The disasters are always different and often devastating. But the questions they raise are hauntingly familiar.
In the days since Super Typhoon Haiyan swept through the Philippines on Thursday, survivors are frantically searching for lost family members and international aid groups are springing into action.
Officials say the death toll may rise to 10,000 in the heavily Catholic country.
How can we make sense of such senseless death and destruction?
Was God in the whirlwind itself, or present only in the hands helping to provide food, water and shelter?
These questions may not be new, but we keep asking them, perhaps because the answers remain so elusive.
For many Americans, a paradox sits at the heart of their thinking about natural disasters. According to a survey taken after 2011’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan, most Americans (56%) believe that God is control of everything.
But more Americans blame hurricanes, earthquakes and other storms on global warming (58%) than on an angry and punishing deity (38%), according to a 2011 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute.
“These kind of questions about God being in control and there simultaneously being suffering are the kind of things that keep seminarians up at night,” institute CEO Robert P. Jones said in 2011.
“They’re thorny theological issues.”
The Bible’s Psalm 107 says that “For (God) commands, and raises the stormy wind, which lifts up the waves thereof. … He turns rivers into a wilderness, and the water springs into dry ground.”
But, as the poll shows, most Americans have moved past the idea that God causes natural disasters, wrote Stephen Prothero, a frequent CNN contributor, in a 2011 column.
“When it comes to earthquakes and hurricanes, our authorities are geologists and meteorologists,” Prothero said as he rode out Hurricane Irene on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. “Most of us interpret these events not through the rumblings of the biblical prophet Jeremiah or the poetry of the Book of Revelation but through the scientific truths of air pressure and tectonic plates.”
For atheists, storms like Haiyan are proof that God doesn’t exist, author and activist Sam Harris said.
“Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn’t care to, or he doesn’t exist. God is either impotent, evil or imaginary,” Harris said after Japan’s tsunami. “Take your pick, and choose wisely.”
God may or may not be in withering storms, but many religious leaders say they sense a divine presence in the aftermath, as people across the world mobilize to lend a hand.
Rabbi Harold Kushner is one of the most famous names in the realm of theodicy, a branch of theology that tries to explain the unexplainable: why a good God would allow bad things to happen.
After Japan’s tsunami, Kushner called nature “an equal-opportunity destroyer,” making no distinctions between sinners and saints.
But Kushner, author of the bestselling book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” said he sees God’s hand in the resilience of people whose lives have been destroyed and in the “goodness and generosity” of strangers who donate and pray for the survivors.
That still leaves a tricky question, though: Why do humans suffer, sometimes terribly, in the first place?
There’s no good answer, says the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and best-selling author.
“Each person has to come to grips with that,” Martin said. “It’s not as if some magic answer can be found. But the idea of God suffering along with us can be very helpful.”
Muslims, on the other hand, see stormy trials as tests from God, said Sayyid Syeed, national director of the Islamic Society of North America’s Office of Interfaith and Community Alliances.
“Muslims believe that God tests those he loves, and these tragedies also serve as a reminder to the rest of us to remain grateful to God for all our blessings and cognizant that we must support those in need,” Syeed said.
Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh, whose native country remains in Haiyan’s path, said such storms remind us that our lives are impermanent and the importance of treasuring each moment.
“This is the best that we can do for those who have died: We can live in such a way that they can feel they are continuing to live in us, more mindfully, more profoundly, more beautifully, tasting every minute of life available to us, for them,” Hanh said.
Stephen Prothero, Jessica Ravitz and Eric Marrapodi contributed to this report.
Daniel Burke | CNN
