On this day in 2004 a massive underground earthquake measuring 9.3 occurred with an epicenter off the west coast of northern Sumatra. The quake caused a series of tsuinamis up to 30 meters high that became known as the Boxing Day Tsunamis. The tsunamis killed an estimated 230,000 people in 14 countries, one of the greatest natural disaster in recorded history.
Natural disasters siuch as this one inevitably cause philosophers and writers to reflect upon the nature of evil and why God permits it. As far as I know, this event did not inspire any great works of literature, unlike another famous earthquake in the 18th century.
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On November 1, 1755 a series of earthquakes striuck the city of Lisbon, killing an estimated 60,000 people. That day was All Saints’ Day. Many people were in the churches attending mass, when the structures collapsed around them and buried them.
This event shocked Europe and inspired Voltaire (1694-1778) shown here to write his satirical novel Candide (1759) that lampoons the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz’s (1646-1716) contention that this is “the best oif all possible worlds.”
People ask, If God is ominopent, omniscient, and good, why does he permit natural evil such as earthquakes and moral evils such as the Holocaust?
In his work Theodicy (defense of God) Leibniz attribiuted moral evil to the free will that God granted his creatures. Natural evil exists, to be sure, and causes human suffering, but humans would have suffered more on other worlds.
Leibniz’s defense of God and his explanation of evil are hardly satisfactory.
Let’s admit, however, that he had a much more difficult task than Voltaire. Satire is easier than serious philosophy.
To my knowledge, the Boxing Day Tsunamis did not inspire any great works of literature.
Have we become desensitized?
In defense of Leibniz, Earth is the only known planet that is fine-tuned for life.
Science does not need the hypothesis of God to explain the Universe, so the problem of evil does not exist for science. What we have and how everything takes place are the result of immeasurably long periods of time and incomprehensibly huge numbers. There are more planets in the Universe than grains of sand in the Sahara desert, so it is not surprising that one or more planets aould have conditions that support life.
Our number just came up in the Cosmic Monte Carlo..