Catholic why does god allow natural disasters

While the Bible does speak of humans suffering because of their sins, some of the most moving passages speak about how innocent people suffer as well. The suffering becomes so intense that Job wishes he had never been born.

The Hebrew Bible recognizes that people suffer often through no fault of their own. Most famously, Psalm 42 is an extended lament about suffering that nonetheless concludes by praising God. Sometimes suffering is caused by God, sometimes by Satan and sometimes by other human beings. But sometimes the purpose behind suffering remains hidden.

But a lot of these things are caused by people , and people can be crazy. I get that. A swirling storm claiming homes, memories, and lives? I have trouble wrapping my head around that. He is always working for our good Romans I believe in a God who is all-powerful, who stretched out His hand and demanded that the wind around Him and the waves beneath Him cease, and they obeyed Matthew I do believe He knows. I do believe He sees. I do believe He cares. I do not understand His ways.

This leads to more questions. If I believe that God could stop the storm, it would also make sense to say that He is letting it happen. In other words, God is in charge.

This can cause confusion, and sadness, and even anger in me. He, to rescue me from danger, interposed His precious blood.

I have been struggling to put anything into or get anything out of Mass lately, but this song brought me to tears. In this way, religious faith, for those who believe, can contribute to personal resilience in the midst of disasters. Disasters remind us that the world is not the way it should be. But the world also contains terrifying parts. Recently, I hiked about a kilometre from where a volcano erupted a few years earlier.

Smoke still billowed forth from the crater; beside me were boulders, weighing up to 3 tonnes, which had been hurled through the sky. We are not in control of our world. The world is beautiful, but it is also dangerous. Lewis represented God as a lion in the Chronicles of Narnia.

One character asked if the lion is safe. He created the world with love and beauty, and humans introduced sin and ugliness. Injustice demands justice; ask any victim. The Bible records that this has happened with specific events from time-to-time, but it does not claim that every disaster is the direct act of God.

Various theodicies have provided justifications for why God allows disasters to continue. The Bible claims that someday this will end and the world will be restored to how it should have been.

Meanwhile, living in this imperfect world, God uses suffering and disasters to call people back to himself and to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with him Micah Those who believe in a generous, loving God should express that love in practical ways. Since God has a particular concern for the vulnerable, Christians should also James Given the view that all humans are made in the image of God, discrimination and injustice are unethical.

And when Christians are hit by disasters, their belief that God can bring good from a bad situation should provide hope and resilience. Disasters should cause all of us to reflect deeply on what matters most in life. They remind us that we are not in control in this world, and will all ultimately face death. Disasters remind us that all people deserve our help. They call on people to commit themselves to helping those in need, both through meeting their immediate needs in the disaster and working to overcome the injustices that exist in the world and contribute to the devastation of disasters.

I accept this view, and the issue is addressed here. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. Skip to main content Skip to sections.

This service is more advanced with JavaScript available. Advertisement Hide. Open Access. First Online: 17 October Download chapter PDF. Alush, Zvi. Rabbi: Hurricane punishment for pullout. Accessed 10 May Google Scholar. Behreandt, Dennis. Why does God allow calamities? The New American 21 26 : 31— CBS Money Watch. Cooperman, Alan. An act of God?

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But there's a counter-argument. Thoroughly good people aren't robots, so why couldn't God have created only people like them, people who quite freely live good lives? However that debate turns out, it's quite unclear how free will is supposed to explain the other kind of evil - the death and suffering of the victims of natural disasters. Perhaps it would if all the victims - even the newborn - were so bad that they deserved their agonising deaths, but it's impossible to believe that is the case.

Or perhaps free will would be relevant if human negligence always played a role. There will be some who say the scale of the tragedy in natural disasters is partly attributable to humans. The world has the choice to help its poorer parts build earthquake-resistant structures and tsunami warning systems. But the technology has not always existed.

Was prehistoric man, with his sticks and stones, somehow negligent in failing to build early warning systems for the tsunamis that were as deadly back then as they are today? The second century saint, Irenaeus, and the 20th Century philosopher, John Hick, appeal instead to what is sometimes called soul-making. God created a universe in which disasters occur, they think, because goodness only develops in response to people's suffering.

To appreciate this idea, try to imagine a world containing people, but literally no suffering. Call it the Magical World. In that world, there are no earthquakes or tsunamis, or none that cause suffering. If people are hit by falling masonry, it somehow bounces off harmlessly. If I steal your money, God replaces it.

If I try to hurt you, I fail. So why didn't God create the Magical World instead of ours? Because, the soul-making view says, its denizens wouldn't be - couldn't be - truly good people. It's not that they would all be bad. It's that they couldn't be properly good. For goodness develops only where it's needed, the idea goes, and it's not needed in the Magical World. In that world, after all, there is no danger that requires people to be brave, so there would be no bravery. That world contains no one who needs comfort or kindness or sympathy, so none would be given.

It's a world without moral goodness, which is why God created ours instead. Even in a world where nothing bad happens, couldn't there be brave people - albeit without the opportunity to show it? So moral goodness could exist even if it were never actually needed. Doesn't our world contain a surplus of suffering? People do truly awful things to each other. Isn't the suffering they create enough for soul-making? Did God really need to throw in earthquakes and tsunamis as well?

Suffering's distribution, not just its amount, can also cause problems. A central point of philosopher Immanuel Kant's was that we mustn't exploit people - we mustn't use them as mere means to our ends. But it can seem that on the soul-making view God does precisely this. He inflicts horrible deaths on innocent earthquake victims so that the rest of us can be morally benefitted. It's OK, some will insist, because God works in mysterious ways. But mightn't someone defend a belief in fairies by telling us they do too?

Others say their talk of God is supposed to acknowledge not the existence of some all-powerful and all-good agent, who created and intervenes in the universe, but rather something more difficult to articulate - a thread of meaning or value running through the world, or perhaps something ineffable. But, as for those who believe in an all-good, all-powerful agent-God, we've seen that they face a question that remains pressing after all these centuries, and which is now horribly underscored by the horrors in Haiti.