Sometimes There Is No Meaning
From a review in today's Wall Street Journal of The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? by David Bentley Hart:
Thus to the claim that the tsunami provides evidence against the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent God Mr. Hart responds: The disordered world in which we live isn't as God intended and created it. God did order the world in such a way that natural disasters don't happen. The only disaster he permitted was the one that we ourselves succeeded in bringing about, the one that disordered the world in the direction of chaos. God will finally overcome even this, Christian faith teaches. But until that victory is complete the damage wrought by chaos provides no evidence against God. Or, as Mr. Hart likes to put it: The God against whom natural disasters might provide evidence isn't the one in whom Christians believe.
Mr. Hart also addresses what he takes to be a confused explanation of natural disaster offered by well-meaning Christians themselves, who claim that the sufferings and deaths produced by tsunamis and their like are part of God's plan, God's providential will. Those who say this, and they are many, are likely to offer bromides like "it's all for the best" or "we can't understand what God means by such things" to those bereaved by catastrophe. But if the classical Christian view is right, this is nonsense. It is not for the best. God doesn't mean anything by it. Suffering and death and evil are meaningless horrors, privations that produce nothing. The best response for the bereaved, apart from lament, is to direct their gaze to a time when all tears will be wiped away.
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