The God of Disaster: Part 1

Could a good and powerful God have created a better world?

“How can a good, loving, and powerful God permit the existence of evil?”

The Judeo-Christian God is frequently put on trial to answer this question, for His character and relationship to creation naturally place him at the center of inquiry. He is said to be perfectly good, having authored the moral law which resides in our hearts, and to love humanity dearly, even to the point of unfathomable self-sacrifice. Taken at face value, these traits seem to suggest that God would neither create evil, desire evil, or tolerate evil.

The Value of Moral Agency

The typical response to the problem of evil is the free will defense: God gifted humans with free will, but imperfect humans continue to act of their own accord, thus perpetuating evil throughout our world. Think of a military invasion initiated by a power-hungry ruler and the ripples of devastation it causes as a consequence of that ruler’s free will and moral brokenness.

Yet even while God desires for humans to behave morally and is grieved by their sin, His overriding will is to preserve our freedom and moral agency, and possibly to avoid a greater evil by overriding a lesser one, as the analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga points out¹:

It is entirely possible that a good person fail to eliminate an evil state of affairs that he knows about and can eliminate. This would take place, if, as in the present example, he couldn’t eliminate the evil without bringing about a greater evil.

Couldn’t God have created morally perfect creatures?

So why didn’t God create humans as creatures with both free will and total moral perfection? William Lane Craig addresses this question in his blog²: it would not make sense for God to do so because moral perfection is a uniquely divine property. To be morally perfect is to “embody goodness itself, to be maximally good” and any such being must also have the essential properties of God (i.e. omnipotence, etc.). God, while all-powerful, cannot do the illogical or impossible (such as create square circles), so demanding that God create another God-like being with “positive qualities of infinite magnitude” doesn’t make sense.

Those who ask this question may also be concerned for God’s perceived lack of fairness: why did God create Adam and Eve to be morally broken from the start? The deck was unfairly stacked against them from the get-go. To this, Craig responds that God did in fact create a morally innocent, sinless human prior to the Fall— but not humans incapable of moral failings:

My answer implies that a human person cannot be a morally perfect being, or he would be God. […] What about Adam?  In Christian theology, Adam is not morally perfect. He is morally innocent prior to the Fall but not morally perfect. Even in heaven, free from sin, our righteousness will be finite, not like the infinite goodness of God.

So I suspect that people’s reservations about my claim were based on a different understanding of “morally perfect.”  Perhaps they interpreted it to mean something like “sinless.” In that case God can (and did) create a sinless human being. But sinlessness should not be equated with moral perfection, which is a positive quality of infinite magnitude.

What about natural disasters and disease— evils not directly caused by humans?

The problem of natural evil, which describes evils whose primary cause is not human sin (such as hurricanes, tsunamis, or pathogenic viruses), is distinct from the problem of moral evil— though not disconnected. Humans have certainly worsened the consequences of many natural evils via improper stewardship of our planet, withholding of humanitarian aid, failure to invest in proper infrastructure, and so on. But human moral failings don’t cause earthquakes, so our free will defense doesn’t directly help us.

The Eruption of Vesuvius, Pierre-Jacques Volaire (French, 1729–after 1799)

Natural evil strikes at the heart of God’s omnipotence and His role as Creator. The Judeo-Christian God not only created the Earth, but He create the entire universe, and remains involved in the natural world to this day. God’s involvement is neither limited in scope or in resolution; he sustains the entirety of His creation and maintains an active relationship with individual people, listening to their prayers and knowing their inmost thoughts. How can a God so intimately intwined with His creation allow it to be ravaged by the forces of nature— forces which He is in charge of?

My most recent read on the problem of natural evil, The Broken Planet by Sharon Dirckx³, proposes three contributors to natural evil: human (moral failings as described above), spiritual, and natural (e.g. material). She notes how the Fall, while the result of human sin, affected all of creation and drove man out from the immediate presence of God. Whether you believe in a human Fall caused by Adam and Eve, or a pre-human fall of spiritual beings (such as Satan), our physical world today contains a brokenness not found in Eden. In other words, the Fall irretrievably changed the physical world, and not for the better.

The Bible doesn’t shy away from recognizing the brokenness of our world, nor does it label every natural evil as a punishment from God, as we would expect a pre-scientific myth to do (see, for example, the Old Testament famines or the storm which shipwrecked Paul). Natural disasters as downstream consequences of the Fall make theological sense, but raise another objection…

The Fairness of the Fall

I’m not going to get too deep into the weeds of the Fall and original sin here, but I felt that an objection might arise on the point of fairness again at this juncture: how is it fair for the actions of two human beings to affect the rest of humanity? I didn’t eat of the tree of life; why am I being punished for it? Old Testament scholar Michael Heiser states that Adam and Eve’s guilt was not transferred to the next generation, rather the privilege of living in a sinless state within God’s sacred space was retracted from consequent generations⁴:

I don’t believe that Adam’s fall affected all humanity by transmitting Adam’s guilt to all humans. I believe Adam’s fall affected all humanity by depriving all humans forever more of the conditions under which they could abide with God in a state of non-sinfulness. Adam and Eve were the only humans to ever live in that condition. After the Fall humans were destined to die, and not only that, they were “on their own” when it came to living in righteousness, a pre-condition for living with God. Adam and Eve met that condition before the fall; they did not need redemption until they sinned. They would live on indefinitely at God’s pleasure. His presence maintained this state, and they were in his presence.

There is no action that does not have consequences. We would have questioned the justice and even the goodness of God if He had not met a morally bad action with a punishment. Unfortunately, we live in the midst of the consequences of that punishment, and have difficulty seeing the end point of God’s promised redemptive arc.

Would you rather inhabit Earth or Jupiter?

Even if our physical world has been affected negatively by the Fall, we must remember that it still sustains life. It contains geophysical processes that are part of a functional and useful design, even if they may result in aberrant natural disasters. Dr. Dirckx points out how Earth’s tectonic plates (which are famous for causing earthquakes) move to shape the distribution of continents and oceans and to permit diverse life, how volcanic eruptions redistribute key nutrients from inside Earth and render the soil highly fertile, and how viruses inhabit our gastrointestinal tract and play a critical part in the Earth’s microbiome. The answer to why God doesn’t stop natural evils may be that the geophysical or biological mechanisms behind them do greater good for creation than ill.

God created a planet which permits life and should inspire gratitude in us as we look upon stormy Jupiter or icy Neptune. But our planet is also home to moments of terrible destruction and suffering which cannot be minimized. Could God have made a better world than Earth, Dr. Dirckx asks? Could He have designed plate tectonics to not yield earthquakes, or could he intervene to stop every earthquake before it causes untold suffering?

If we believe that the consequences of the Fall were just, that the Fall affected the physical world, and that moral evils arising from both humans and spiritual beings continue to plague the world today, it’s not difficult to understand why natural evils might exist. As to why God doesn’t stop those natural evils in real time: who can know for certain? Yet it is entirely plausible that an omniscient God, as Plantinga suggests, permits some smaller evils to prevent a greater evil which would have resulted from stopping the smaller evil.

A personal note…

If your objection to the problem of evil is a personal one, intellectual justifications may serve as your anchor in a storm of emotion or they may not penetrate the surface at all. I’ve experienced both responses. In that case, I’d like to direct you to Tim Keller’s humble discussion of the problem of evil at Columbia University, and join you in the hope for a future where “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4).

Coming next: Part 2, explanations on the problem of evil from throughout Church history.

1. https://heltonduarte.medium.com/the-problem-of-evil-alvin-plantingas-point-of-view-99a6fc453b68#:~:text=Plantinga%20shows%20with%20various%20thought,none%20of%20these%20types%20of

2. https://www.biola.edu/blogs/good-book-blog/2019/could-god-create-a-morally-perfect-being-revisited

3. Dirckx, Sharon, "Broken Planet: If There’s a God, Then Why Are There Natural Disasters and Diseases?" (InterVarsity Press: February 2023)

4. https://drmsh.com/romans-512-part-4/