Humans seem to almost
universally ask “why?” in the face of disasters. When wildfires, earthquakes,
and hurricanes strike, especially all in the same week, explanations and
scapegoating grow rampant. People of all sorts blame one factor or another for
such events, and all too often these analyses ascribe morals—or a perceived lack
thereof—as the driving forces behind them. I think that’s ridiculous.
Let me back up here first. It’s
fine to ask why a particular disaster occurred and examine the reasons behind
it. Sometimes there are pretty clear causes for disasters, or at least factors that
contribute to the severity of their effects on people.
Sometimes a wildfire is
started by a person, intentionally or accidentally. That’s worth knowing and
learning from so we can more effectively work to prevent such occurrences in
the future. Sometimes an earthquake brings far greater destruction than it
would in another area, due to substandard building codes and materials
available. That’s worth considering as we rebuild with an eye for mitigating
future destruction. Sometimes flooding is made worse by poor planning and
overdevelopment of low-lying swampland. That’s worth examining as we
reconstruct after a hurricane, or perhaps choose not to in some areas.
After all, when most of us ask
why a particular terrible event transpired, we don’t actually want to know the
reason for it as much as we want to know what to do about it. We want to know if
there’s any action we can take to prevent or minimize future iterations of such
disasters. And that’s wise. We need to take seriously the anthropogenic factors
like climate change and insufficient emergency preparedness measures that make
natural disasters worse. We would be foolish not to.
At the same time though it
strikes me as extremely unwise to ascribe moral causes to natural disasters or
anything else that is part of the natural, dynamic systems at play in this
world. When we look for sources of the events that bring suffering into our
lives, too often we hear that everything happens for a reason, that God has
some greater purpose for allowing or even causing painful events to unfold. I
believe such thinking is utterly false.
Natural events like wildfires,
earthquakes, hurricanes, or cancer simply define the extremes of different
dynamic systems working in God’s world. We could argue about whether or not
they are a result of sin in general corrupting the systems God created,
throwing them out of balance and allowing for greater extremes than God
originally intended, but that’s incidental to my point here. Either way,
hurricanes are a part of the ever-changing weather systems currently at work on
this planet. Either way, cancer is just an extreme manifestation of DNA
mutation and cell division, both of which are good and necessary for adaptation,
growth, and healing. To say that any natural process somehow responds to the
morality of the people they affect is patently absurd.
It’s true that human actions
can influence the effects of events like wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes,
and even cancer. How and where we build or the amount of carcinogens we expose
ourselves to can certainly impact these things and reduce or exacerbate the
suffering they can cause. But at the same time, no amount of preparedness can entirely
eliminate the possibility that these things will still cause human suffering.
Natural processes are by definition beyond human control. They don’t respond to
our actions. They just happen, and our morals have nothing to do with them.
