TSUNAMIS & ATHEISM
A reader named "John" left a comment after the Don & Lillian Dwight story on their experience in the tsunami zone. "That is a tragic story. But.....it's reality check time. There is no god (notice the lower case)..." And John isn't the only one who fails to see a god at work. Several people have written in prominent publications questioning whether anyone could possibly believe in a god after a tragedy like this.

I don't know John or any of the others who are publicly asking the questions, but my sense is that for a lot of people gravitation toward atheism after a disaster is a knee-jerk emotional reaction to the fact that God doesn't seem to respond the way they would respond. Therefore, he must not exist.

Interestingly, though, someone as sharp as Antony Flew recently decided that 81 years on the atheistic trail is enough and that it makes more sense in spite of all the questions to believe in a god than to not believe in one. Then there is the physicist Stephen Unwin who calculates that the mathematical probability that God exists is 67 percent.

It seems to me that the question isn't really "Is there a god?" but rather who/what is God? And that leads into a discussion of why he doesn't more directly intervene in human history (or if he does, how does he do so?). How, if at all, does he reveal himself? Cliffe has an ongoing discussion on his website about these issues. See, too, some of the thinking of Ravi Zacharias.