Who is to Blame?: Disasters, nature, and acts of God

By Robert White FRS

How can an omnipotent God of love allow disasters? Bob White, a leading geophysicist, tackles one of the biggest conundrums in Christian thinking. He combines a profound knowledge of the science behind dramatic natural events with thorough research into their impact, and underpins it with a carefully reasoned theological response. Examining each type in turn, he illuminates the way in which human factors turn natural processes, without which the earth would be sterile and uninhabitable, into disasters: how population growth, widespread inequality, foolish farming and building practices, and climate change all contribute, exacerbating heat waves, famines, and droughts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Release date: Jun 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9780857214744

Robert White FRS

Professor Robert (Bob) White is Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1994. He is Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. He is the author of Who is to Blame and What Good is God? by Monarch.

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Preface

We often talk of disasters of biblical proportions when images from some particularly horrible disaster hit our television screens and newspapers. We tend to reserve the phrase for the devastation caused by natural processes such as floods, storms, volcanic eruptions, or earthquakes. Subconsciously, perhaps, we see these as acts of God, as disasters which humans could do little or nothing to prevent. In one respect that is correct: if we live in a world made by the creator God, then, as the Bible makes clear, God is ultimately sovereign over everything that happens. He holds the universe, as it were, in the palm of his hand. However, in another respect the term acts of God for these disasters is wide of the mark, because as I document in this book it is almost always the decisions and actions of humans which turn an otherwise beneficial natural process into a disaster.

There is another ironic failure in talking about particular disasters today as being of biblical proportions. In reality the global population has increased so rapidly that, in sheer numbers, far more people die nowadays from disasters than did during biblical times when the global population was much lower. The global population now is over 50 times larger than when most of the Bible was written. On current trends, it is likely that there will be an earthquake in the not-too-distant future that will kill over a million people at a stroke, far more than any of the natural disasters recorded by the Bible.

Who then should we blame? Is God to blame for allowing, or even for causing the disasters which scream out to us as being deeply unfair and unjust to those affected? Or are people, often nameless, faceless, unknown persons, to blame when as a consequence of their decisions or actions numerous other people die – maybe because builders ignored building codes, or corrupt officials denied resources to the most vulnerable, or those profligately burning oil, coal, and gas in high-income countries indirectly caused increased intensities of droughts or floods elsewhere in the world as a result of global climate change?

Perhaps most poignantly of all, what are we to make of the suffering caused by disasters, whoever was responsible for them? How can we reconcile God’s purposes for a world which he proclaimed in Genesis 1:31 to be very good with the untold suffering of millions of individuals in his world as a result of disasters?

In the first half of this book I outline the ways in which natural processes make this a fertile, fruitful world in which to live. Indeed, without them the earth would be a barren, infertile place without the possibility of human life. I go on to discuss the main things we consider to be natural disasters and show that for many of them they are not natural at all – in fact, we might even go so far as to call them unnatural disasters, because human agency has turned an otherwise good feature of the natural world into a disaster.

In the second half of the book I discuss some biblical perspectives on the occurrence of disasters and of suffering. There is a long history in Christendom of trying to make sense of the suffering that is the frequent lot of humankind. I review the main suggestions. Then I turn to the recorded experiences of three people in the Bible to see what we might learn from them: Joseph, Job, and Jesus. Each offers complementary insights into how we might deal with disasters and suffering in our lives.

Disasters bring out the best and the worst in people. I am writing this six days after Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines with unprecedented ferocity and record wind speeds. The main television news tonight showed pictures of soldiers with guns in armoured vehicles moving onto the streets of Tacloban to stop looting. After several days with no relief supplies at all, with water and power cut off, it was perhaps understandable that grocery stores were being raided for food and water. But how to account for the widespread theft of electrical goods in the midst of the chaos, the grief, and the suffering – items that could not even be plugged in? Then the camera switched its focus. It showed a church that had opened its doors to provide shelter and basic food to 2,000 homeless people. The parishioners walked in, grieving and helpless, intoned the reporter. The pews where they once knelt to worship are now the spaces they call home. The report then described the priest wandering round in a T-shirt as like the good shepherd with his flock. The priest’s comment was that The church is the church for the poor. So we not only do the sacraments, but we have to save lives. It was a picture of practical care by Christian people that has been repeated untold thousands of times over the years. When the church is working properly, it is doing just as this church did: being a means under God’s providence for rescuing lives both physically and spiritually.

This is a book for all those who, like me, long for the time when this beautiful world, which appears so often to be out of joint, to be broken, will be restored to the fullness of life that is promised by God and sealed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The certain Christian hope is that in the fullness of time God will make all things new, will renew this world and make it the place he always intended it to be, before it was spoilt by human rebellion, by sin. It will be a place with no more tears or mourning or death. It will be a place where God will dwell with his people. In the meantime, Jesus announced that this new kingdom of God has already been inaugurated with his coming to earth.

We are called to live in this world in the light of Christ’s example and of the new creation: to seek with all our scientific, technological, medical, financial, social, and personal abilities to remedy some of that brokenness that human sinfulness has caused and continues to cause. God has graciously given us an orderly world in which to live, one where the consistency of natural processes makes it possible to understand them and to use them for the good of humankind. Where disasters are concerned, something can always be done to help prevent them happening again or to relieve the burden of suffering when they do. It is my hope that this book will go a small way towards encouraging each of us to play our part in doing just that.

In my professional life as a geophysicist I have been privileged to study at first hand many of the phenomena discussed in this book, particularly earthquakes and volcanoes. I have been impressed by their immense power, but also by the way it is possible to begin to understand their workings using the tools of science and technology. I am grateful to the many people, students and colleagues, who have helped me on that journey. I am also thankful to numerous friends who have taught me, have sharpened my thinking, and have gently helped me to understand better what the Bible says. For comments on material in this book I am particularly grateful to Colin and Janet Abbiss, Roger Abbott, Christopher Ash, Denis Alexander, Colin Bell, Sam Berry, Tina Biggs, Derek Fraser, Rodney Holder, Hilary Marlow, Jonathan Moo, Mark Smith, Meric Srokosz, and Mark White, among many others.

I

Setting the Scene

It might come as a surprise to many people that the number of people affected by disasters (defined as requiring basic survival needs such as food, water, shelter, sanitation, and immediate medical assistance) has risen steadily over the past century. The number of reported disasters (events that overwhelm local capacity, necessitating external assistance) has also increased enormously over the past century. There are around 400 reported disasters affecting over 200 million people every year. The increase in reported numbers of disasters since the mid-twentieth century is perhaps less surprising because it may largely be due to improvements in global communications – we live in a global village where mobile phone pictures and video footage are often streamed out to the rest of the world even as the disaster develops.

These increases in the impact and reach of disasters are occurring despite humankind becoming technologically more advanced and despite our improved understanding of the science of the physical world in which we live. The primary reason is the rapid increase in global population – more than quadrupling from 1,600 million at the start of the twentieth century to over 7,000 million today. So there are now more people at risk in the world. Much of the current population growth is also occurring in regions that happen to be most prone to disasters. In Chapter 3 I discuss population growth in more detail, and the factors that are driving it.

(top) Number of reported natural disasters and (bottom) number of people reported as affected by natural disasters over the period 1900–2011. (Data from the International Disaster Database of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) www.emdat.be/natural-disasters-trends.)

But first, in Chapter 1, I will examine where in the world disasters are occurring, and who they are affecting. We will see that it is predominantly the poor and the disadvantaged who suffer from disasters. This is true in both high- and low-income countries. It will also become clear in Part II of this book that human actions and decisions, whether by intent or neglect, frequently hugely magnify the size and effects of these disasters. As Chapter 2 examines, natural processes such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, and the natural greenhouse effect are what makes this world a fertile place in which to live. Without them it would become a dead, sterile world and no one would be here to see it. But it is people who so often change a natural process into a disaster.

1

The Problem of Natural Disasters

Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to reveal a social disaster.

Jim Wallis¹

What is nature itself, but the art of God, or God’s method of acting in the material world?

John Wesley²

We live in a world where the same natural processes that make it habitable can turn round and bite us, killing thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people at a stroke. Disasters pull us up sharp and make us face head-on the hard questions of life and death. For atheists and agnostics they challenge humankind’s hubris that we can control our environment – or that our cleverness can keep us from suffering. For Christians they raise the hard question of why an all-powerful, all-loving God allows such things to happen. Disasters bring into sharp focus the relationship between the creator God, his creation, and people made in his image.

In this book I will often use the term natural disasters as shorthand to distinguish them from disasters caused directly by identifiable human evil, such as the Nazi Holocaust of the twentieth century. However, as we shall see in Part II, the deaths caused by natural disasters can often be attributed almost in their entirety to actions taken by people, which turned a natural process into a disaster. In that respect there is nothing natural about them.

The fourfold increase in global population over the past 100 years is one of the major factors which means that disasters affect more people than ever before. Exacerbating this increase in the total number of people is the migration of more than half the world’s population to cities. A disaster that hits a megacity is likely to be far worse than one affecting dispersed and self-sufficient rural communities. Furthermore, as population pressures increase, so people are forced to live in more marginal and often more dangerous areas. Generally this affects poorer people most: many of the people who died in Sri Lanka in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami were living close to the seashore in areas that were zoned by the authorities as unsuitable for housing – they should not have been living there, but they had nowhere else to go.

Likewise, even in the technologically advanced nation of the USA, the 1,836 people who died in New Orleans in 2005 as a result of flooding during Hurricane Katrina were mainly the infirm and the poorer people living in undesirable, swampy, low-lying areas. The evacuation plan called for people to drive north away from the coast. But without cars they could not leave the city as the storm approached, and the people in charge did not provide buses or other transport to move them away.³

Loss of life is not the only consequence of disasters. For many of the poorest people who lost their houses and were resettled elsewhere, Hurricane Katrina caused long-term and often permanent disruption of family and community ties, of the relational social fabric around which their lives had centred. Five years after the disaster, the poor were disproportionately worse off than their higher-income compatriots. Low-income black workers were seven times more likely to lose their pre-Katrina jobs than higher-income white workers. The poorer neighbourhoods suffered the slowest recovery of basic amenities such as schools, shops, and petrol stations. Even now, nearly a decade later, some poor districts have recovered only a quarter of their population compared to the wealthy Central Business District, which has increased by more than 50 per cent compared with before the hurricane.⁴ Despite our technologically rich world, the poor remain vulnerable and not infrequently the cause is failing human institutions and social organization.

Nor does a technologically advanced nation always protect its residents from disasters. The massive March 2011 earthquake that hit Japan caused an estimated 19,000 fatalities. But only a tiny fraction of those were killed by the earthquake shaking itself because Japanese buildings are constructed to very high standards of earthquake resistance. Almost all the casualties were from the water carried in by the tsunami, which was far higher than any in living memory. Ironically enough, there is a lot of evidence that many people put their trust in the tsunami protection sea walls and actually stayed around to watch the incoming sea instead of fleeing to higher ground or safe buildings while they had time to do so. When the tsunami overtopped the sea walls, many people died unnecessarily – there had been sufficient warnings to enable them to escape, had they taken notice of them.

Fatalities from natural disasters since the mid-twentieth century have split approximately equally between those caused directly by geological factors (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and mudslides), and those related to the climate (such as droughts, floods, storms, and heatwaves).⁵ Figure 1.1 shows a map of people who were killed by all disasters during the 30-year period 1975–2004. This map has been distorted from our normal view of the world by making the area of each territory proportional to the number of people killed by disasters in that region.

Perhaps more surprising still is that the most deadly killers are not the spectacular volcanic eruptions (generally they give plenty of warning so there is time to evacuate), nor the sudden earthquakes (which cannot be predicted), but something as banal as floods. Floods affect more people than all other disasters combined. Flood deaths are highest in South East and eastern Asia and in South America (Figure 1.2). But the high-income countries are not spared either, and it is a shock which makes national headline news in Britain, which suffers none of the other disasters like volcanoes, earthquakes, droughts, or famines, when people die from floods.

The last of our distorted maps (Figure 1.3), shows the proportion of the population in each territory living in absolute poverty, defined here as less than US$2 per day at 2005 prices. That accounted