“If you believe in a loving God, why do babies die of leukemia?” I’d never engaged seriously before with the question, but when faced with hostile questioning at university, I was stumped for a reply. After graduation, I became a Dominican friar for a couple of years in a community of exceptional intellectuals, but the more I read, the less convincing became the traditional excuses for God. “Divine punishment for sin?” Really? In a baby? “God uses suffering to enhance our character.” Well, many people collapse under the weight of life’s trials, so I’m not sure that model of a sadistic deity works either. Then there’s the all-time classic: “It’s all down to the Fall.” Our disobedient ancestral parents caused death and disease to enter the world and suddenly there were thistles and barbed wire in this former earthly paradise – apart from the fact that mortality and decay were around long before homo sapiens appeared on the world stage.
Then, back in December 2004, something happened that meant there was no longer a hiding place from the conundrum. When scenes of carnage erupted onto our TV screens of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, my father, a lifelong devout Catholic, turned to me and said: “God could have stopped that.” The subsequent conversation spawned a two-hour film, Tsunami; Where Was God? shown on Channel 4 in the UK on the Christmas evening of 2005.
In making the film, I spent seven weeks touring landscapes that had been devastated by the tsunami. I met people such as Fadil in Sumatra, Indonesia, who lost 19 family members on the day in question, Boxing Day 2004, yet who told me his faith in God was now stronger. I met a woman in Tamil Nadu, India, who raged against God because despite all her offerings in temples, God had not protected her husband and children from the killer wave. In Thailand, Buddhist monks implored me to abandon the question of God and just deal with the reality of duhkha: suffering.
I heard extraordinary tales of heartbreak and survival. Some lost their faith, others were emboldened to dig deeper and spoke of enhanced belief, but nowhere was I nearer to a satisfactory answer to my prime question – why had a loving Creator made a world with diseases, earthquakes and tsunamis?
Then, a breakthrough: our team attended a symposium at the Vatican Observatory on scientific perspectives on evil. A contributor drew our attention to an article in the New York Times on crustal recycling – the benefits that might ensue from the movement of the Earth’s crust. On offer was a positive view of tectonic plates, aspects of nature that not only forced land to rise above the oceans (necessary for human development), but whose motion churned up ores and minerals to the surface which made agriculture possible.
Other examples of this positive/negative ambiguity of nature abounded. Cyclones, yes, were horribly destructive to humans at the cutting edge, but necessary for maintaining global equilibrium by transferring heat and energy. Mosquitoes, yes, they spread malaria, but these creatures are also arch-pollinators and essential elements in a complex food chain. “You have it all in scripture,” said the wise Jesuit director at the Observatory, Fr George Coyne, “unless a grain of seed dies and falls into the ground, I tell you, you cannot have new life.”
God, I was told by many of the delegates, cannot perform the logically impossible. Similarly, might it be that a pain-free material world does not make scientific sense, given what we now know of the interplay of creative and destructive forces in nature. And as Christians, God’s answer to this conundrum about the downsides associated with a material world is Incarnation: to take on flesh, to love unconditionally, die an excruciating death and be transformed on the third day.
If God cannot create, or shine a lamp, without casting a shadow, then one might ask why God created at all. The answer to that came from philosopher Philip Clayton. At the Vatican gathering in Rome he told me: “That God made creation hints at a mystery we don’t understand. It hints at a resolution that we only hope for: God will only be God if the outcome is something so far better than what we see around us. But I can only say that as a wish and not as an item of knowledge.”
Amen to that. After decades vexed by this obstacle to faith, I feel I can now, after my father’s observation, not declare that I have “solved” the question, but simply assert that I can, at last, live with a model of explanation that is at least plausible and defensible and yet leaves open the way to a deeper faith. On my own tsunami journey, that faith was indeed strengthened by witnessing countless heroic responses to human suffering, more often than not, from people who professed a profound belief in God.
Mark Dowd’s My Tsunami Journey: The Quest for God in a Broken World is published by Resource Publications on April 11; wipfandstock.com.
This article first appeared in the Easter 2022 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.