Two headline-grabbing catastrophic natural disasters—the cyclone in Myanmar and the earthquake in China—once again have prompted the “Why?” question, as in, “Why does God allow these things to happen?” Some might even phrase the question this way: “Why does God cause these disasters?”

After all, we do refer to these kinds of natural events as “Acts of God.” Even insurance companies use the term to designate major natural catastrophes: hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis and the like. Is that accurate? Does God act to bring them about? Does He actually cause natural evil?

While I would never have the audacity to offer an answer to this vexing question, I think there is approach or two that may help us deal in some small measure with the unfathomable misery and suffering caused by such natural occurrences.

It goes to the heart of the problem of evil, which includes both moral evil (the bad stuff that people do) and also natural evil (the bad stuff that people do not do).

Just as the problem of moral evil is sometimes addressed with what is known as the “free will” approach, the problem of natural evil can be addressed with what is known as the “free process” approach. I’m not a philosopher (nor do I play one on TV), so my explanations for these two approaches will be overly-simplistic. Still, I hope they prove to be useful. (Perhaps tamb, our resident ConversantLife.com philosopher, can go into more depth on these approaches…assuming he agrees that they offer a useful perspective!)

The “free will” approach to the problem of moral evil is based on the premise that God cannot make free moral agents who can never go wrong. This statement is part of an argument developed by the philosopher Alvin Plantinga. It goes like this:

a. A world with moral good is better than a world with no moral good.
b. Only free agents can do moral good.
c. Even God cannot create free moral agents who can never go wrong.
d. Therefore, it is not within God’s power to create a world with moral good but no moral evil.

At the heart of this argument is the idea that God cannot create truly free moral agents who do not have the freedom to do wrong. If they didn’t have that freedom, they wouldn’t be free moral agents. To put it another way, says Plantinga, even an all-powerful God “cannot forcibly prevent sin without removing our freedom.”

The “free process” approach to the problem of natural evil is a variation of this free will approach. It goes something like this: Just as God cannot make free moral agents who can never go wrong, God cannot make a dynamic world in which natural evil can never occur. Why? Because in order for free moral agents to exercise free moral choices, you need a dynamic world where natural elements interact in a dynamic way. If the natural world were static, free moral choices would not be possible.

In a dynamic world, God grants a kind of “qualified self-sufficiency” to nature to operate according to the laws He designed. What this means is that even though God is sovereign (nothing happens outside of His control), He created an open system of causes and effects. (An example of this is gravity. If you jump off a cliff—the cause—you will feel gravity’s effect when you hit bottom.)

This doesn’t mean that God can’t intervene in nature supernaturally. He can and does, primarily because God is supernatural—or above nature. God is not nature (or Mother Nature), nor is He bound by natural law. When God intervenes in nature supernaturally, it’s called a miracle.

In Scripture we have several examples of God acting miraculously in nature. Noah’s flood may be the most spectacular example, but the most personal incident occurred when Jesus personally calmed the stormy sea by simply saying, “Silence, be still.” This scared the you-know-what out of His disciples, who happened to be in the boat during the storm. “Who is this man?” they asked each other. “Even the wind and waves obey him!” (Mark 4:39-41). They weren’t terrified so much of the miraculous act as they were of the realization that they were in the presence of the living God.

So how does this help us deal with catastrophic natural events that wipe out hundreds of thousands of people? I’ve got some thoughts on this, and I will roll some of those out in my next blog. Meanwhile, let me know what you think. Does this approach help, or is of no practical value? I’d love to hear from you!