How Haiti's earthquake has shaken us all

The horror of major disasters like the recent Haiti earthquake are best viewed from the air, or through the safe distance of an endless catalogue of mind-numbing statistics. As of today, Tuesday January 26, estimates are perhaps 200,000 dead, 250,000 injured, and 1.5 million homeless. The numbers simply transcend our ability to calculate the misery and horror, the hopelessness and anger, the sadness and utter agony. Paradoxically, to take in the horror "from the air" all at once, in a cascade of dizzying statistics and the broad sweep of a decimated landscape, is to keep it at arms length.

But drop down to ground level, and walk among the ruins, rub shoulders with the walking dead, see the rotting bloated corpses, and we face difficult questions. Terrifying questions. Agonizing questions. Questions that scream at us with such intensity that every ounce of our being longs to turn back to the mundane triviality of Leno vs. Conan or the latest sorry audition on "American Idol".

If we dare to descend to ground level, and refuse the temptation to turn back to the triviality of "American Idol", Haiti's misery hits us all in the solar plexus, knocking the wind right out of us. And this regardless of our view of the world.

Consider my recent exchange with "sorcerer", an atheist, in my last thread. In "‘The Lovely Bones,' and why Roger Ebert will not like a film version of ‘The Shack'" I noted that film critic Ebert objected to the film "The Lovely Bones" most profoundly because it implied that providence oversaw the rape and murder of a young girl. Better that there be no purpose - and thus no providential God - at all.
Sorcerer concurred, finding the ground level contemplation of God allowing acts of horror for some proximate providential purpose to be too much to stomach.

I can sympathize. Like the earthquake that ripped the bedrock underneath Port-au-Prince, terrible tragedies and evils rip at the bedrock of religious faith. If a Christian has no problem - e.g. no deep visceral revulsion - to the notion that God superintends horrible events like the Haiti earthquake, then I have to wonder whether that Christian has yet dared to move beyond the safety of mind-numbing statistics in order to survey the carnage up close.

Even so, that hardly means others do not find the earthquake's upheaval in their worldview as well. And this is the point I made to Sorcerer. As I put it, the notion that God oversees natural and moral horrors should disturb the Christian. But the idea that there is no such thing as an objective natural or moral horror to begin with should equally disturb the atheist.

And yet this is what atheists commonly hold. The fact is that according to a naturalistic worldview, there is no objective difference between an earthmover crushing an ant hill to make way for a new housing development and the plates of the earth shifting in the Caribbean resulting in the death of tens of thousands of human beings. Ant suffering is of concern to ants. Human suffering is of concern to humans. But the universe neither knows nor cares.

But this cannot be right. This cannot be the whole story. While I may struggle with God's providential hand in horrific events, I struggle even more with the notion that these events are not objectively horrible, but only the chance collocation of atoms in the void. I resolutely refuse to consider that a young girl being crushed under a slab of concrete is not an objective moral horror set against the backdrop of a universe that neither knows nor cares.

 And so I find myself clinging to the providential God and eschewing the atheist's interpretation of Haiti as nothing more than bad luck on a fault line on the surface of an insiginificant planet in the suburbs of an average galaxy.

Of course the atheist responds in kind to the Christian. They embrace nothingness rather than a providential God. And so we have a stand off. This doesn't settle the matter either way. But at the very least it shows that whether you are a Christian or an atheist, the horror of Haiti has shaken us all.