God and the tsunami

In his article, Responsibility For That Tsunami, Mgr Anton Gauci reminds us that when Christ's attention was drawn to "the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices" and "those 18 upon whom the tower fell in Siloe, and slew them", he said: "Except you do penance, you shall all likewise perish" (Luke 13: 1-5).

Before issuing this warning, however, Christ said: "Do you think those Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no!... Do you think those 18 who died when the tower in Siloe fell on them were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no!" (Luke 13: 2-4).

The meaning of Christ's words is plain. Those Galileans whom Pilate slaughtered and those 18 who died when the tower in Siloe collapsed were perfectly ordinary people, no worse than anyone else. And since the point Christ is making can be presumed to be a general one, the same applies to those who died in the tsunami of December 26 last year, in the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers of September 11, 2001 or indeed in any comparable disaster.

But what, then, of Christ's warning "Except you do penance, you shall all likewise perish"? This can hardly mean that if one does penance, one becomes immune to being killed by a brutal tyrant, a falling building, a tsunami or whatever. Indeed, innumerable Christian martyrs were cruelly killed precisely because they were truly penitent and holy people.

Actually, Christ's warning has nothing to do with physical death. He is using "perish" in the same sense as when he said "God so loved the world that he gave up his only begotten son, so that those who believe in him shall not perish, but have eternal life" (John 3: 16-17).

Having defended the massacred Galileans and the 18 killed by the falling tower from the slur that they must have been great sinners, Jesus then goes on to use their deaths as a metaphor for something he regards as far worse, namely eternal separation from God.

Christ's remarks about the slaughtered Galileans and the 18 crushed by the falling tower are fully in line with what he said elsewhere, in particular with his exhortation to his disciples: "Love your enemies, do good to those that hate you... that so you may be true sons of your father in heaven, who makes His sun rise on the evil and equally on the good, His rain fall on the just and equally on the unjust... You are to be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect" (Matthew 5: 43-48).

Certain Old Testament accounts notwithstanding, such clear and authoritative statements from the mouth of Jesus seem to pose insuperable difficulties for the claim that God ordains wars and natural disasters to punish human beings - not least because, as Jesus says, those who are killed are no guiltier than those who remain unharmed.

After the execution of the unfortunate Admiral Byng in 1757, Voltaire famously remarked that from time to time the English kill an admiral to encourage the others. It is hard to believe that God operates on similar principles.

Mgr Gauci also criticises "a Catholic priest in Canada" who, when asked why tsunamis occur, replied: "Ask scientists. This is a purely seismic natural phenomenon". He is right to do so. The Canadian priest's answer is worryingly evasive. As we shall see, the priest was not wrong to bring up the scientific explanation of tsunamis but he could hardly have done so more ineptly.

In particular, the priest is to be faulted for stopping there (if he stopped there) and not going on, as Jesus did in similar circumstances, to draw an appropriate religious lesson from the disaster. That is his job as a priest, just as it is the job of scientists to explain why tsunamis occur.

Einstein once said: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind". St Thomas Aquinas, presumably, would not have disagreed since he wrote: "An error regarding creatures leads to a false knowledge of God" (Summa contra Gentiles II3).

The tsunami was caused by an underwater earthquake. Science suggests, however, that if humans are to exist, earthquakes are a necessary evil. If the earth were a geologically dead planet with no tectonic activity such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, aeons of erosion would long ago have made it a dully flat and inhospitable place, in all likelihood completely covered with water and we certainly would not be around.

Earthquakes, therefore, appear to be a good example of what Aquinas meant when he said, in a passage cited by Mgr Gauci, that "God can never want moral evil, but, accidentally, he can want physical evil. This last because of some good tied up to that evil" - in this case, the existence of human beings.

In his 1980 television series Cosmos, the astronomer Carl Sagan said: "To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe". But a universe where apple pies are possible is an unimaginably complex affair which cannot be put together any old how. Everything but everything has to be just right.

In a fascinating essay of 1920 included in Christianity and Evolution, the Jesuit philosopher/scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin argued persuasively that the creation of a universe capable of containing intelligent life must involve satisfying some extremely rigorous physical and logical constraints.

Einstein was clearly thinking along similar lines when he said that what really interested him was how much choice God had when he created the universe.

Contemporary cosmology has proved Teilhard right. As the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, explained in his 2004 television series What We Still Don't Know, the laws of nature can be defined by a set of numbers that provide the parameters for the evolution of the universe.

Einstein named one of these numbers the cosmological constant. It is incredibly tiny, barely above zero. Amazingly, for the universe to grow old enough and big enough to contain stars and life, this number needs to be set to an accuracy of one part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. Any minuscule variation means that stars cannot form and life is a non-starter. Cosmologists have found many such numbers.

Even given these exceedingly narrow constraints, many different life-bearing universes are possible. In the matter of the balance between happiness and suffering for the beings inhabiting them, however, they would all be pretty much the same.

Our universe is presumably as good as it gets. As Teilhard wrote in 1920, "a world without sorrows, faults, dangers - a world in which there is no damage, no breakage... is a conceptual fantasy". (A world, after all, is not a heaven.)

Does this mean that God is not omnipotent? Not at all. Aquinas defines omnipotence as the power of God to effect whatever is not intrinsically impossible. The intrinsically impossible is what either contradicts God's nature (like God performing an evil act) or is self-contradictory (like a spherical cube). Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God. "Hence," says Aquinas, "it is more exact to say that the intrinsically impossible is incapable of production than to say that God cannot produce it" (Summa Theologica I, q. xxv, a 3).

After the tsunami, the usual atheists all over the world set up their smug refrain that if God existed, such things would not happen. They seemed quite unaware that the nice safe universe they claimed God should have created had long ago been shown by science to be a sentimental fantasy. Unfortunately, with very few exceptions, defenders of religion appeared equally unaware that what the atheists were saying was scientific as well as theological nonsense. This suggests that the Church is in urgent need of a revitalised, hard-nosed, up-to-date natural theology.

Believers who distrust science like to quote the adage "if theology marries the science of this age, she will become a widow in the next".

But why should theology marry the science of today when scientists themselves freely admit they have no guarantee that even their seemingly best-founded theories will not one day turn out to be mistaken? The real danger is rather that a theology which ignores the science of its own time will find itself unwittingly wedded to that of a bygone era, as happened in the condemnation of Galileo in 1633.

Ironically, the lesson of the Galileo debacle had been wittily stated more than 30 years earlier by Cardinal Cesare Baronius (1538-1607): "The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go".

According to historians, the science used by the Old Testament writers, which seems so quaint nowadays, was actually the most up-to-date available at the time. This suggests that we modern believers would do well to follow their example and utilise the best scientific knowledge currently available to us.

As the 18th century Jesuit author Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote at the end of his devotional classic Self-Abandonment To Divine Providence: "When souls are given the understanding of faith, God speaks to them through all creation, and the universe becomes for them a living testimony... a continuation of the scriptures, expounding for us what has not been written... an abstraction presenting the vast extent of divine action".