenges of this world. However, defenders of the Soul Making theodicy argue that the following is a necessary truth: A person cannot come to have the higher moral and spiritual qualities unless he or she actually experiences and overcomes hardships and challenges. In other words, the higher moral and spiritual qualities are logically connected to various sorts of lived-experiences and it is therefore a logical necessity that they can only develop through experience. It is a category mistake to suppose they could be directly built into the human soul before birth by divine fiat.

In support of the claim, consider that a person cannot possibly come to be compassionate, or even know what compassion is, without first confronting and then responding to a case of need. For it would not make sense to call a person compassionate if the person had never confronted or responded to a case of need. The same sort of thing can be said for each of the higher qualities mentioned above. These are not qualities like hair color that can simply be programmed into a person at birth. Rather, they only develop over time as a person freely experiences and confronts the perils and suffering of a world such as this.

John Hick has observed that according to Irenaean theodicy, God's creation of the world is a two-stage process. In the first stage, God played the leading role as he created the physical universe and our physical bodies. In the second stage, through our free choices, we play an important role in the coming to be of the universe, in the sense that our real choices make a difference in how things will eventually turn out. Thus, in the process of struggling through the world's trials and tribulations, we grow into souls approaching union with God while at the same time acting as co-creators whose choices help bring about the universe that eventually will be. Unlike the first stage, the second stage cannot simply be commanded by God's omnipotence. Rather, the second stage requires our free cooperation. Life, the second stage of creation, is an adventure in freedom

A Final Problem: The Quantity of Evil

Many philosophers argue that none of the theodicies mentioned above confront the real problem, which is the quantity of evil, not its mere existence. These philosophers argue: Suppose we grant the theist that suffering and hardships are necessary for moral and spiritual growth. Perhaps some suffering and some challenges are necessary, but the Holocaust? Cancer? The Asian Tsunami? Why so much suffering? Couldn't an omnipotent God have accomplished his ultimate purposes with the occurrence of far less suffering? Why does God allow the huge quantity of evil that we see all around us? If there is an omnipotent God, isn’t much of it avoidable, unnecessary, superfluous?

I personally think this question is the biggest single challenge to the rationality of theism; I know of many atheists for whom this is the prime reason to reject belief in God.

Open Theism

I shall close this piece by offering some reflections on this final problem from the point of view of Open Theism, a new theoretical perspective that is right now generating a great deal of interesting debate in the philosophy of religion. To begin with, open theists (such as Pinnock, Hasker, Boyd, Sanders, and Basinger) stress the radical freedom that is logically bound up with any expression of genuine love. It is because God’s essence is to love that God shares his primal existence by creating a world, for love inherently goes outward, love is essentially diffusive, love wants to share. But since love is not just the beginning but also the telos (goal) of creation, God gives his creation real freedom, for only in real freedom can genuine love be returned. Thus, Open Theism focuses a great deal of attention on the freedom with which God endows his creation. (I use the masculine pronoun for convenience, knowing all along that God is not simply male.)

A number of interesting things shake out of the idea of freedom if it is probed far enough. For example, logically bound up with the idea of freedom is the idea, amazing as it may at first seem, that God, though omnipotent and sovereign over the whole of creation, must voluntarily bind or limit himself if he is to respect the freedom of the creature. This means, if it means anything at all, choosing to not make the creature’s choices for him or her. Analogously, parents reach a point where they must stand back and resist making choices for their child, for only so will the child become a morally autonomous being. Real personhood only develops and flowers if the person makes genuine choices through real freedom. (Here Open Theism has affinities with Boston "Personalism.") It is common sense that if you make too many choices for someone else, they are no longer living their own life. The divine limiting thus means allowing the creature to, in a sense, build himself (don’t we say: "Go out and make something of yourself"?) Freedom is becoming what you will become through choices of your own. Your choices are not yours if you are not making them, and the life you are living is not your life if you are not making your choices.

Which brings up another fascinating idea: Since love is diffusive, the object of real love is always an "other," a separately existing reality. Self-love alone is not complete love. But creatures are separately existing realities only if they are freely creating their own lives. Creatures whose every thought, word, and deed are determined (caused) by God are not truly separate realities, they are mere extensions or projections of God, as a hand puppet is an extension of its owner, and hence cannot really be loved. Open Theism says that a real creation is a free creation, one really living its own separate life, for only then is love really returned; and only then is the love that is returned real love.

Part of the horrible tragedy in Asia is that virtually the whole thing could easily have been avoided, at a relatively small cost, if certain choices had been made a few years back. It may be a delicate subject, but it is a fact that America built its first tsunami warning system in 1949 at Ewa Beach, Hawaii. And long ago Europe and America built, at relatively small cost, extensive emergency warning systems for civic emergencies. I have read that any Asian country, if it had chosen to, could have installed a Western-built tsunami warning system for approximately 20 million dollars—around the cost of one fighter jet in the Thai Air Force. And civic emergency warning systems, of the type developed in the West, are also relatively inexpensive. During the 20th century, Asia adopted enormous quantities of Western invention and technology, from cars, trucks, and jet airplanes, to refrigerators and electric lights, to the camera and the computer, to microscopes and modern medicines. Unfortunately, civic warning systems and electronic tsunami warning buoys were not among the many inventions borrowed, adopted, or copied.

So, real choices were made, and the consequences of those choices are heart-wrenching. Many historians have observed that Western civilization has long embodied an unparalleled, dynamic impulse to not only tame and control nature, but to harness its powers for human use. And as Rabbi Daniel Lapin recently observed, the West, far more so than the East, has also sought to achieve an independence from the vicissitudes of uncontrolled nature.

Open Theism, at least as presented here with its stress on the freedom of the person, tempts a believer to (sadly) observe that the tsunami, as horrible as it was, reminds us that God respects the reality of human choice, that God binds himself in order to let human beings be true creatures—ontologically separate beings embarking on an odyssey of self-discovery and self-development through real choice in a universe of freedom.

Some will see in this idea nothing more than divine neglect: A father who stands by and watches while a horrible tragedy destroys his child, whether or not the tragedy could have been avoided by better choices, is a neglectful father. These folks may say: A God who watches while the creation he created disposes of thousands of innocent people as if they were just pieces of waste, is a cosmic monster, not a loving God.

Others will see in this God’s respect for the freedom of the creature: God so respects human choice that he allows it to occur even when the consequences are this bad. Such a theist may conclude: The end result of this experiment in freedom must (somehow) be something immensely great, something magnificent beyond our imagination, if the creator allows the occurrence of something this awful along the way.

Conclusion

So where does the argument from evil leave us? I think the Archbishop is right: It certainly gives us reason to doubt that God, as conceived within traditional theism, exists. A traditional believer ought to feel a degree of doubt and puzzlement upon confronting the terrible suffering of this world.

On the other hand, there are many positive arguments for the existence of God, although I have not examined any in this piece. These arguments, it seems to me, make a substantial case for the claim that God does exist. Philosophers such as Richard Swinburne argue that although the Argument from Evil counts against belief in God, the many strong arguments in favor of belief outweigh the negative case so that the total evidence, when considered fairly, still makes it reasonable to believe in God. In a typical court case, one piece of evidence might count against the defendant, but once the total evidence is considered, the defendant might be found innocent. Ultimately, a reflective, critical-thinking individual needs to balance the arguments and decide what viewpoint makes the best overall sense of his or her life.

Theism includes the hope (I would not say "knowledge") that the future to come will be such as to not only outweigh, but to redeem, all the tears that were shed along the way. Perhaps no goal short of this is truly worthy of an infinitely loving God.

附：

Article on the Asian tsunami for the Sunday Telegraph –
published 2 January 2005

The photographs that stay with us, haunt us, are always those of particular faces: one mother’s grief, one child’s nightmare bewilderment and loneliness. Last week, we learned in Canterbury of the death in the Asian disaster of a 14 -year old from the King’s School, with her mother and grandmother. And because of that, people here experienced what had happened in a different way. The number of deaths horrifies us - but what most painfully reaches our feelings is the individual face of loss and terror.

In 1966, when the Aberfan disaster struck, I was a sixth former beginning to think about studying theology at university. I remember watching a television discussion about God and suffering that weekend - with disbelief and astonishment at the vacuous words pouring out about the nature of God’s power or control, or about the consolations of belief in an afterlife or whatever. The only words that made any sense came from the then Archbishop of Wales, in a broadcast on Welsh television. What he said was roughly this: "I can only dare to speak about this because I once lost a child. I have nothing to say that will make sense of this horror today. All I know is that the words in my Bible about God’s promise to be alongside us have never lost their meaning for me. And now we have to work in God’s name for the future."

He was speaking from the experience of losing one child; but he was able to speak abut a much greater tragedy simply because of that, not because of having a better explanatory theory. "Making sense" of a great disaster will always be a challenge simply because those who are closest to the cost are the ones least likely to accept some sort of intellectual explanation, however polished. Why should they?

Every single random, accidental death is something that should upset a faith bound up with comfort and ready answers. Faced with the paralysing magnitude of a disaster like this, we naturally feel more deeply outraged - and also more deeply helpless. We can’t see how this is going to be dealt with, we can’t see how to make it better. We know, with a rather sick feeling, that we shall have to go on facing it and we can’t make it go away or make ourselves feel good.

The question: "How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?" is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren’t - indeed, it would be wrong if it weren’t. The traditional answers will get us only so far. God, we are told, is not a puppet-master in regard either to human actions or to the processes of the world. If we are to exist in an environment where we can live lives of productive work and consistent understanding - human lives as we know them - the world has to have a regular order and pattern of its own. Effects follow causes in a way that we can chart, and so can make some attempt at coping with. So there is something odd about expecting that God will constantly step in if things are getting dangerous. How dangerous do they have to be? How many deaths would be acceptable?

So why do religious believers pray for God’s help or healing? They ask for God’s action to come in to a situation and change it, yes; but if they are honest, they don’t see prayer as a plea for magical solutions that will make the world totally safe for them and others.

All this is fair enough, perhaps true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far in helping us, one week on, with the intolerable grief and devastation in front of us. If some religious genius did come up with an explanation of exactly why all these deaths made sense, would we feel happier or safer or more confident in God? Wouldn’t we feel something of a chill at the prospect of a God who deliberately plans a programme that involves a certain level of casualties?

The extraordinary fact is that belief has survived such tests again and again - not because it comforts or explains but because believers cannot deny what has been shown or given to them. They have learned to see the world and life in the world as a freely given gift; they have learned to be open to a calling or invitation from outside their own resources, a calling to accept God’s mercy for themselves and make it real for others; they have learned that there is some reality to which they can only relate in amazement and silence. These convictions are terribly assaulted by all those other facts of human experience that seem to point to a completely arbitrary world, but people still feel bound to them, not for comfort or ease, but because they have imposed themselves on the shape of a life and the habits of a heart.

Most importantly in this connection, religious people have learned to look at other human faces with something of the amazement and silence that God himself draws out of them. They see the immeasurable value, the preciousness, of each life. And here is one of the paradoxes. The very thing that lies closest to the heart of a religious way of life in the world, the passion about the value of each and every life, the passion that makes religious people so obstinate and inconvenient when society discusses abortion and euthanasia - this is also just what makes human disaster so appalling, so much of a challenge to the feelings. Sometimes a secular moralist may say in contemporary debates: "Nature is wasteful of life; we can’t hold to absolute views of the value of every human organism." That is not an option for the believer. That is why for the believer the uniqueness of every sufferer in a disaster such as the present one is so especially harrowing. There are no "spare" lives.

That is also why the reaction of faith is or should be always one of passionate engagement with the lives that are left, a response that asks not for understanding but for ways of changing the situation in whatever – perhaps very small – ways that are open to us. The odd thing is that those who are most deeply involved – both as sufferers and as helpers – are so often the ones who spend least energy in raging over the lack of explanation. They are likely to shrug off, awkwardly and not very articulately, the great philosophical or religious questions we might want to press. Somehow, they are most aware of two things: a kind of strength and vision just to go on; and a sense of the imperative for practical service and love. Somehow in all of this, God simply emerges for them as a faithful presence. Arguments "for and against" have to be put in the context of that awkward, stubborn persistence.

What can be said with authority about these terrible matters can finally be said only by those closest to the cost. The rest of us need to listen; and then to work and – as best we can manage it – pray.

ENDS

© Rowan Williams 2005

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