Amoral Disasters

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.