Why Did God Allow This?

Martin Kettle in the Guardian asks this difficult question in regards to the massive earthquake and tsunami death toll that is now approaching 60,000. Based on his article (and I'd encourage you to read the whole thing), I'm guessing that Martin is not a religious person and is therefore using this disaster to question the whole notion of a loving God.

I'm not a theologian and I wouldn't begin to try to come up with an answer to why these things happen, except to say that I don't believe God is sitting on a throne somewhere with his finger on the switch of death ready to flip it as His whim. God created a dynamic world which in its own way is a living, moving thing. It is not a perfect world in the sense that everything works for the good of man all the time. Sometimes the earth has to respond to the stresses within and man gets in the way of the results.

I'll leave it to the deeper thinkers to figure this one out.