WELCOME, because this question implicitly addresses the question, Is this a moral universe? Facing the mystery of good and evil, some have concluded that evil tops good, so the world’s source must be evil: the creator was a demon (said Marcion in the 2nd century AD/CE). But the Bible doesn’t even get through its first chapter before it says that the Creator was and is “very good” (tov meod, Genesis 1:31—said of what he’d made in his benevolence [good will]). So there you have it, and our question’s problem, even before you get to the Bible’s second chapter. In the words of an ancient Christian grace-at-meals, “God is great and God is good, and we thank You for our food.” (Christopher Hitchins’ current title, "God is Not Great", at least has the virtue of knowing where the starting point is.)

The question is WELCOME because of its realism about our species as both theotropic (Rousseau’s word for our turning toward God as flowers are heliotropic, turning toward the sun) and puzzle-solving. The question’s center is God, and the puzzle is why his goodness-driven power wouldn’t mercifully exclude “disasters—natural or manmade.”

Of course you could make the problem go away by denying God’s existence or by reducing his power, his goodness, or his knowledge. But as Rilke said, it’s better to live with an awkward question than to deny any of the realities within it. It’s logically neat but simple-minded (in the bad sense) to “make it all right” by jettisoning all impediments to so-called “rational” sense-making.

Physicist Nils Bohr gave up trying to make the problem go away that light behaves both as waves and as particles. “Complementarity” was the philosophical term he devised (parallel with the physical term “quantum physics”) to affirm the non-sense contradiction in light’s behavior. In biblical religion (Jewish and Christian), “faith” is the term for affirming the non-sense that God is both powerful and good, both infinite and involved in finite affairs.

WELCOME because the question suggests that “God” is the correct sphere within which the puzzling mysteries of good and evil are best addressed. He is the Lord--whose will is creative, providential, directive, and (sometimes) permissive of what we call evil.

And WELCOME is the question because the answerers it calls forth from the Bible are not philosophers or scientists but story-tellers. Notice how playful are the two very different origin-stories with which the Bible begins! And by the time you finish reading its third story (its third chapter), you should have concluded that this book (actually, archive) doesn’t give a fig for either logical or ethical consistency. (So, how ignorant and unfair are the Bible-haters who demand that it be something it doesn't intend to be, and who commit the genetic fallacy of reading its upper evolutionary strata as though their perspective were really “nothing but” that of its lower strata.)

What is consistent in the Bible is that its stories converge, over many centuries, on what can properly be called the Story, which is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (First Corinthians 1:23-24). At the heart of the Story is the humble-joyful conviction that no matter how our heads manage to make sense of the mysteries of good and evil, including disasters, God Almighty (all-powerful) in his mercy, in these very disasters, and despite our rebellions from reality, suffers with us and even for us. So (and here comes the two-word signal of the Story, in the four words with which verse 23 begins), “we proclaim Christ crucified.”

(This week's question is in the theological category, "theodicy." A classic formulation of it is at the beginning of Milton's PARADISE LOST, which he wrote [he says] to "assert eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men." Currently, a masterful exposition is David Bentley Hart's THE DOORS OF THE SEA: Where was God in the Tsunami?)