[Here are the links for the earlier posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. There's a 'prequel' here; and there are two comments - from Sophie Masson and Bruce Dunstan.]
Some of the blogosphere discussion I've read by Christians reflecting on the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster has seen the latter as a challenge to religious faith. It's a challenge which other Christians have taken up. I want to comment on just one such response I've seen, since it seems to me to share a feature with some of the Jewish post-Holocaust theology I discussed here - in section (3) of the post.
Before I get to this, though, let me first point readers to some reflections by Steve Kingston. If Steve's right in what he says, I'm about to waste my time, because he holds that belief in a benevolent Creator doesn't require arguing. 'That's why it's called faith.' It's not a reason, he also says, it's a vision.
One Christian blogger who does put forth argument on the question has argued it like this (I summarize, rather than quote, the key points I'm interested in): God is not subject to our - human - purposes and hopes. We have a place in the universe God has created, and we are fully subject to its processes.
What strikes me about these kinds of argument, as about the arguments in post-Holocaust Jewish theology which react to that event by postulating a self-limiting and caring, a suffering, God and/or a hidden, or mysterious or dialogic-partner God, is that they persuade, if at all, by either withdrawing or seriously qualifying one or more of the characteristics standardly ascribed to the (traditional) Creator: benevolence, omniscience and omnipotence. The withdrawal or qualification purports to explain the absence of intervention to save innocents from calamity. But to my mind the same would-be explanatory moves that aim at this result also have the effect of subtly altering the idea of such a Creator so that it's no longer clear why His existence should be a source of solace in the face of grave suffering and evil. Even assuming an originating or pervasive force of the type that this Creator is said to be, His (for short) 'remoteness' from and/or 'incapacity' towards mundane human griefs now makes Him a less plausible source of comfort than the God of popular conception. This qualified Creator seems to be no more of a reassurance, in the face of human suffering, than the basic constituents of the material universe as identified by scientific enquiry; or than the moral and emotional supports that there are to be had from other human beings - principally, but not only, those we love.
Christopher Hitchens said recently:
My hope is that literature can replace religion as the source of our ethics, without ceasing to be a pleasurable study and pursuit in its own right.Whether or not literature will be able to do that, it seems clear that literature couldn't in any case fulfil all the needs that have been, and are presently, met by religion, in particular the sort of need (to do with meaning and reassurance) in face of mortality, calamity, great evil or suffering. Whether there is, or could be, any substitute for religion in meeting these needs - meeting them for everyone, not just already convinced rationalists and secularists - is not a question I know how to answer.
(See also the discussion thread started here by Amy Wellborn.)