Today, the body count stands at more than 125,000 following Sunday’s tsunami.
I listened to a CBC radio report critical of Canada’s response. The radio station played an audio clip of a Canadian tourist in — I think it was — Jakarta. She said the Canadian embassy had let her down. Canadian officials told her it would take 10 days to replace her passport and there would be a replacement fee. She was appalled. Her American friends got replacement passports within the day. Her Indonesian friends had new passports within the hour. Then she said something that caught my attention. She said that it wasn’t her fault that she had lost her passport; it was an act of god.
Why do we use this phrase — act of god — and what do we mean when we use it?
It was probably first coined by clever actuaries who wanted to limit insurance liability. It has something to do with assignment of responsibility. Insurance companies cannot be held accountable for disasters that lie outside their predictive models. Not even the biggest reinsurers will underwrite earthquakes and tsunamis.
Do we mean to blame god for 125,000 deaths? 125,000 is a conservative figure. In the aftermath, with disease and hunger, the number may double. This is roughly 100 times the number who died when Al Quaeda terrorists flew aircraft into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. When we think of 9/11, we at least can comprehend the enormity of that atrocity. We can point our fingers at people. We can name them. We can print their photographs in our newspapers. And, although we may never be able to answer “Why?”, at least we can answer “How?” But today we can do neither. And so we call it an act of god.
This is a theology of the gaps. When we encounter a gap in our understanding, that is god.
But is god so malevolent? Why would god visit such horror upon us? Why snuff out innocent lives?
Answer #1: The doctrine of original sin. No one is truly innocent. By virtue of the fact that we are human, we all bear the stain of Adam’s first transgression. Therefore we can never claim that some people are morally exempt from pain.
What a load of crap.
The only force of malevolence at work here is the stupidity of the theologians who first came up with this idea.
Answer #2: The victims did something to bring this destruction down upon their own heads. God is merely the agent of justice — the enforcer of an order upon what would otherwise be a chaotic universe.
What another load of crap.
On one (not terribly nuanced) reading of the big Hebrew prophets (like Isaiah, Jeremiah & Ezekial), Israel suffered grave misfortunes because it turned away from its god. Assyrians and Babylonians and Philistines were merely the agents of divine retribution. But even the ancient Hebrew people suspected that this proposition was shallow. The writer of Job posed the question that presses us still today: why do bad things happen to good people? Job was a virtuous man. And still he suffered.
No one can point to a disaster and call it an act of god without coming up against the Book of Job. 9/11 is easy. As with Job, 9/11 has its Satan to visit evil upon the innocent. But a tsunami? This monster that rises from rumblings deep within the earth defies our comprehension. But we must resist the temptation to ascribe it to god.
To what, then?
For this question, I have no answer. Job tried to answer that question more than 2500 years ago. We still try today. And the words we use today are no more satisfying than those uttered in ancient times. I have no answer. And I suspect that part of the answer lies beyond words. It emerges only through living.
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Thu, Dec 30, 2004
From the Drainpipe