Environmentalists, Malevolent Design, and Disaster

Bob Keller is a retired history professor who has worked on local Greenways campaigns. He currently serves on the boards of Whatcom Land Trust and the Dudley Foundation. His opinions here in no manner reflect policies and beliefs of those organizations.

Environmentalists, like liberal religious believers, may easily fall into a romantic utopian view of the natural world. If one respects Nature and finds inspiring spiritual resources in it, only a short leap can trick us into seeing all of existence as beautiful sweetness and light, the earth as a Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Viewing the environment through such rose-colored lenses is profoundly mistaken. If Nature can be inspiring and uplifting, just as frequently it can be inherently brutal and harsh. As Christian thinkers have argued for centuries, dark, evil and destructive forces function in Creation as they do in human affairs and individuals.

Thus a careful observer will not agree with Rodgers and Hammerstein‘s “Oklahoma!” that “All the sounds of the earth are like music.” We also hear the sounds of crashing trees, cyclones, hurricanes, floods, volcanoes, swarming bees, earthquakes, tornadoes and tsunamis.

For the terror of tidal waves and the blind power of nature, Geoff Tibballs‘ “Tsunami” (2005) provides a harsh and sobering introduction. After Tibballs‘ book appeared, disasters in Burma and China killed an estimated 130,000 people. Imagine two Bellinghams filled with nothing but corpses. Now an earthquake in Haiti has killed more than 200,000 while in Chile the present toll of hundreds of lives will grow.

These victims of perfectly natural events are not dictators, corrupt politicians, terrorists or corporate executives, but stoop laborers, shop keepers, children and mothers. Like hurricanes, typhoons, black widows and cobras, earthquakes have no concern at all over whom they kill or maim. In China, we find outright denial with the government banning the Oscar-nominated film “An Unnatural Disaster” about children dying in the 2008 quake. The mainstream media, liberal churches and the secular academy seldom explore, much less explain, the meaning of such natural events. If we believe in a particular personal providence—that God is not a remote overseer, but has His hand in our everyday affairs—then the Christmas 2004 earthquake and tsunami in Southeast Asia followed by Katrina in 2005 followed by the Chinese cyclones and earthquakes of 2008 followed by Haiti and Chili pose a daunting problem. Hebrew writers solved it by making Yahweh a brutal monarch who judges and damns people, including the chosen ones in Israel:

“Who may abide the day of his coming?
Who shall stand when he appears?
For He is like a refiner’s fire. (Malachi 3:2)

Thou shall break them with a rod of iron,
thou shall dash them into pieces
like a potter’s vessel. (Psalm 2:9)”

The New Testament deity, supposedly a loving Father, likewise shocks worshipers when He suddenly decides to kill more than 200,000 innocent people with a tidal wave. Christians nonetheless can reconcile these floods, earthquakes, epidemics and volcanic eruptions that cause immense suffering.

Destruction is seen as the Father‘s punishment for sin, a testing or discipline, a lesson in humility and a sign of our need for grace. Earthquakes and cyclones, theologians explain, arise out of some mysterious purpose hidden from human sight. Similar difficulties confront happy humanists who believe that Nature is benign, that life follows Reason, that Progress toward Happiness is the purpose of existence.

The French philosopher Voltaire once belonged to this upbeat humanist camp proclaiming the triumph of joy and reason. He did, that is, until a 1755 Lisbon earthquake in Spain killed 30,000 people. That act of Nature shook Voltaire deeply.

“I am a puny part of the great whole,” he wrote in stunned verse, “yes, but all animals condemned to live, all sentient things, born by the same stern law, suffer like me, and like me also die.”

The Lisbon quake sidestepped Christmas, but did occur on All Saints Day, killing many worshipers as they attended religious services. Clergy preached that this catastrophe was divine punishment for sin, a response that infuriated Voltaire. Instead:

“What is the verdict of the vastest mind?
Silence: the book of fate is sealed to us.
Man is a stranger to his own seeking;
He knows not whence he comes, nor where he goes.
We are tormented atoms in a bed of mud,
Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.”

But if Lisbon like New Orleans and Haiti discredits a loving God, Voltaire shrewdly recognized that it also undercut Enlightenment optimism and faith in benign Nature. “All the sounds of the earth are like music”? Hardly:

“The whole world in every member groans,
All born for torment and for mutual death.
And o’er this ghastly chaos you would say
The ills of each make up the good of all?
What blessedness! And, with quaking voice,
Mortal and pitiful you cry, ‘All’s well.’
The universe belies you.”

Voltaire spoke as one of the most acclaimed (and condemned) thinkers of the Enlightenment. A skeptic, he with other French, Scottish and English philosophers directly influenced our Founding Fathers, the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Very likely the 1755 Lisbon earthquake likewise influenced our nation‘s founders. How should humans respond to capricious cataclysms? What limits face any government? Do we need checks and balances? Can we trust kings, queens, nuns, nobles, preachers, priests and later Sierra Clubs to save us? Should religion and clergy be part of the State? What system will allow people to recover and begin anew in the face of immense losses due to Nature?

The Declaration and the Constitution call for people to reject monarchs and take responsibility for their own fate. Both documents are testimonials against human pride and arrogance, against blaming some deity for the woes of humankind, against believing that inevitable human progress is the grand purpose of the Universe. Voltaire again:

“Our being mingles with the infinite.
Ourselves we never see, or come to know.
This world, this theater of pride and wrong,
Swarms with sick fools who talk only of happiness.”

More than 250 years after the catastrophe in Lisbon, after the Indonesian tsunami, after Katrina, after 130,000 deaths in China and Burma, then twice that many in Haiti, Nature once again teaches us Voltaire’s painful lesson in humility. §