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Included in a mass burial in India, 8-year-old Anthony Praveen shocked hospital workers when he suddenly sat up and opened he eyes. Though saved from the tsunami when it hit the town of Vailankanni, India, and saved again from premature burial, Praveen's story is not seen as a glimmer of hope amid the tragedy. According to The Washington Times, "His father, a daily-wage laborer from Madras, had taken his wife and two children on a pilgrimage to the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of Health in Vailankanni, a shrine famed for its healing powers, [Praveen's] grandmother explained." The only other survivor in the family, she said the family made an offering at the church, went to the sea to bathe, and were swept away by the tsunami.

"They went to offer their hair to [Mother] Vailankanni," said the grandmother. "In return, they lost their lives to the sea. I don't know why [Mother] gave this rude blow to us. How can I take care of this boy and his education now?"

Did God cause the tsunami?
Supernatural causation and divine culpability are the hottest debates coming out of the Indian Ocean devastation. Man-made destruction seems easier to understand and explain than indiscriminate natural havoc. That's why there is so much more discussion of theodicy in newspapers around the globe than after 9/11. We don't blame Abel's death on God; we blame it on Cain. But it's much easier for people, like Job's friends, to blame the death of Job's family on someone.

One commentator says it's God's fault, not that he exists. "God, if there is a God, should be ashamed of himself. The sheer enormity of the Asian tsunami disaster, the death, destruction, and havoc it has wreaked, the scale of the misery it has caused, must surely test the faith of even the firmest believer," says Allan Laing, in The Glasgow Herald in Scotland says, "I hope I'm right that there is no God. For, if there were, then he'd have to shoulder the blame. In my book, he would be as guilty as sin and I'd want nothing to do with him. A death toll of 140,000 (and still rising) is one helluva price to pay to let the rest of us feel his presence and allow humankind to indulge in a redemptive exercise of mass compassion."

Kenneth Nguyen, writing in The Age of Melbourne, Australia agrees. "Responsibility for the tsunami must be sheeted home to God … . the tsunami has highlighted just how unpalatable the idea of an interventionist God ultimately is."

If believing in a God that allows tragedy is difficult, Nguyen will have more difficulty understanding a God the uses tsunamis to punish. Some in India are blaming the tragedy on Christians and the recent arrest of a Hindu leader. "In India—a country often seen as a spiritual battleground, where religions fight over the souls of the poor and dispossessed—some conservative Hindus have used the tsunami to criticize both a Hindu leader's arrest and the presence of Christian missionaries in India. Meanwhile," reports Beliefnet, "evangelical Christian groups may proselytize as they help tsunami victims."

But most Westerners have quit believing in a God that causes or prevents natural disasters. "To profess that sort of belief is to betray oneself as a captive to a fundamentalist mind-set that has elevated faith above reason in apprehending natural phenomena," says Scot Lehigh of The Boston Globe.

Michael Novak, on the National Review Online, says that those who blame or get angry with God are angry with a God they profess not to believe in. Those who ask, "How could God let this happen?" are not seeking an answer. Rather, it is an attempt "to prove that he has been smarter all along, and to watch me have to surrender as he has surrendered."

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January (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49