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Notes -
Yes, I know what theodicy is. I’ve thought a lot about it too, and I’ve looked into many of the various answers which sincere Christians have offered as solutions. Maybe, though, the fact that over the course of 2,000+ years of Christianity (and, of course, centuries of Judaism before that) so many people have had to come up with so many different answers points to something: None of their answers have been very good! None of them have made much sense, or satisfactorily answered the problem at hand without highlighting important contradictions within the logic of the faith.
The core dilemma here is that Christianity is very explicitly dedicated to, among others, two key claims about God: 1. He is benevolent, loving, and invested not only in the future of humanity as a whole, but in the well-being and spiritual life of each individual living human. 2. He intervenes, at least subtly, in the lives of individuals, to effectuate positive life outcomes for them.Those two claims are what make theodicy so incredibly difficult for Christianity specifically to deal with.
Paganism has no problem explaining why something like a natural disaster happens. The various gods and supernatural entities are capricious, they’re in competition with each other, they frequently act wrathful or even tyrannical, and humans’ primary relationship with them is transactional. We propitiate the gods by offering them praise and things of value, so that we can remain in their favor and persuade them to intervene helpfully on our behalf, and to not curse us or slaughter us. This view of the order of the world leaves much to be desired emotionally; it offers little in the way of a message of hope, love, inspiration, and salvation. But if nothing else, it makes it very easy to explain the wanton suffering which so many humans experience — and not always at the hands of each other — without producing any cracks at the heart of the religion.
Judaism, too, famously has a certain fatalism and moral ambivalence about God. The Old Testament, as you note, features many episodes in which God acts wrathfully and in a way which, if a human ruler acted the same way, we would recognize as tyrannical or even monstrous. (Of course, Judaism also offers an explanation: We deserved it then, and we’ll probably deserve it again in the future. God doesn’t especially love the Jews, even if they are his chosen people, and he’ll gladly throw any individual Jews into a shredder if they disappoint him — and that’s to say nothing of what he will do, or instruct the Jews to do on his behalf, to the gentiles!)
In contrast, I think Christianity is really at a loss when dealing with natural disasters of this nature, though. Theodicy is uniquely corrosive to the doctrines of Christianity, which is why so many of its theologians have obsessed about it, and why they’ve reached for such contradictory answers. Of the three explanations you put forward, at least two of them are wildly insufficient to deal with a problem of the magnitude of the example I offered. In fact, one of them —
— doesn’t address natural disasters at all! Sure, I can totally understand and appreciate the idea that a world in which humans have free will is necessarily a world in which humans have the power to murder each other, to make war on each other, to firebomb each other’s cities, etc. That has nothing to do with a natural disaster, though. Whether or not humans have free will would have made no difference in the outcome of an earthquake or tsunami; again, the only “free will” any human exercised was the “choice” to happen to be in its path. (Not a choice at all, of course, since nobody could have predicted it nor seen it coming.) It isn’t even a “problem of evil”, since “evil” implies intention, and a tsunami has none. Any supernatural entity which did intentionally send that tsunami toward blameless human habitation would indeed be evil, and any supposedly benevolent supernatural entity which could have prevented it but chose otherwise is, at best, ineffectual.
As for one of your other proposed explanations —
— you must recognize why non-Christians find this answer so exasperating. Suppose I’m a child, and I break some sort of rule. To punish me and to teach me a lesson, my father strangles one of my siblings to death in front of me. Obviously if a human father did this, we would universally recognize it as psychopathic. No benevolent person acting out of love would do so. So, if the Christian God did indeed intentionally make the tsunami happen, in order to teach people a lesson, what does it actually mean to say that this same God “loves us”?
That leaves your third explanation — the one you put first, which may be seen as implying you lean toward it:
I mean, isn’t this getting pretty dangerously close to paganism, or at best Henotheism? There are many powerful supernatural entities at work in the world, and God is, at best, only arguably the strongest? He can intervene in people’s lives sometimes, to help with relatively quotidian issues — you can pray to him before an important job interview, and maybe he’ll subtly help that interview go well for you — but he can’t reliably do anything about the really big stuff if there’s some other entity, like Satan, who’s directly working against him. This is, again, satisfactory to me as a plausible explanation for how the world actually works, but it seems to be in contradiction with some of Christianity’s stronger claims about God’s omnipotence.
I want to be clear that I’m not saying any of this because I hate Christianity. I’m not some fire-breathing atheist like I was when I was younger. I would like very much if Christianity were true, and if someone could provide to me an answer to these questions which I could psychologically wrap my head around. I’ve prayed to God myself, and even explicitly to Jesus Christ. I’ve no idea if any of these prayers produced a tangible effect on the world, although I do know that they produced some level of internal comfort within me.
Still, though, the 2004 tsunami, and then Hurricane Katrina the very next year, made a very profound effect on me. Seeing that level of wanton suffering (some of the footage of people being swallowed by the floods is still seared into my brain) delivered to people who had done nothing particularly wrong, while so many individuals who were so much more blameworthy continued to prosper unharmed, put theodicy at the very front of my mind at the very point in my life in which I was first starting to ponder these religious questions. Christians seem two-faced about the issue. When confronted directly about it they’ll claim that God isn’t as omnipotent as we think, and therefore he simply can’t be expected to step in and save people from things like this; in their own lives, though, they routinely pray for God to intervene on their behalf in issues which have, comparatively, so much less importance.
@FCfromSSC claimed below that Christians do not expect God to make any changes to anyone’s appointed hour of death, but this is directly belied by Christians’ actions. God can help you get a raise at work, but he can’t help you not get hit by a car? Christians pray for each others’ safety and health all the time. They pray before surgeries, before flights, before risky endeavors, etc. If they don’t expect these prayers to do anything, then is God no more than a therapist? Just there to be a sounding board for whatever’s making us anxious, to help us order our internal lives and soothe ourselves? This seems highly unsatisfactory compared to the loftier claims which the Bible seems, to me, to make about God’s capabilities.
What do you make of Scott's answer in God's Answer To Job, out of curiosity? It's the only one that's ever really convinced me, though it hasn't made me a believer.
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@FCfromSSC claimed below that Christians do not expect God to make any changes to anyone’s appointed hour of death...
I claimed that prayer doesn't make one's hour of death predictable, and I think the difference between the two formulations is substantive.
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First off, I’m not worried about getting “dangerously close” to Henotheism or other issues. I’m Orthodox, we have a pretty relaxed view about the omnipotence of God compared to Catholics, or really the ability for us to know much about God beyond what Christ directly told us at all.
In regards to a God of love allowing evil - yes! That’s the fundamental paradox of the world! The thing is, this idea that God is love comes from direct mystical experience, and of course the revelation of Christ & the apostles.
It’s not even limited to Christianity. Many sects of Buddhism also posit a sort of “loving kindness” quality inherent to the Tao, or the Ground of Being. Yes it’s confusing as to why a God of Love would allow evil.
My personal answer is something like - suffering is inherently voluntary, whether we understand that or not. With the right mindset or view, this world would be Paradise, despite all the limitations. You see this in the great mystics and Saints who take the worst outcomes like torture, martyrdom, etc with a smile on their faces.
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