Christian Agnosticismatheists to rehearse the argument for the non-existence of God.
They echoed Voltaire who wrote similarly following the Lisbon
earthquake of 1755. ‘This is indeed a cruel piece of natural phi-
losophy!’ he cried. ‘What a game of chance human life is!’ It
should crush the sanctimonious, he continued, for it is the
mountains of human achievement that will save people from
earthquakes, if anything.
However, two things stuck out in the aftermath of the tsunami
which make that humanist outrage inadequate, if understand-
able. One was the way in which the people involved turned to
religion as a response to their often terrible loss. To deploy the
metaphor of the wound and bandages again, the material supe-
riority of the Western world could and did provide the means to
fl y absolutely necessary aid into the disaster zones – that is, to
provide the bandages. However, when it came to seeking means
of expressing just what it was that the tsunami had infl icted –
the nature of the wound – it was religion that people turned to.
Although some people were wholly understandably angry with
God, there appeared to be no objections to Buddhist monks
chanting on beaches in Thailand, mosques becoming places
of refuge in Indonesia, and Hindi prayers being offered in Sri
Lanka. Indeed, they were wanted. Bernard Williams, the philoso-
pher, was once confronted with the objection that religious faith
might be thought of as colluding with a God who allows bad
things to happen. He replied that such a position overlooks what
religion does for people. ‘That religion can be a nasty business’,
he wrote, ‘is a fact built into any religion worth worrying about,
and that is one reason why it has seemed to so many people the
only adequate response to the nasty business that everything is.’
I observed something similar in the aftermath of the Chilean
miners’ disaster of 2010, when 33 miners were trapped under-
ground for two months. For the fi rst two weeks after the col-
lapse that contained them half a mile down, they thought
they would die. They kept themselves alive out of thin hope
on meagre rations. Then, they were discovered and eventually
marvellously rescued. As they emerged, their personal stories