Creation Untamed 3

“… if God cares for so much for all creatures, why didn’t God create a world in which there would be no natural disasters?”

Terence Fretheim asks why God created a world in which bad things happen in his new book, Creation Untamed: The Bible, God, and Natural Disasters (Theological Explorations for the Church Catholic).

Here is the problem: we live in a world that we believe is created by God, and we believe God is good. The good God created this world. But God’s goodness is hard to square with earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes and volcanoes and other “natural” disasters. Why did the good God make a world that can devastate?

One traditional answer is that the world was perfect or good until the Fall. That is, prior to Adam and Eve there were no “natural disasters.” In fact, prior to Adam and Eve, so the traditional view goes, there was no death because death only entered the world through sin. This view conflicts with science.

Perhaps there’s another solution, though it is not one I’ve heard: perhaps there was a cosmic disturbance in the Fall of Lucifer (Satan et al) and it was that Fall that unleashed natural disasters. I’ve never heard this view, perhaps you have.

But if one doesn’t opt for this Fall of Lucifer theory and one posits a more theistic evolutionary theory for both origins and history, then one is left with the problem of the first paragraph unresolved.  A good God created a world in which world there are natural disasters and those natural disasters are part of the way God made this world. One could also then argue that “death” itself was part of the theistic evolutionary theory and that death — say of plants and animals — was at work well before Adam, Eve and their sin.

How do you explain natural disasters with a good God as sovereign?