appendix

In my earlier post I responded too quickly to the excerpt below. But on reading the full article I find that the argument that Mr. Hart makes is still far from satisfactory. E.g., he says:

    "Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God."

    As applied to the present question, this seems to suggest that the geophysical processes which gave rise to the tsunamis are the result of some primordial sin (whether identified with a literal interpretation of Gen.3 or not) rather than of the fundamental interactions & their laws which God created in the beginning. Such a argument is highly problematic. It is "insufferably fabulous" not only to non-Christians but to a lot of Christians.

    A more serious problem is that while Hart refers to the Incarnation, he makes no reference to the cross as God's participation in the suffering of the world. While that doesn't provide a neat solution to the theodicy question, I'm convinced that anything said about the problem of suffering that doesn't appeal to the cross is worth little.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Steven M Smith
  To: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Monday, January 03, 2005 10:13 AM
  Subject: What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami?

  Here is an interesting article from the Opinion Journal in the WashPost On-line:
  Link: http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006097

  Tremors of Doubt
  What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami?

  Quote from article ... "When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering--when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's--no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms--knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against "fate," and that must do so until the end of days."

  _____________
  Steven M. Smith, Geologist, U.S. Geological Survey
  Box 25046, M.S. 973, DFC, Denver, CO 80225
  Office: (303)236-1192, Fax: (303)236-3200
  Email: smsmith@usgs.gov
  -USGS Nat'l Geochem. Database NURE HSSR Web Site-
   http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1997/ofr-97-0492/
Received on Mon Jan 3 11:06:35 2005