Floods destroy whole villages in Pakistan. A massive landslide in China buries over 1,000 people alive. Haiti is struggling to recover from recent earthquakes. Natural disasters may be deemed "acts of God," but they leave religious observers in a quandary about divine responsibility. Epicurus put it succinctly: "Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?" After the Lisbon earthquake of 1755—one of the deadliest in history—a founding father of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire, ridiculed the wishful thinking of a previous generation. Gottfried Leibniz's optimistic belief that we live in "the best of all possible worlds" got short shrift, as did Alexander Pope's declaration "whatever is, is right." Surely, Voltaire argued, a good and all-powerful God wouldn't tolerate such evils? Indeed, how could an all-powerful and entirely good being even coexist with such vast, arbitrary suffering? In our own day, Richard Dawkins has pointed to a simple way out for theists: deny one of the premises. Why assume a benevolent god when most scriptures describe vicious ones prone to revenge? The ludicrous Iranian cleric who recently blamed earthquakes on women's dress sense doesn't need a theodicy to explain evil, and nor do those Christians who blame recent events on human sin: their gods are vengeful against non-believers. If the Biblical flood was a punishment, why not contemporary ones? As suspicion grows that carbon emissions and drilling for oil could ultimately be behind some of these disasters, however, future theologians may get help from a surprising source: scientific evidence that pins these events on human activity. Then the free will defence can kick in again. It's human action that brought about the suffering; and it is better that we make free choices than live as automata. That's not an easy explanation to stomach. Still, for those who can't bring themselves to embrace atheism, science may yet provide a way of clinging to religion as the earth splits open and the waters begin to rise.
