Where was God when the earthquake flattened Haiti?

Taking on John Humphrys on the BBC flagship Today programme is not something for the faint hearted. Usually, this is not a description I would use of the Anglican Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, but last week he found himself being quizzed at length about the massive loss of life in Haiti. "Why did God allow this to happen?" Not an unexpected question, but always one to instil acute difficulty in most believers. "Christians find their answer in a God who comes alongside us in the figure of Jesus," retorted Dr Sentamu. He quoted a rabbi who had been asked where God was in the Holocaust and the answer came back: "God was being blasphemed" - just as he was in the disfigurement and carnage of the collapsed slums of Port-au-Prince.

The next day, it was the turn of Giles Fraser, the new canon chancellor at St Paul's. A slightly easier assignment his, two and half minutes of Thought For the Day (and no interjections from a Grand Inquisitor). His approach was much more defensive: there is nothing we can say or do save light a candle and pray for the victims. Any intellectual explanation, any theodicy, attempting to reconcile suffering and the existence of God, would backfire and fall prey to a repeat of Voltaire's vicious satire on the views of Leibniz. His assertion that we live in the best of all possible worlds was mercilessly pilloried in Candide through the character of Dr Pangloss, whose insensitive cheerfulness and optimism following earthquakes and a litany of natural disasters made him a figure of contempt.

Is Fraser right? Is this the best we can do? A muted trilogy of candles, prayer and silence? I am a big fan of all three, but rather better at the first than numbers two and three, I must confess. Yet I maintain there is more we can say. I recall my faith almost collapsing in tatters in my late teens at university when my raw cradle Catholic belief system was exposed to questions like: "How can you believe in God when young babies die of leukaemia?" I parroted the usual stuff: inscrutable mystery, Original Sin, and "God uses our suffering to bring us closer to Him" - all more likely to usher in contempt for faith, not excite respect for it and bolster enquiry. In truth, years passed, and these were always questions I dreaded.

Then, in 2005, Channel 4 asked me to make a two hour programme, Tsunami: Where Was God? I met people in the Indian Ocean region who had lost everything. Some lost their faith totally, yet others emerged stronger, reminded of their ultimate powerlessness and contingency on forces beyond our control and comprehension. The climax of the programme came at a conference on God and evil attended by scientists at the papal palace at Castel Gandolfo. Some of those gathered quoted the biblical passage "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit". Others widened our horizons to eastern influences and pointed out that in the Hindu god Shiva, who was both the deity of creation and destruction, one found a similar dynamic. But how did this apply to the horrors of the tsunami? A number of those gathered mounted what one might call a "creation defence" for God. Without the movement of tectonic plates, land would not have been forced up above the seas and the planet's surface would be a boggy swamp, totally unsuitable for complex life like our own. The grinding plates had led to a recycling of the earth's crust - essential for the advance of agriculture by ploughing up vital new minerals from the depths below and making the land essentially more fertile. What works well for the system as a whole, however, often appears cruel to those affected at the point of impact. Wrong time, wrong place certainly, but "evil"? What certainly is evil are the attempts by those, like Pat Robertson, to make crude religious capital out of events in the Carribean by suggesting that Haiti had paid a price for a past riddled with Voodoo after throwing off the yoke of the French in 1804.

I would never invoke the intellectual arguments about a "creation defence" for God with those whose lives had been directly afflicted. They would appear crass and insensitive. But there are others of faith, several stages removed, who are troubled and disturbed by what they see on the television screens and I think we should speak out as best we can. Sir John Polkinghorne, the great Christian physicist, has articulated his view that in a material world, whenever you cast a light you cannot but help cast a shadow. "Why can't we have all the good bits in creation and leave out the bad side effects?" we might ask. Well, everything we know about evolution and the journey to bring about complex intelligent life like our own suggests that death and some form of suffering are integral parts of a process of the passing on of genetic material.

Is it possible to create a better world free of these downsides? This is the territory that Job wanders into in chapter 38 of that great Old Testament book and when he demands that God explain all this to him, he is greeted with: "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand."

I think old Leibniz is treated rather badly. If we could somehow prove that God has done a botched job of all this then there would be a case to answer. But if positives and negatives in a material world are impossible to separate, then the real question is this: "why create at all?" Why push that button if you know that creation involves death and suffering? This was the point I put to Professor Philip Clayton at that Castel Gandolfo conference. When the programme was repeated on December 27 of last year it was watched by a Catholic priest who had been dealing for years with the torment of watching his elderly father suffer from dementia. He told me that he had started and stopped the programme four times because its subject matter was so painful. Then came Clayton's words five minutes before the end.

"I filled up with tears at the image of a creator God weeping before pressing the button to bring us into being, and the prospect that he pressed it knowing that the destination would outweigh the pains on the journey," the priest wrote to me last week. "The image of a God who would weep at our sufferings and the sufferings of his own Son, knowing that the bond of love between us in the end would be preferable to an eternity without us, in a God-filled emptiness, is just so overwhelming. At last something had resonated and struck a chord of truth."


Mark Dowd works for Operation Noah, the first Christian campaign focused exclusively on climate change (www.operationnoah.org)