Why put up with war and natural disasters?

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By Fr. Thom Hennen
Question Box

Q: Why does God put up with wars and other human-made disasters generation after generation?
A: Finally, an easy question! Not so much. Your question gets to the very heart of one of life’s biggest questions: Why does God permit evil?
The atheist might answer: “Easy. There is no God. People are very complicated animals, but animals nonetheless. They do terrible things to each other and to the earth out of a sense of need, greed, advantage or dominance. Life is only as meaningful as we make it. Enjoy it while it lasts and try not to ruin it for others.”
The fundamentalist might answer: “God is working out his divine wrath on a wayward world. We are being punished for our sins. If we repent, there may be hope, but the end is surely near, so buckle up!”
Both of these are pretty “easy” answers. There’s not a lot of room for mystery in either. But what is the Catholic response? I don’t claim to speak for all Catholics, but I have studied and know something about Catholic thought and here’s what I would say:
God created the world (by some process) and everything and everyone in it. Creation is inherently good because God made it. God also created human beings. Human beings are inherently good and yet we possess free will. In fact, this is one of the things that makes us most like God. This means that from the beginning we have had the capacity to reject God and his benevolent will for us — and, boy, did we!
We are still dealing with the fallout of those first humans turning away from God. We call this “original sin.” This is not a sin that we have personally committed, but a condition in which we find ourselves after this truly earth-shattering decision.
G.K. Chesterton once quipped that he could not understand why some theologians reject the doctrine of original sin, as it is “the only part of Christian theology that can really be proved.” We certainly see evidence of it everywhere. Despite our fundamental goodness and the goodness of creation, there is something broken in us and in our world.
God could have made us to be perfect little moral robots programmed never do anything wrong. But then we would also be incapable of genuine love. We would be incapable of choosing love. We would just be following our programming. Morality doesn’t even enter into it. In a strange way, the necessary condition for genuine love (free will) is the very thing that opens us to sin (the misuse of free will).
I don’t think that God “puts up with” wars and other human-made tragedies in the sense that he is indifferent to them. In fact, I think God hates them. He hates to see the terrible things that we do to each other. He does not cause these things, much less delight in them, even as he allows them to happen. But why even allow them? Because, ironically, out of love for us, God will not override our free will. He wants us to choose him, to choose the good, to choose love.
“Okay, Father Smarty-Pants, what about natural disasters, disease and the like? Why does God allow that stuff?”
First, I would say that some of these natural disasters and even diseases may well be human-made or at least human-influenced and so again our misuse of free will comes into play here. But, what if none of those things is human-influenced? I’ll grant that this is a much tougher question than the question of human evil.
Wow! Look at the time! Stay tuned…
(Father Thom Hennen serves as the pastor of Sacred Heart Cathedral in Davenport and vicar general for the Diocese of Davenport. Send questions to messenger@davenportdiocese.org)


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1 thought on “Why put up with war and natural disasters?

  1. That was an excellent response, which sadly is probably more comforting to us in America, who are not sitting in the middle of all the wars going on in the world than to those innocents who are truly trapped in it!

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