Tsunami - Part One

“We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in a distant and obscure future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance”
- Marcel Proust

This will be the most difficult post I have had to write yet, and may well be for some time to come. It is easier to talk about philosophical abstractions, the existence of non-material objects, and the law of non-contradiction, even when boiling these things down into existential examples and illustrations, than to deal with the naked face that death can so easily rear. Indeed, as I have mentioned previous, when death crosses your path, very often your entire worldview is shaken at least momentarily.

I have heard about many of those who have been interviewed on television and attempted to give some sort of answer as to how or why this could happen, and have found nearly all of them to be lacking in some form or another. I do not know how long they had to prepare, or if they could not turn the conversation a certain way due to time constraints or whatnot, but it may be easier to do in a forum such as this where there are not sponsors waiting to have their logos parade across the screen and do not look kindly on being made to wait.

I am going to talk about this in what may seem a convoluted manner, so I hope you will bear with me because I intend to try and tie all of this together at the end. And let me reiterate this now, before I go any further – my purpose here is not to cause any arguments, or stir up controversy – my purpose is rather to try and shed some light on such vitally important things in life.

It was Voltaire who said,
“I am a puny part of the great whole.
Yes; but all animals condemned to live,
All sentient things, born by the same stern law,Suffer like me, and like me also die.
The vulture fastens on his timid prey,And stabs with bloody beak the quivering limbs:
All’s well, it seems, for it. But in a while
An eagle tears the vulture into shreds;
The eagle is transfixed by shaft of man;
The man, prone in the dust of battlefield,Mingling his blood with dying fellow men,
Becomes in turn the food of ravenous birds.Thus the whole world in every member groans:
All born for torment and for mutual death. And o’er this ghastly chaos you would say
The ills of each make up the good of all!What blessedness!
And as, with quaking voice,Mortal and pitiful, ye cry,
"All’s well,"The universe belies you, and your heart
Refutes you a, hundred times your mind’s conceit...
What is the verdict of the vastest mind? Silence.
The book of fate is closed to us. Man is a victim of his own research.
He knows not whence he comes nor wither he goes, tormented atoms in a bed of mud;
Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.”

There are those that have said that only the purely scientific worldview can offer any sort of explanation that is, at least, coherent. Or so said an article in The Guardian. But what is the verdict of the vast scientific minds? The minds say that there was a great eruption and upheaval of plate tectonics beneath the earth which caused the water level to dramatically rise and sent that water spilling across the shores. But that is not worth anything to someone who has had to watch a child, a sibling, a loved one swept away from where they stood beside you. In essence, these minds too are reduced to silence because they have nothing meaningful to say to someone who has suffered through this agony. But at least, so read the Guardian’s article, that message of nothingness is coherent.

If man is the simple outworking of time + matter + chance then the question of why is irrelevant. Indeed, I would simply suggest that we all sit down and read The Green Book, so we can all be reminded that this immense tragedy is nothing but the product of certain enzymes being secreted by certain glands, which we interpret as feelings of sorrow, frustration, anger and loss; and saying that you don’t like tsunamis is the equivalent of preferring chocolate ice cream to strawberry; any such statement loses any significant meaning and instead becomes a comparison of what we like compared to what we don’t.

But we ask this question of why because, as Voltaire put it, our hearts refute us a hundred times with the conceit of some minds who can only explain this tragedy as the movement of plate tectonics.

There are assumptions the questioner makes when asking the question why of the believer, or even of God. If you are not given to philosophical thinking, please put your thinking caps on and bear with me because this is important. These ideas have relevant consequences. I will examine these, and then we can move into seeing what God has to say to us. The question of why implies that the question of why is meaningful, and that we expect a meaningful answer. If there is no God, then there is no meaning, and asking why would be the same as saying “blark;” that is asking why would be unintelligible drivel because apart from God there is no meaning. Neither is there objective morality apart from God, so asking God why he allows for such evil also assumes the existence of good. If there is good and evil, then there must be a moral law on which to differentiate between the two. But in order to have a moral law, there must be a moral law giver; there is no reason to assume (or defend, really) objective moral properties apart from an objective moral law giver. So if the questioner points out the evil and suffering of the tsunami in an attempt to disprove the existence of God, his or her own question assumes that God exists (by assuming the existence of evil and then, by necessity, having to assume the existence of good, a moral law, and a moral law giver) and therefore the question is self-negating. In essence, the questioner has said nothing. Aristotle defined nothing as that which rocks dream about.

Once upon a time, Ravi Zacharias (along with someone else whose name I regrettably forget) was a guest on a radio talk show whose host was an atheist. During their time of taking phone calls, a very angry woman called the show and carried on, saying that she knew what their agenda was as men and as Christians, and she went on to bring up the whole issue of abortion. Now, Mr. Zacharias countered by saying that no one had even brought up the issue, but the woman insisted that abortion was the driving force behind their agenda, and she continued that she could not accept the right of God or men to impose such rules upon what she deemed as her own body.

Mr. Zacharias asked if she could reconcile a contradiction from her perspective. His refutation went something like this: the woman (I’ll call her Adelia) has abrogated the right to decide on the life of the fetus she carries to herself and called it her moral right to do as she will. Mr. Zacharias has been on campuses where people ask what kind of God allows a plane to crash with twenty people dead and only four alive. Such objections are always followed by questions of what kind of God is he worshipping who arbitrarily decides twenty people to die and only four to live. He’s not a very good or moral God, is he?

The point is this: people blame God for seemingly arbitrary choices when we proclaim, and demand, that we be given that same right to arbitrarily choose between life and death. In other words it is okay for us but not okay for God. Ravi asked if she could explain this contradiction to him, and do you know what she did? She just hung up the phone. She had no answer to give. And my point in bringing this story up is quite frankly that the same questions we have of others very often apply to ourselves whether we like it or not. Nor is it fair to hold someone else accountable for exercising rights we have demanded that we be allowed to exercise.

On the other hand, the questioner might mean: “Well, you talk about such-and-such a God. Let us assume that God exists – now tell me, how can he be this way in light of what has happened?” This is a very different question, and I will proceed from here.