Contemporary Christians may hesitate to assign a direct connection between particular natural disasters and sins. Yet many still believe that the reason for the existence of natural disasters in general is punitive and a direct consequence of early human disobedience in the Garden.
As harsh as that may sound to some, the alternative seems bleaker from a religious perspective. If natural disasters are not anyone’s fault, human or divine, wouldn’t that mean these catastrophes are also without purpose, just another tragic event reflecting the fragility of our lives? If God isn’t using natural disasters to punish disobedient creatures, why does He allow them at all?
One historically significant answer finds divine purpose in natural horrors””without those horrors signifying punishment. This year marks the 300th anniversary of Gottfried Leibniz’s “Theodicy,” which remains one of the grandest attempts to prove the goodness and justice of a God who created an evil-soaked cosmos like ours. Most affecting was his claim that our world is, in fact, the best world that God could have made (so don’t complain!), which sounds either crudely optimistic or despairingly pessimistic.
It seems to me likely that natural disasters, disease, rain, death, hatred, etc, all followed Man’s sin.
It seems that this should be taken into consideration when we attempt to judge God’s purposes. Perhaps we should judge Man’s state instead.
Don
Without natural disasters, life as we know it would never have existed in the first place.
Isn’t the point of many psalms, Luke 13:1-5, the book of Job and indeed the incarnation that we don’t get what we deserve? This is very confusing to atheists but God’s first priority is not maximizing our level of comfort.
(Ezekiel 18 is interesting. It seems to foreshadow the new covenant but it does not really address the problem of injustice.)
Amen, John, Jesus did not die on the cross so that we could be comfortable, but to take up our cross and follow Him.
2 Peter chapter 1 tells us what we need to be gaining every day in order to do so.
Don
Yet, let someone like the late Rev. Falwell or Pat Robertson say such a thing and the echo of the cries of outrage can still be heard.
This issue is really very simple. Why the distress and angst? We all must die. Period. Can the Master the Universe make a world in which no one dies? Probably, but there would be no humans in it because death is a vital part of humanity – and for our survival, an absolute necessity. Does it make any difference whether we die slowly of cancer or suddenly in a plane crash? It does not, nor can God be blamed for any of it, for there can be no fault in necessity. He has made the world and everything in it; this includes Ebola, earthquakes, mudslides, politicians and the like. No one is at fault here, and this absolution includes God Himself. Why is this so hard to grasp? Larry
As I understand the story of the Fall in Genesis, “What consenting adults do in the privacy of their own paradise” (to paraphrase a common modern argument justifying sexual immorality) is not a private matter between them, but rather has cosmic consequences. We do not live in the perfect world which God created, but one in which sin has corrupted nature. The Hebrew prophets understood that disasters (natural or man made) were the consequence of God’s judgment on human infidelity. Interestingly, the ancient non-Jew had a similar view of such events.