David Hart and natural evils

I saw this story in the news today - Death toll from Indonesian quake hits 777

In the post below this one, Alejandro García-Rivera writes about the question of cosmic evil and human agency, but there's another kind of evil that has nothing to do with human free will - natural evil. I've been looking for a convincing theological argument that can square tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions (not to mention planet-killing meteor strikes) with God's goodness and power, an argument that convinces me this is the best of all possible worlds. Keith Ward tries to show this kind of world is necessary to make creatures like us, and other theologians cite the falleness of the world as the reason for such evils. Neither argument really works for me.

Seeing that story about the earthquake in the news made me think about the 1755 Lisbon earthquake which took place on All Saints' Day. That awful event affected the thinkers of the day, including Voltaire and Immanuel Kant, and it drove a stake through the heart of the theodicy arguments of that time. Here's just a tiny bit of Voltaire's poem on the earthquake ...

"But how conceive a God supremely good,
Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,
Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?
What eye can pierce the depth of his designs?
From that all-perfect Being came not ill:
And came it from no other, for he ’s lord:
Yet it exists. O stern and numbing truth!
O wondrous mingling of diversities!
A God came down to lift our stricken race:
He visited the earth, and changed it not!
One sophist says he had not power to change;
“He had,” another cries, “but willed it not:
In time he will, no doubt.” And, while they prate,
The hidden thunders, belched from underground,
Fling wide the ruins of a hundred towns
Across the smiling face of Portugal."

And here's a bit about the earthquake that inspired it, from Wikipedia ...

"The 1755 Lisbon earthquake took place on November 1, 1755, at 9:40 in the morning. It was one of the most destructive and deadly earthquakes in history, killing between 60,000 and 100,000 people. The quake was followed by a tsunami and fire, resulting in the near-total destruction of Lisbon. The earthquake accentuated political tensions in Portugal and profoundly disrupted the country's eighteenth-century colonial ambitions .... Geologists today estimate the Lisbon earthquake approached magnitude 9 on the Richter scale...

The earthquake shook much more than cities and buildings. Lisbon was the capital of a devout Catholic country, with a history of investments in the church and evangelism in the colonies. Moreover, the catastrophe struck on a Catholic holiday and destroyed almost every important church. For eighteenth-century theology and philosophy, this manifestation of the anger of God was difficult to explain."

I first read about the earthquake in David Bentley Hart's book, The Doors of the Sea. Here's some of what he wrote about the earthquake and Voltaire and God ......

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Voltaire was not an atheist; he was a deist of the most austere variety, whose reverent admiration for the God who had made the universe and then left it to its own immanent devices was evidently quite genuine. His poem was a lacerating attack not on the idea of a creator God, but on the sort of theodicy that had become standard by his time, that odd, bland metaphysical optimism -- most scintillatingly expressed in Pope's Essay on Man, but derived from the works of Leibniz, Shaftsbury, and Bolingbroke -- that says that this is the "best of all possible worlds," and that thus "tout est bien." Setting aside the vexatious question of whether Voltaire ever properly understood the complexity of Leibniz's system (mostly because there really is no question about it: he did not), he certainly grasped the imbecility of popular theodicy's attempt to explain away cosmic evil by appeal to "universal laws" that have been set in place to assure the greatest possible good for creatures and that are therefore, necessarily, binding even on God .....

His poem possesses what one can only call an exquisite savagery, made all the more effective by the fine, smooth, mellifulous polish of his alexandriness. He invites all philosophers who say that "all is well" to come and contemplate the wrack and ruin of Lisbon -- its debris, shreds, and cinders -- and explain by what calculus of the universal good they can reckon the cosmic necessity of ....

[There women, these infants heaped one upon the other, these limbs scattered beneath shattered marbles; the hundred thousand unfortunates whom the earth devours, who -- bleeding and torn, still palpitating, interred beneath their roofs -- end their lamentable days without comfort, amid the horror of their torment!]

Looking upon all of this, Voltaire asks the metaphysical optimist, would you dare state that what you see is nothing more than the effect of eternal laws, which must determine even the will of a God both free and good? .......

As I have already noted, however, Voltaire's poem is not directly concerned with the God of Christian doctrine .... Nowhere does Voltaire address the Christian belief in an ancient alienation from God that has wounded creation in its uttermost depths and reduced cosmic time to a shadowy vestige of the world God truly intends .....

Again, however, though it is tempting to let the matter rest here, one cannot. As before, in the case of less refined arguments, the more objectively one considers Voltaire's poem, the less easy it becomes to pretend that it poses no challenge whatsoever to Christians .... It is Christianity that not only proclaimed a God of infinite goodness but equated that goodness with infinite love. The atheist who argues from worldly suffering, even crudely, against a belief in a God both benevolent and omnipotent is still someone whoe moral expectations of God -- and moral disappointments -- have been shaped at the deepest level by the language of Christian faith .... He demands of us not a surrender of our beliefs but a meticulous recollection on our parts of what those beliefs are, and a definition of divine love that has at least the moral rigor of principled unbelief. This, it turns out, is no simple thing. For sometimes atheism seems to retain elements of "Christianity" within itself that Christians have all too frequently forgotten.

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