The tidal wave that killed so many people on St Stephen's Day has been a stern test of faith. We asked religious thinkers to respond within the framework of their beliefs
A Catholic Outlook: Sean Freyne
'Alternative Gods might begin to make more sense'
There is a Job-like quality to the protest "Where is God now?", to people who ask what kind of God would allow the catastrophe of the Asian tsunami to happen. Humans must accept the tragic nature of their existence and look after each other, according to this theory, because nobody else will.
In South-East Asia it was nature - the sea - that turned on innocent and unsuspecting humans. Yet, according to the dominant, androcentric view of the natural world, Earth was intended and ordered by God to be the benign nurturer and sustainer of human life.
Since the rise of the "Death of God" theology of over 50 years ago theologians have struggled to find more adequate ways of talking about God. The problem is one of finding an appropriate language, given that secular culture rejects any talk of God that does not relate immediately and directly to human experience. The notion of transcendence was deemed meaningless and received theology outmoded. God was dead, and his demise was to be celebrated, not mourned.
The celebration may have been premature, however. The brave new world promised once humans had outgrown the foolish myths of the past failed to materialise. Humankind come of age was, and is, beset by deep anxieties about life's real meaning. Failure to address these issues means the most significant aspects of our existence are ignored.
The notion of God as president of a static and ordered universe, or of God as pharmacist, dispensing remedies on demand, has long hindered the search for the true God. Yet this type of idea has dominated Western piety for centuries, apparently still operative in many otherwise sophisticated minds.
The perspective of an expanding and evolutionary universe provides a fresh starting point. The intricacy of matter and the fragile complexity of human life appear to raise again the notion of an intelligence working in and through our universe. God as metaphor for our deepest yearning for wholeness and fulfilment is, or should be, a distinct possibility for even the most sceptical person.
To whose version of God are we to turn faced with the devastation of the tsunami? Which story of God can best resonate with our current unease? There is little doubt that the peoples of South-East Asia, with their rich and varied religious traditions, are better equipped than we secularised Westerners to recognise aspects of their God in this "whirlwind". But there are alternative versions of God within the Judeo-Christian tradition also.These might just begin to make more sense now.
The ancients were at once fascinated with and in awe of the sea. Many of their myths sought to assuage their anxieties about the deep and the threat of a returning chaos. Those stories seemed more appropriate than ever as one viewed the devastation the Indian Ocean wreaked on its inhabitants.
The enduring power of these primitive myths about the deep, as indeed of all myths, is the reassurance they offer when one is confronted with the deep mysteries of the world. The poets of Israel shared such stories with their Near Eastern neighbours in describing their God's continued involvement with the created world, a world at once precarious and fragile but also awesome in its power and beauty.
The picture painted in Genesis of a finished universe, perfect in its harmony, becomes a Utopian ideal of the future rather than a paradise that has been lost. The poets of Israel saw things differently: the universe was and is an unfinished project, and God's continued struggle to ensure that, in the end, good might triumph and chaos be averted was more realistic and more challenging.
Jesus and his contemporaries shared these senses of the fragility of the world and of the deep as threatening and invasive in the human realm. Yet his Jewish faith told him "that One is good, God". His death was an act of faith in the goodness of God, a statement that evil, human or natural, could never have the last word. It was for him a declaration of his conviction that God was suffering too and that, therefore, God's creation had ultimate meaning also.
Helping others in need can never be for Christians a symptom of the tragic condition of the human lot. It is, rather, an affirmation of the triumph of love, because God is love and is unconditionally in love with this universe and all its inhabitants.
A Church Of Ireland response: Gordon Linney
'We have found global compassion'
Nobody should be surprised that people are asking where God was as the tragic events unfolded that caused so much death and destruction across parts of Asia on St Stephen's Day. There is nothing new in the fact that, faced with communal or personal tragedy, people ask: Why? Some come to the conclusion that there can be no God - certainly not a God of love - in a world where such things happen. We just have to accept what comes our way and get on with it.
Religious belief involves living with questions and reflecting on the mystery of life, the mystery of love and the mystery of suffering. That is evident in many parts of the Bible. The book of Job, for example, is an agonising search for an explanation about why good and innocent people suffer. Elsewhere the psalmist is troubled by the prosperity of those perceived to be wrongdoers.
Often the questions remain unanswered. Sometimes in the Bible, as well as in our own time, people look for a quick-fix god who will jump in when bad things happen, but such a god doesn't exist. Nowhere in the Bible or in Christian teaching are we encouraged to think of the world as safe. Each of us receives the gift of life in a world fraught with danger.
Christianity addresses the mystery of suffering not in words or theories but through events. The suffering and death of Jesus are seen as a critical encounter between evil and suffering on the one hand and the power of God's self-giving love on the other. Yet in the context of this great drama there is the questioning. Jesus, even Jesus, is struggling: where are you, God, in all this? Have you abandoned me, forsaken me?
At first there appears to be no answer to the questioning, and the end is followed only by silence and despair. Nobody entered that silence more completely than those who had believed in Jesus.
The event we know as Easter changed all that, however, and the faith that gives so many hope today was revealed not by some process of rational thinking or in a great temple or cathedral ceremony but in a graveyard to a grief-stricken and incredulous woman.
The Anglican thinker Evelyn Underhill stressed the centrality of these events when she wrote: "The primary declaration of Christianity is not 'This do!' but 'This happened!' " And arising out of what happened we are given to understand that God is with us through all the experiences of life, good and bad, even through and beyond death.
The religious debate will continue, and we must listen to each other with sensitivity and respect, but together we can give thanks for the great outpouring of love and compassion that embraced the globe as people of many religions and none united to help and support the victims of that day of destruction.
And perhaps we might reflect on the far greater suffering caused by poverty, disease and war, for which humankind, not God, is responsible and do something more about it. We have discovered a global compassion. We have the resources, but do we have the will?
A Muslim approach: Yahya Al-Hussein
'There are secrets and wisdom only God knows'
Questions about what sort of God presides over a natural disaster have prompted responses based on myths about God. The key to understanding fundamental questions about the God-man relationship, the purpose of creation and the nature of our life in this world is correct knowledge about God. Can we conceive God and His attributes with our limited mental capacity? God is infinite and, as such, cannot be comprehended absolutely by the finite minds of humans. Man cannot even comprehend the universe in which he lives or the soul or mind within his body, so how can he hope to comprehend God?
In His mercy, however, God has described Himself in human language, in order that we may know something of the divine attributes, that we may feel closer to Him and that we may not confuse the Creator's attributes with those of created things.
Thus man knows about God only what little God has chosen to reveal through His prophets - in the pure form of revelation, not after man had interfered with it by additions or alterations. So there are two types of knowledge: knowledge that is accessible to created beings and knowledge that is inaccessible and beyond the grasp of created beings.
There is a limited function of the human intellect in knowing about God, namely by reflecting on God's signs. God Himself calls upon us to consider the wonders of His creation in the universe and in ourselves.
We often make the mistake of comparing the qualities of God and His actions to ours when God is not like any of His creation in any way. God, for example, sees all events and things in a manner wholly unlike our means of seeing things. His sight does not depend on distance, light and appendages. Likewise, He hears all events and things with a hearing that transcends sound waves, volume, tone and pitch.
There are also some questions about God's decree to which it is impossible for any human to know the exact answers. For the exact nature of the decree is God's secret in His creation, and no angel or prophet has been given knowledge of it. Delving into it and reflecting too much about it only leads to error and bewilderment. So anyone who argues with God about the decree and attempts to investigate the Unseen is seeking a secret that can never be uncovered.
Take the argument that human life is sacred for God to touch. One can say that God is not qualified by the laws of His creation. There is no obligation on Him in any deed towards anyone. It is for this and the fact that He has charged Himself not to wrong anyone - as He has told - that tyranny is inconceivable in Him. It is impossible that God could cease to have this perfection or any other, for otherwise He would not be God.
Finally, how do we understand what has happened in South-East Asia? Disasters and misfortunes are part of human life on Earth. There are secrets and wisdom that only God knows. From what He has told us, however, a calamity could be for punishment, for expiation of sins, as a test to see how we respond, as a warning or as a reminder of the blessings of God on those who were not touched by it. And Allah knows best.
A Presbyterian point of view: Katherine Mayer
'New glimpses of ourselves may be entrusted to us'
Just what sort of God would they have us believe in, the dreaded apologists who defend God in the midst of such suffering? If they cannot hear the sad music of humanity, what do they know of life, as lived? I write because I am a human being who bears the name of Jesus of Nazareth, the Jew, the Christ, who heard the sad music of humanity and did not turn away, who taught his followers to look after one another, who knew that the world can be cruel. He prayed to a God whom Christians, with our easy anti-Semitism, have often dismissed as a God of wrath but whose anger, when it appears, looks more like heartbreak.
To the extent that this Jesus reveals the face of God, as Christians claim, it is a face marked by every anguish born of the strange and powerful vulnerability of love. It is a face scarred by the letting go of every other claim to integrity and power except this one: that God does not scorn the sad music of humanity and that life is never to be abdicated for any false consolations, nor demeaned by any easy references to the will of God.
To the extent that this Jesus reveals not only the face of God but also the face of what it means to be human, it is the face of one who enters the darkness, the swelling waters, the inexorable forces of destruction with none of the comforts of religious piety and none of the false assurances of those for whom faith is a bulwark against the rising waters.
While I do not accept for a moment that suffering has some kind of perverted meaning, I believe that if we maintain our humanity in the weeks and months ahead, new glimpses of ourselves may be entrusted to us from time to time, for which we may one day be grateful. I carry in my mind the story of the Belfast woman who went to buy a cooker in the sales but decided to stuff her money into the collection barrel at the Cathedral Church of St Anne instead.
For just as I am not sure that God is ever an explanation for anything, I do not believe that the question of why God allowed the tsunami to happen can ever be satisfactorily answered. But to keep asking it, as certain kinds of believers and certain kinds of atheists do, can be a very effective way of remaining helpless when we should not be.
I need hardly mention the Republic's shamefully failed commitment to give 0.7 per cent of its GNP in development aid. Or issues of trade justice, or of debt cancellation, all of which will be increasingly relevant in the long days of recovery ahead.
For now, you ask where God is in all this. I dare to believe that God, if anywhere, is looking on those whose voices betray the courage of such a question with the same awed respect once accorded to Abraham, whose firm objections to a certain understanding of God's behaviour were unrelenting. If there is a glimpse of God anywhere it is in the face of one for whom life means facing death, and then facing life - which is sometimes harder - without false comforts.
The only God I will be able to recognise is one who will not deprive us of our humanity and who knows what anguish humanity often entails. But also, at times, what small acts of dignity and respect and courage. So, yes, let's look after each other. And never, ever accept answers unworthy of the God in whom we believe or might ever want to believe.
