Natural Disasters and the Wrath of God
By Samuel Newlands
Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304017404575165724219623474.html...
Gottfried Leibniz's "Theodicy," which remains one of the grandest attempts to prove the goodness and justice of a God who created an evil-soaked cosmos like ours. Most affecting was his claim that
our world is, in fact, the best world that God could have made (so don't complain!), which sounds either crudely optimistic or despairingly pessimistic.
...Leibniz insists, God had a justified and discernible reason for creating a universe with life-sustaining, but tectonically unstable planets. Leibniz argues that a world with simple, regular natural laws that yielded a rich diversity of effects—including rational creatures—was better than alternative worlds with different laws and creatures, even if the alternatives were free from natural disasters.
If Leibniz is right, then
natural disasters aren't the result of divine punishment for sin. They
are the foreseen but unintended consequences of a well-regulated and overall good system of natural laws. So religious believers can explain the causes of earthquakes in purely natural terms (Leibniz was an avid scientist himself), while still maintaining belief in a divine, nonpunitive purpose for allowing such events. The
harmonization of natural and theological explanations, reason and faith, is Leibniz's true legacy.
...Yet if Leibniz concedes that some people suffer for the sake of making the world as a whole better, then perhaps we ought to challenge him further, not so much about God's blamelessness and retributive justice in the face of natural disasters, but about the focus and extent of His love.
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