Why the giant waves were acts of a benevolent God

Things are stirring on the God front. A leading atheist recants his disbelief, provoking cries of anguish from the Darwinian fundamentalists crowded on to their isolated bandwagon, now stuck in the mud of events. On the other hand, the giant waves in the Indian Ocean shocked the Archbishop of Canterbury — not one whom Jane Austen would have called ‘a sensible man’ even at the best of times — into doubting the existence of a deity, or at least a benevolent one. The question of whether the notion of God is compatible with the existence of evil or calamitous events in the world is a very ancient one, and was pondered by Plato and the Stoics, and most of the early Christian philosophers — such as Origen — and later by Thomas Aquinas. The Manichees got worked up about it, believing as they did that the universe was governed by evil as well as noble forces; obviously, a major earthquake would tend to suggest that evil has got the upper hand, if only pro tem.

In 1695–97 Pierre Bayle published his Dictionnaire historique et critique, which subjected common religious notions to historical and critical analysis, and became (as it were) a bestseller among European intellectuals, laying the foundations of the 18th-century so-called Enlightenment. Among other things, he argued that dreadful happenings in the world, whether natural, like earthquakes, or man-made, like wars, were incompatible with an omnipotent deity committed to the triumph of goodness and virtue. He was answered on this point in 1710 by G.W. Leibniz in a grisly work called Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal. The word ‘theodicy’ was his coinage, as meaning the investigation of God’s justice. He also invented the phrase that this world is ‘the best of all possible worlds’, much bandied about by 18th-century salon savants.