Mark's Notebook


	One of the nice parts about heading toward middle age is that you can find all your favorite music in the bargain bin. - Ken Floyd

Faith goes wobbling on

Daily Telegraph

Monday 10 January 2005, 1:00 pm
Keywords: Christian Topics , News Articles

By Tom Utley

Priests of every denomination have been telling us since Boxing Day that great natural disasters tend to shake believers' faith in the existence of God.

I hesitate to argue with so many priests, but I feel that somebody ought to point out that what they are saying is simply not true. Certainly, a great many people who did not believe in God in the first place have seized on the tsunami as further evidence that He does not exist. But I have yet to come across anybody who has said: "I used to believe in God until the tsunami struck, but I don't any more." From the earliest days of the Church, believers have had to get used to the fact that terrible things happen in this world, for which theological explanations are very hard to find.

Only a very fragile and dimwitted faith would be shaken by an event that was just the latest in a series of natural disasters - earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and tsunamis - stretching back to the dawn of time.

I reckon that all those priests are just plain wrong when they say that the tsunami has shaken people's belief in God. If anything, it has had the opposite effect. Like so many natural disasters before it, it has made people more, rather than less receptive to the idea that a supreme being may exist.

When something as terrible as this happens, people look for an explanation of human life that transcends the basic biological facts of birth, reproduction and death. Most of us give barely a thought to God when the car is running nicely, the children are doing well at school and there is food on the table.

Churches tend to be fuller, rather than emptier, when natural disasters are in the news.

The tsunami has not affected my belief in God at all, one way or the other. That goes wobbling on - sometimes strong, sometimes weak.

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