Where was God During the Asian Tsunami?

An intellectual and a theological giant square off. In this corner, the great British historian Paul Johnson:

The Lisbon business, like the Big Wave of Boxing Day, makes me doubt not the existence of God but the common sense of those who claim to be leading thinkers. What had the deaths of 150,000 Lisboans to do with a fundamental question like the existence of God? They were going to die anyway. You might argue that the existence of death itself told us something about God, but not the acceleration of extinction in a few particular cases . . .

The notion, put forward by the Darwinian Central Committee, that the Indian Ocean disaster should persuade us to turn our intellectual backs on a God-directed universe, seems to be puerile. Why did God kill so many people? But God kills people all the time, millions every day. For that matter, God creates people, millions every day . . . Against a total of 150,000 or so, we have to remember that four billion have been added to the number of people in the world during the last 70 years. That 150,000 is only the tiniest ephemeral blip on the world’s demographic radar . . . We are asked to draw transcendental conclusions from this event because of its scale. But the scale, in terms of the magnitude of the world and its inhabitants, is puny, almost insignificant.

...The true theological or philosophical point to be made about the Indian Ocean wave — if, indeed, there is one — is that it is a timely reminder of the fragility of our existence in this world . . . And any reminder of the ultimate and total powerlessness of human beings, made always necessary by our arrogance and boasting, must be an act of God, and a very sensible and benevolent one too. It can also be argued . . . that such events make us think about transience and death, and our own preparedness for our extinction and the life to come. So the calamity — so distressing for those individually involved — was for humanity as a whole a profoundly moral occurrence, and an act of God performed for our benefit.

And in the other corner, the respected Eastern Orthodox theologian David Hart:

The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities" -- spiritual and terrestrial -- alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him--"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not" -- and his appearance within "this cosmos" is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature.

Whatever one makes of this story, it is no bland cosmic optimism. Yes, at the heart of the gospel is an ineradicable triumphalism, a conviction that the victory over evil and death has been won; but it is also a victory yet to come. As Paul says, all creation groans in anguished anticipation of the day when God's glory will transfigure all things. For now, we live amid a strife of darkness and light.

When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering -- when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's -- no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms -- knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against "fate," and that must do so until the end of days.

I agree with Johnson after listening to Johnson; Hart after listening to Hart.