New Orleans and the Problem of Evil

Well it seems that the second hurricane to hit New Orleans was not, thankfully, as bad as the first one. Even so, when I first heard it on the news, my instant reaction – from which I restrained myself – was to turn to the Christian friend I was sitting with and ask her how she can believe in a god who would do this. The city was devastated, picked over by parasitic corporate interests and then, it seemed, was due to be devastated again. It strikes me as a logical impossibility that a God who is both all loving and all powerful could do this. Surely we might conclude that God either lacked the power to stop this suffering or chose not to? The inevitable theistic recourse here is to the Irenaen Theodicy.

Yet does this make God seem any better? He watches and waits, suffering as he watches us suffer, yet all the time steeling himself, lest he forget that if he interferes, we won’t make the free choice to love him. His desire to have us be moral beings, possessed of the goodness that results from having to make moral decisions, takes priority over any concern he might feel about our fear and our doubt at the apparent senselessness of it all. I’m a lot more open to this than I used to be. Even so, it still suggests a God valuing an abstract developmental goal over the alleviation of the concrete reality of human misery. I guess it’s the same bit of me that feels guilty when I continually pick up my dwarf hamsters in the hope that it will socialise them (for what is essentially my own amusement) even if the process scares them. The Irenaen Theodicy makes me feel as if God is like a dwarf hamster owner who keeps doing this, however rather than simply scaring them, he routinely damages them and/or kills them in the pursuit of proper socialisation. Obviously, as any pet owner knows, socialisation is a worthy and pleasing goal yet surely there’s a point – such as, perhaps, a second hurricane - where it all becomes a bit too much? Where the sheer amount of needless suffering being inflicted renders it immoral?