Why does God allow disasters?

First published on 28 February 2022

God moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform. So how come He allows disasters to occur?

Let us take a paradigm that is fairly widespread across the globe and certainly one that the movies tend to endorse: the world is made up of good and evil. And God’s on the side of good, the Devil on the side of evil. So far, so good (or evil, as the case may be).

So, the crux of the matter: how come God allows evil to occur? Or, we could put it the other way, how come the Devil allows good to occur?

To answer these questions, we first have to decide what it is that we classify as good and what as evil. The Ten Commandments include a rule that “thou shalt not kill”, yet, if I am threatened by a murderer, the law allows me to defend myself, if necessary by killing the murderer. Since the Ten Commandments forbid me from doing that, I have thereby broken God’s law; yet Man’s law says I was justified in my action, and Man’s law will not punish me. Will God’s law? That we do not know in this life; not until I stand before a court of law will I know whether Man’s law condemns me; and not until I stand before God will I know whether God’s law condemns me. So, at this point we must make a clear distinction: that, while Man’s law is in many respects inspired by God’s law, or by what we perceive to be God’s law, Man’s law is not God’s law. It is by confabulating the two that we sometimes get into confusion about what God is, what God wants from us, and what God’s law actually is.

Man’s law punishes acts – actus reus – the act of the thing. And before Man’s law condemns a man, it requires that he shall have intended the act of which he is charged – his mens rea – his thought of the thing. Sometimes we dispense with the mens rea, and these we call statutory offences. Offences for which you are guilty simply by having done them, whether or not you intended to do them. They are manyfold, so manyfold that one might be forgiven for proceeding through life with the notion that simply doing wrong will see you punished for it. With many minor offences, there can be a feeling that whether or not you intended committing them or not, punishment is automatic. If that is so, then punishment is simply a consequence of being caught. If God can see everything and knows the things I do, then there are many things I do that are wrong, and yet I don’t get punished, so therefore God does not exist.

This is false. God can no more prevent sin than the Devil can procure it. Neither can do either. Nor can God prevent a volcano from erupting, or an aeroplane from succumbing to its pilot’s error and tumbling from the sky. And nor can the Devil cause a volcano to erupt or an airliner pilot to make a fatal error; for neither of them has any influence over our intentions and our assessment of how sinful or otherwise those intentions are. So, what, then, do God and the Devil do?

What God and the Devil both do is prevail upon us to do good or evil. They do that through our consciences. God instils us with a notion that a certain act will procure harm and therefore not to do it, and the Devil instils in us a notion that a certain act will do no harm. He does not prevail upon us to do evil in the sense in which it’s generally understood: like waging wars or mass killings or school shootings or grand larceny. All these things are sins because they involve man’s failure to love another as he would love himself. But the Devil’s maxim is to act only in pursuit of love of oneself, to the exclusion of all others, (probably) except for those for who one’s acts of love constitute a strategy to obtain a benefit for oneself. That last potential condition should cause us to hesitate before congratulating ourselves on how selfless we think we are when entering in to marriage, friendship, contracts of employment or for sale. If understanding God is a challenge, understanding the Devil is in many ways the double challenge, because the both of them impinge not on what we do, what others do, or what just happens (like volcanoes erupting), they impinge on our consciences, on what we intend. All God does is instils in us a notion that our act will do harm, in order to avert us from it.

Unlike running or football, tennis and skiing are strange sports, in that, whereas there’s no speed limit for the first two, the second two require speed and dexterity within set limits. With tennis and skiing, you cannot engage hell for leather. God and the Devil have less to do with going than with stopping.

The same can be said for driving a car or even walking down the street. The Highway Code is littered with rules and regulations which are all designed to prevent accidents; virtually none of them has anything to do with opening your throttle and letting her rip. They’re all about stopping. And Man’s other laws—whether it’s tax, money-laundering, the rights and obligations of married partners, you name it—are all about stopping things. A law is passed in order to address what’s called a mischief—something that needs dealing with—and the assumption is that what’s not legislated against is free for anyone to do to their heart’s content—there’s no law against it. Even laws that are passed to set up institutions like great public works (electricity grids, railways, ports, motorways) are in fact there as part of a grid of legislation that is prohibitive rather than permissive: the new railway gets built as a means of circumventing an existing prohibition (that no railway may be built without an act of parliament) and to institute prohibitions on the new railway’s behalf (no railway may be built competing with the authorised railway).

Whereas most laws are about preventing or forbidding something, there is nevertheless one law that is generally about allowing something, and that’s a country’s constitution. Constitutions may lay down limits on the powers of the executive, the judiciary, the legislature, but, on the whole, they differ from regular statutes because they set out what the people of a country can do.

Most of the limitations contained in a constitution are in fact restrictions on what the country’s institutions can do, not its people. God’s law, on the other hand does not contain a constitution and the reason for that is that it doesn’t need one. God’s law comprises, fundamentally, a requirement simply to love others as you would yourself and to love God, so that God’s constitution is effectively “anyone can do anything they please as long as they adhere to these two rules.”

Belgium’s constitution has 198 articles and, since 1831, this constant mainstay of the nation’s rights has been amended 78 times. Even that constitution is not so immutable as God’s law, which has remained unmodified in nearly 2,000 years (despite Man’s best endeavours to change it).

So, is God’s law all about stopping us doing things, is it about authorising things, or is it about making us do things? This essay explores this stopping or averting mechanism. If it stands to reason, it proves nothing, but it may at least be a potential candidate to explain how God interacts with his universe. Shall we try it?

What does it mean to say that God prevails upon us? What does prevail mean? Let’s look at Saint Teresa of Calcutta: Mother Teresa as she was known in her lifetime. And let’s assume the common belief is correct (for only her soul and God can know differently) that God never once during her lifetime had to tap on the shoulder of her conscience and say, “Ahem, do you really think you ought to be doing that?” Did that please God? I cannot say whether it pleased God or not but, if it’s true, God never needed to prevail upon Mother Teresa, persuade her, to do the right thing when faced with an option of doing the wrong thing. The Devil, on the other hand, had a Hell of a job with her: there he was, constantly prevailing on Teresa to, “Go on, treat yourself, you know you want to!” and just not getting through. Teresa didn’t treat herself, she treated the sick and needy and that brought her satisfaction because she believed she was serving God by doing so, and I agree. And so did the Church when it canonised her.

So, what about people who give to charity, out of the goodness of their hearts? Aren’t they serving God too? Yes, they are, but only to a degree. Because no one, or very few, give to charity to the point where it would impinge on their lifestyle, or standard of living or the welfare of their children or whatever it is that stops them from giving their ALL to charity. But, of course, that’s ridiculous, no one can give everything they own to charity, otherwise what would they live off? Well, what they do live off when they don’t give their all is their service to the Devil and, if you don’t believe me, you should go and read up a little on what satanism truly is. 

God’s law requires you to love your neighbour as you would love yourself. Now, at the very least, that would mean that, if you take giving to charity as a measure of your godliness, then you should give half your possessions to charity, because the half you give—love for others—would match the half you retain—love for yourself. But very few do even that. We generally retain far more of our possessions for ourselves than we give to charity, which means that, on that score, if score it is that we want to keep, a divestment of half your possessions would only give you a score draw in the God v. Devil league championship; and keeping more for yourself than you give to charity means the Devil wins that game on a penalty shootout. Because God’s law is to love others, and Satan’s law is to love thyself. It does not, as we conveniently define satanism, mean “do harm to others”, so that – and this is the “convenience” part - no one who gives only £5 to charity would consider themselves as doing harm to anyone (other than their own purse), and they cannot thereby be evil, or so they reason. It’s this equating evil with doing harm to others that gets us most confused in determining where we are in the God/Devil league table, and it is part of why we see God as responsible for failing to prevent disasters. You see, God and the Devil, in prevailing upon our consciences, don’t look at what we do on this Earth; rather, in a reverse logic to the statutory offence, they look only at what we intend. It is our intentions that nourish or deteriorate our souls and not our acts. And it is the net goodness or evilness of our intentions that determines the state of our souls.

“Yes, but I know perfectly well what my intentions are, and I always try to ensure they’re of the purest sort.” I’m sure that’s what you think you do. The problem is you don’t. Nor do I; nor does anyone, bar possibly Mother Teresa. We engage day in, day out, in our inner selves with the constant battle between the interests of others and our own interests; we clothe our interests in ideas like self-preservation, or matrimonial duty, or economic necessity, or the fight against this or that, or the good of society. Or even, to quote Meatloaf, “I’ll do anything for love – but I won’t do THAT.” There is barely a single aspect of our lives that, while we deliver ourself up to the altar of goodness, we don’t at some point say “But here I draw a line.” And, worse, we sometimes convince ourselves that the line we draw is just and fair and right and proper and beyond reproach, which it likely is under Man’s law; but if we would reassess our behaviour from the viewpoint of God’s law, we would seemingly often come to the conclusion that we had not loved the other as we would love ourselves. For, pure of intention though we might consider ourselves to be, we frequently lie to others as to what our intentions in fact are and, what’s more, we lie to no one with greater conviction and success than to ourselves.

When we formulate an intention in our minds, such as to go and help an old lady across the road, is it truly benevolent assistance that motivates us? It may be, I’ll grant. But, what if you know your boss is looking down from his office window as you see the old lady? The good done is the same in the old lady’s eyes, yet our intention has been coloured by our desire to put on a good show for the boss. The same might be said for corporate governance policies, implemented for the most part because they are ordered by government in the first place, and then later paraded before shareholders to demonstrate how philanthropic and sustainable these shareholders are when they receive their dividends in the post. And one must not forget that corporate governance policies were often only introduced to temper some of the worst excess that large corporations had been observed engaging in during the years leading up to their introduction. What are paraded as “holiness” are often the result of being very naughty boys in the past. It’s a bit like ex cons shouting about what a valuable contribution they are to society but failing to mention they spent ten years in jail after being caught dealing drugs.

God and the Devil can prevail upon our consciences, but they cannot change them. They cannot actually make us avert from going bad or, for that matter, from doing good. But, supposing the Devil wins the conscience game, what then is so bad about that? Surely going to Hell to carry on the same kind of self-centred egotistical pleasures as one had done on Earth would be a real boon for evildoers? Well, that’s not right. I must say that, unlike Johannes Faust, I’ve never visited Hell, but I’ve had clients who’ve had season tickets and I have to tell you, the idea that Hell would be Heaven in Hell, if you get my drift, is probably wrong, for the simple reason that it doesn’t stand to reason, and the reason that it doesn’t stand to is this: the battle between God and the Devil is not about you; it is about your soul. Because the Devil’s concern is to win souls for his kingdom, and his means of winning them is to persuade people that they must think only of themselves and not of others; once he has won your soul, the same game rules apply: he doesn’t give a damn (literally) for you and if that means you’ll boil in oil for eternity, that’s your problem. He’s not in the “looking after” game at all. But if it is God that wins your soul because you have loved others as much as you loved yourself, then He will continue that game with you in Heaven: He will continue to love you back just as you loved Him on Earth, because God practises what He preaches; and, in case it has escaped you, so does the Devil. They both practise what they preach. And Heaven and Hell are not rewards or punishments for what you do on Earth. They are simply a continuation of what you do on Earth; it’s just that you’re not doing the doing this time.

Now, Mother Teresa was pretty boring for God and the Devil, and Adolf Hitler probably likewise. When you go and see Rangers play Partick Thistle and the game is a straight run of goals in the Jags’ end from the starting whistle to the end, you might be elated at seeing the score mount from 1-0 to 12-0, but it does take a bit of the cut and thrust out of watching, and you can probably guess the end result if you go home at half time. But, pit Rangers against Celtic, where one team sneaks in a late goal to clinch the match in the final minute, now that’s football adrenalin. And late goals are a part of God’s and the Devil’s league as well: repentance and sudden changes of heart. Such as, say, true sorrow for committing a horrendous injustice against another person – perhaps Vladimir Putin deciding at the last minute, or even after bombarding Kyiv that he was truly sorry and doing all he could to repair the damage he had wrought. Or, perhaps Vladimir Putin being convinced by the arguments of Great Britain and France in the weeks leading up to the Ukraine invasion and then suddenly “the Devil catching hold of his tail” and his deciding to bomb the place to smithereens after all. Repentance can go both ways, you see – towards God or towards the Devil.

How are we doing for standing to reason? In any discussion of spirituality, there will always come a point where one’s arguments are dependent on what we call a leap of faith. Either you believe or you don’t believe. Surprisingly, many people will say they believe in the Prince of Darkness or in God the Almighty but that they don’t believe in the other and one really has to ask whether this isn’t the greatest act of self-delusion that one can ever practise on oneself. For, how can one honestly tussle daily with good and evil and then deny the existence of the one or the other? Only if one is out and out evil (or Mother Teresa) can one even begin to contend that, whilst believing in good or evil, one does not also believe in evil or good.

So, God and the Devil prevail on our minds with these thoughts of “do for others” against “do for yourself”; but what about disasters that are not intended at all? Volcanoes, earthquakes, airliners crashing to the ground? Is that a part of the God v. Devil league table? Well, no; I don’t think so, at any rate.

If the reader has followed me so far and is in agreement that God’s and the Devil’s influence is limited to impressing on our minds to commit or refrain from the acts we formulate as actions, then I think it must be clear that neither of them has a hand in matters on which no human on earth has exercised any form of intention whatsoever. These must therefore be pure unfortunate, or fortunate, incidents. 

And yet, I feel in my heart of hearts that there is something more to it than that. Precisely what it is, I cannot say; but I will try, because many people will testify to a deep sense within them that their life or their safety has been preserved at some point by some unseen or intangible force – and I am one of them. It has happened to me on a number of occasions of which I am conscious; and perhaps countless more of which I am not conscious. From that simple notion comes a conclusion: that it is not important for me to know that my safety was preserved, it is only important that it was. So, how do you explain accidents, disasters, those in which we perish; how are we to understand the fact that we survive, if survive we do? I think that this is where guardian angels come in. And, for the other side, dark angels. Guardian angels, or demons, are the spirits of the departed who have such love in them (or such despicability) that they either are assigned or they take upon themselves a role in the afterlife to further our love of others, or our love of ourselves, back here on Earth. Because they have been told to, perhaps, by the Devil or God; or because they do so as part of the Universe’s great, wondrous workings, the fine details of which can never be comprehended by Man, in any case.

The lesson from all of this is simply: that we shall not be judged, come the Day, on what we have done in this world, but on what we intended in this world. We can temper our ulterior fate with repentance, by either negating the wrong we have intended or by reversing the good we have intended, none of which of course will have any influence on how Man’s law is meted out upon us. And, whether this is truth or falsehood cannot be known in this life, so it is a spurious line of enquiry – but we like whodunnits, so why not this? The one truth we can be certain of here on Earth is the truth of our own intentions, and of the lies we tell ourselves of what those intentions are or are not; and for that, we must search our own souls. The souls that are so highly prized by God and by the Devil and which we on Earth so often pay such scant attention to. Or is that merely one more deception that we practise upon ourselves?