We shouldn’t let disasters undermine our faith in God

George Ricker
University UMC,
Austin

My View

The Dec. 26 tsunami in the Indian Ocean—as well as many natural disasters across the years—has elicited the question: “Where is God?”
A Feb. 1 article in the Austin American-Statesman focused on this question. James H. Dee, a classics professor at the University of Texas, entitled his article “Should disasters undermine our faith? Yes.”
Of course Mr. Dee is correct if the reality we call God is a “deus ex machina”—who every now and then enters the human scene to prevent disaster. Mr. Dee writes, “either God does not exist—or he does not care.”
With an interventionist God, omnipotent and omniscient, we would be left with such a dichotomy. Natural disasters undermine such a faith.
What Mr. Dee overlooks is that contemporary theology—and, yes, philosophy as well as some science—focuses on a different concept of God. The ground of being (or being itself) is self-limited. That makes such terms as omnipotent and omniscient irrelevant.
The evolutionary process continues with natural forces operating through time that can here and there run amuck. The reality behind it all (what physicist Freeman Dyson calls Mind) is within the process but not managing it.
Instead what we have is Presence—or what could be called a force-field of love—that is available as the object of faith.
Mr. Dee assumes a concept of God that resembles a puppeteer who can at will manipulate the strings to make things happen or not happen. That indeed leaves us either wondering whether such a reality exists or whether such a God cares.
Facing earthquakes, tsunamis, mud slides, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc., could consequently undermine faith.
My point is that the presupposition about the nature of God behind Mr. Dee’s dichotomy is wrong. The object of a more mature faith is itself growing and changing (process theology) in an evolutionary process. That object of faith is our Ultimate Companion in the struggle to live in a world that is still becoming.
Such a faith offers us possibilities for environmental managing, community building and compassionate responding to humanity’s vulnerability in the process of an ever emerging world.
The object of faith is not a being that exists somewhere but a Presence that is everywhere urging us on toward future possibilities. Those possibilities make the human enterprise challenging and exciting.
Our world may not be the “best of all possible worlds” (humanly speaking). But it does give us freedom and does make possible compassion, caring and love. Those qualities originate not in ourselves but in the One who is in everything and in whom everything is.