It was on Boxing Day that the ocean suddenly surged without warning and claimed tens of thousands of lives from Malaysia in the east to the African coast in the west. Of those who died, more than one third were helpless and innocent children. Insurers would describe the Asian Tsunami as an 'act of God'.
This is an interesting expression. An act of God is a metaphor for a phenomenon beyond our calculation, contemplation and control. Natural disasters of mother nature would come under its category.
We attribute natural disasters to 'acts of God' in part because of our concept that God is the creator of all things, which naturally would include the caprices of mother nature.
The problem with that expression is that we also attribute to God the qualities of all-benevolence, compassion and mercy. So how do we reconcile these attributes with the devastation and human misery wrought by an act of God like the tsunami?
If He were all benevolent and all-powerful to avert this catastrophe, why did He allow it to happen? Why were pilgrims as well as hapless and innocent children not spared? Why were places of worship equally lashed by the powerful waves alongside brothels and places of sins? How does the mind make sense of such calamity that has befallen so many?
To suggest any malevolence on His part would be heresy and blaspheme because God is, by definition, all-benevolent.
As can be seen from the above, the following three propositions would pose an intractable conundrum:
1) God is all powerful;
2) God is all benevolent, compassionate and good;
3) Terrible things like Asian Tsunami do happen that claim innocent lives and inflict rampant misery and hardship in its path without differentiation.
As the theologian and author Frederick Buechner has written, one can match any two of these propositions but never all three.
Today, more than ever, Evil is on the march with not just natural calamities like tsunamis and cyclones but rampant drug abuse, robbery and the senseless raping and killing of young children.
Where Evil asserts a constant presence, it also provides opportunities for the Good to manifest, as for example, the way people of all races and nations of different culture, religion and economic level rally, unite and come forth to make available financial aid and all kinds of help for the relief of the unfortunate and distress victims.
In the struggle to make sense, believers would say that it was part of His grand design that Evil shall exist in order for the Good to be manifested, compared and appreciated.
For non-believers, Evil and its antithesis, Divinity, is but immanence in human mind and of the human heart in response to a capricious world where the good and bad things happen at random defying comprehension.
We are however upbeat that the course of civilisation, between bouts of destruction and revival, is generally ascendant slowing coming out from the shadows of superstition and unreason to the open spaces of scientific discovery and technological advance bringing in its wake material prosperity and longevity.
But has the human mind, and heart from which both Evil and Good emanate and vacillate, change over time or maintain the same proportion?
Surveying the scene, the answer is that both Evil and Good still exist in juxtaposition. Perhaps precisely for this reason, Evil and senseless destruction must exist so that the Good in men would be brought out, honed and developed. For doesn't Good become meaningless in a world without Evil?
Only from these perspectives, does the axis of beliefs of believers and non-believers of God intersect at a common point in the struggle to make sense of why - when we already know how - natural disasters like the Asian tsunami happen.
