If you are just wondering why people respond in such different ways, then perhaps your question is just psychological. But there are deeper issues here, too. Natural disasters raise, in a very impressive way, the so-called Problem of Evil. It goes like this. Suppose that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent. Then it would seem that God would had to have known what sort of suffering Katrina would cause, want to prevent that suffering, and be able to do so. But God didn't, so God must not be all those things. And if you think that, if God exists at all, then God has to be all those things, then you get the conclusion that God does not exist.

It will not surprise you that the Problem of Evil has been much discussed. There is a very nice collection edited by Marilyn Adams on it.

I can't end this note, however, without saying one more thing, namely, that there are many different ways "believers" respond to such events. It is true that the reactions you mention are commonly encountered, but they are not the only options. I won't say more, though, as doing so would take us away from philosophy and towards very practical questions of faith.

I have to add a bit to Richard Heck's explanation of the "problem of evil. " There are actually two different problems that go by this name. One is the "logical" problem of evil: here the challenge to the believer is to show how the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly benevolent being is consistent with the existence of suffering in our world. I think this challenge can be met rather easily. all that must be done is to deny that suffering is a bad thing. This can be done in a number of ways: one can argue, for example, that we only regard suffering as bad because we fail to understand God's larger purpose in allowing suffering -- really, it's quite good, because it leads to greater wisdom than we'd obtain otherwise, or something. Or it can be argued that "suffering" is only a relative notion, and that if there is any variation at all in the amount of pleasure we experience, we will always regard the least amount as "suffering." I don't think either of these illustrative claims are very plausible, but they suffice to show that there's nothing incoherent about believing in God while acknowledging the existence of (what we commonly regard as) suffering.

But the second version of the problem of evil is very different. In this version, the challenge is to the reasonableness, rather than the mere coherence of, belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly benevolent being. The question here is this: if we were to just examine the evidence objectively and dispassionately, would we come to the conclusion that the universe was created by such a being as the Judeo-Christian God, or would we come to some different conclusion? A conclusion such as: the universe was created by a perfectly benevolent being who had limited knowledge or limited power, or both? Or that it was created by a being who was completely indifferent to our feelings? Or that it wasn't created according to any intentional plan at all, but just "happened"? Thought of this way, the problem of evil is a challenge to the believer to show that evidence and reason supports belief in the Judeo-Christian God, and supports it above its competitor hypotheses.

It's worth noting in this connection that the argument for the existence of God that has the most popular support -- the argument from design (cf. the current tempest about the teaching of "intelligent design" in my state and others) -- can only show that the Creator is smart enough and powerful enough to have made a universe. It doesn't even purport to show that the Creator is morally good.

My own view is that there is no evidence whatsoever that the designer of our universe (if there was one) was concerned in the slightest about the welfare of the sentient creatures He/she/It was creating, and that there's mountains of evidence that He/she/It couldn't give a damn.

All of these considerations, by the way, come from David Hume's incomparably wonderful work Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. It's available on the web at

http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/dnr.htm#A8

Check it out.

One final observation: believers often like to have it both ways. One person will thank God for sparing him, while telling the neighbor whose home's been demolished that it's not God's fault. But this doesn't make sense. If God actually intervened to save the first person's home, then shame on Him for not doing the same for the second person's. And if the reason that He didn't save the second person's is that the poor bugger's homelessness was part of some unfathomable Divine Plan, then the first person shouldn't take things personally either. The only way out of this dilemma that I can see is to say that each person deserved what they got -- i.e., bad things don't happen to good people. If anyone says this, they have, in my view, left the company of decent people.

Let me start by thanking Louise for her contribution, and especially for mentioning Hume's Dialogues, which remains my single favorite philosophy book. Hume's dismantling of the argument from design probably should be cited as often as possible in the current climate.

Having said something nice, I'll now proceed to disagree with Louise on one point. But I'll then agree with her about another.

It is not entirely obvious that there is any such thing as the 'Judeo-Christian' conception of God. The various Problems of Evil, logical and "evidential" (as I've seen the one Louise emphasizes called), attack a particular combination of claims---omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence, typically---that, to be sure, has figured significantly in Christian theology but whose relation to Jewish thought is really quite unclear. Moreover, even within Christian thought, there are many conceptions of the divine, and not all of them would subscribe to those three claims. Nonetheless, it probably is true that most people who call themselves Christians would subscribe to such a conception of God, and I would agree with Louise myself that the evidential PoE is essentially fatal to that conception. It can be evaded, to be sure, but only at very high cost, such as leaving the decent (and, sadly, there are many who take that route, to be sure). I suppose there are other options, too, actually: Self-deception, compartmentalization, cognitive dissonance, and general head-in-the-sand-ness.

That said, the challenge the PoE poses for a person of faith brought up in the Christian tradition is to articulate an alternative conception of God that is consistent with the world as we find it. As I said, several have been on offer over the centuries, but none has achieved the sort of dominance the conception that is the target of the PoE has. I do not know of any that fully satisfies me. I sometimes think about trying the view some Gnostics seem to have held, that Satan created the world, and God is still trying to sort it out. But then I don't believe in Satan, so there is that little problem.

Louise's remarks in her last paragraph strike a chord with me. I think the deepest challenge the PoE poses is to what one might call an interventionist conception of God, that is, a conception according to which God from time to time intervenes in the world to save children, cure illnesses, end droughts, and the like. Even absent omnipotence and omniscience (note that Louise doesn't even have to mention these to get her worry going), God's apparent failure to intervene a whole lot more often calls into question God's benevolence, and that, it seems to me, is a feature of the traditional conception that absolutely cannot be abandoned. Views of the sort Louise mentions at the end of her posting are available here, to be sure: Jones got saved because he was good, or it fit into God's plan, or what have you; I guess Smith will just have to suck it up, poor guy. In short, God plays favorites. But such a being does not seem to me to be one worthy of worship or even of respect but only of fear, and I take it to be another non-negotiable feature of the traditional conception of God that God is worthy of worship and an appropriate object of love.

So the question with which I find myself faced is: How should I think about God (and, more importantly, about my relation to God) if I have abandoned the interventionist conception?

Professor Andrew Dole (Department of Religion, Amherst College) kindly provides the following response to a query of Alan Soble's above:

"In 1992 Plantinga wrote a ‘spiritual autobiography’, which is available online here. (I think this piece was published in Philosophers who Believe, edited by Kelly James Clark and published by InterVarsity in 1997; but I’m not sure about that.) The piece gives a fair impression of how Plantinga would answer Alan’s question. It also contains an extended discussion of Plantinga’s position (then) on the problem of evil. This was a number of years ago, but I have no reason to think Plantinga has changed his position on the relevant subjects since then.

I think it would be fair to say that Plantinga would answer Alan’s question as to why he believes in an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God by pointing to his religious upbringing. That is to say, he was raised to believe in God, and came to the ‘age of reason’ with such a belief already in place. Further, it’s clear from what he says in the autobiography piece that he has encountered nothing in adult life that has led him to change his mind about belief in such a God; and that includes the challenge of the problem of evil. (In person, Plantinga would also make it clear that he thinks that holding beliefs on the basis of this sort of history is rational, and would produce analogous examples that don’t involve religious beliefs).

He does say, in the autobiography piece, that “of all the anti-theistic arguments, only the argument from evil deserves to be taken really seriously”; and he devotes several pages to the problem of evil. Here’s a relevant passage:

Why does God permit all this evil, and evil of these horrifying kinds, in his world? How can it be seen as fitting in with his loving and providential care for his creatures?

The Christian must concede she doesn't know. That is, she doesn't know in any detail. On a quite general level, she may know that God permits evil because he can achieve a world he sees as better by permitting evil than by preventing it; and what God sees as better is, of course, better. But we cannot see why our world with all its ills, would be better than others we think we can conceive, or what, in any detail, is God's reason for permitting a given specific and appalling evil. Not only can we not see this, we often can't think of any very good possibilities. A Christian must therefore admit that he doesn't know why God permits the evils this world displays. This can be deeply perplexing, and deeply disturbing. It can lead a believer to take towards God an attitude he himself deplores; it can tempt us to be angry with God, to mistrust God, like Job, to accuse him of injustice, to adopt an attitude of bitterness and rebellion. No doubt there isn't any logical incompatibility between God's power and knowledge and goodness, on the one hand, and the existence of the evils we see on the other; and no doubt the latter doesn't provide a good probabilistic argument against the former. No doubt; but this is cold and abstract comfort when faced with the shocking concreteness of a particularly appalling exemplification of evil. What the believer in the grip of this sort of spiritual perplexity needs, of course, is not philosophy, but comfort, and spiritual counsel. There is much to be said here and it is neither my place nor within my competence to say it.

This passage indicates, first, that Plantinga thinks that neither the logical nor the evidential challenge from evil are ultimately successful in showing theistic belief to be irrational (a position he has defended at length elsewhere, but has some things to say about in this piece as well); and second, that he admits that there is indeed a substantial cost to be paid for such a belief in the face of the existence of evil. The price is admitting that we don’t now understand, and possibly cannot understand, why an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God would permit evils of this sort to occur. This has come to be known as the ‘no-defense defense’; a detailed development of the position can be found in Stephen Wykstra’s article “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of ‘Appearance’”, in the Adams & Adams anthology. Marilyn Adams has also taken this position in her recent book Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, in which she tries to advance the discussion beyond the ‘why-question’ (i.e. why does God permit evil?) to the ‘how-question’ (given that there is evil, what is God going to do about it?)."