Finding meaning to catastrophe<\/p>\n
Martin Kettle
\nGuardian News Service
\nLondon<\/p>\n
The modern era flatters itself that human beings can now know
\nand shape almost everything about the world. But an event like
\nthe Indonesian earthquake exposes much of this for the hubris
\nthat it is.<\/p>\n
Perhaps we have talked so much about our civilization's
\npotential to destroy the planet that we have forgotten that the
\nplanet also has an untamed ability to destroy civilization too.
\nWhatever else it has achieved, the Indian Ocean tsunami has at
\nleast reminded mankind of its enduring vulnerability in the face
\nof nature. The scale of suffering that it has wreaked -- 20,000
\ndeaths and counting -- shows that we share such dangers with our
\nancestors more fully than most of us realized.<\/p>\n
An entirely understandable reaction to such an event is to set
\none's face against any large questions that it may raise. But
\nthis week provides an unsought opportunity to consider the
\nlargest of all human implications of any major earthquake: its
\nchallenge to religion.<\/p>\n
A few days after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York, I had
\ndinner with the Guardian's late columnist Hugo Young. We were
\nstill so close to the event itself that only one topic of
\nconversation was possible. At one stage I asked Hugo how his
\nreligion allowed him to explain such a terrible act. I'm afraid
\nthat's an easy one, he replied.<\/p>\n
We are all fallen beings, Hugo declared, and our life in this
\nworld is a vale of tears. So some human beings will always kill
\none another. The attack on New York should therefore be seen not
\nas an act of God, but as an act of fallen humanity. Then he
\npaused, and added: "But I admit I have much more difficulty with
\nearthquakes."<\/p>\n
Earthquakes and the belief in the judgment of God are, indeed,
\nvery hard to reconcile. However, no religion that offers an
\nexplanation of the world can avoid making some kind of an attempt
\nto fit the two together. And an immense earthquake like the one
\nthat took place off Sumatra inevitably poses that challenge
\nafresh in dramatic terms.<\/p>\n
There is, after all, only one big question to ask about an
\nevent of such destructive power as the one that has taken place
\nthis week: why did it happen?<\/p>\n
As with previous earthquakes, any explanation of this latest
\none poses us a sharp intellectual choice. Either there is an
\nentirely natural explanation for it, or there is some other kind.
\nEven the natural one is by no means easy to imagine, but it is at
\nleast wholly coherent.<\/p>\n
The tsunami took place, say the seismologists, because a
\nmassive tectonic rupture on the sea bed generated tremors through
\nthe ocean. These unimaginable forces sent their energy coursing
\nacross thousands of miles of water, resulting in death and
\ndestruction in a vast arc from Somalia to Indonesia.<\/p>\n
But what do world views that do not allow scientists
\nundisputed authority have to say about such phenomena? Where do
\nthe creationists stand, for example? Such world views are more
\nwidespread, even now, than a secularized society such as ours
\nsometimes prefers to think.<\/p>\n
For most of human history people have tried to explain
\nearthquakes as acts of divine intervention and displeasure. Even
\nas the churches collapsed around them in 1755, Lisbon's priests
\ninsisted on salvaging crucifixes and religious icons with which
\nto ward off the catastrophe that would kill more than 50,000 of
\ntheir fellow citizens.<\/p>\n
Others, though, began to draw different conclusions. Voltaire
\nasked what kind of God could permit such a thing to occur. Did
\nLisbon really have so many more vices than London or Paris, he
\nasked, that it should be punished in such a appalling and
\nindiscriminate manner? Immanuel Kant was so amazed by what
\nhappened to Lisbon that he wrote three separate treatises on the
\nproblem of earthquakes.<\/p>\n
In the UK, British society seems to be more squeamish about
\nsuch things. The need for mutual respect between peoples and
\ntraditions of which the Queen spoke in her Christmas broadcast
\nseems to require that we must all respect religions in equal
\nmeasure, too. The Blair government, indeed, is legislating to
\nprevent expressions of religious hatred in ways that could put a
\ncordon around the critical discussion of religion itself.<\/p>\n
Yet it is hard to think of any event in modern times that
\nrequires a more serious explanation from the forces of religion
\nthan this week's earthquake. Voltaire's 18th-century question to
\nChristians -- why Lisbon? -- ought to generate a whole series of
\n21st- century equivalents for all the religions of the world.<\/p>\n
Certainly the giant waves generated by the quake made no
\nattempt to differentiate between the religions of those whom it
\nmade its victims. Hindus were swept away in India, Muslims were
\ncarried off in Indonesia, Buddhists in Thailand. Visiting
\nChristians and Jews received no special treatment either. This
\nposes no problem for the scientific belief system. Here, it says,
\nwas a mindless natural event, which destroyed Muslim and Hindu
\nalike.<\/p>\n
A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based
\non any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to
\ndo, however. What God sanctions an earthquake? What God protects
\nagainst it? Why does the quake strike these places and these
\npeoples and not others? What kind of order is it that decrees
\nthat a person who went to sleep by the edge of the ocean on
\nChristmas night should wake up the next morning engulfed by the
\nwaves, struggling for life?<\/p>\n
From at least the time of Aristotle, intelligent people have
\nstruggled to make some sense of earthquakes. Earthquakes do not
\nmerely kill and destroy. They challenge human beings to explain
\nthe world order in which such apparently indiscriminate acts can
\noccur. Europe in the 18th century had the intellectual curiosity
\nand independence to ask and answer such questions. But can we say
\nthe same of 21st-century Europe? Or are we too cowed now to even
\nask if the God can exist that can do such things?<\/p>",
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