On Sunday, November 1, 1755, in Lisbon, Portugal, a great earthquake took place while Christians were worshipping their good all-powerful God. Since it was All Saints Day more Christians were in church than on other Sundays. Known as the Great Lisbon Earthquake it shattered and destroyed church buildings, which fell down on, and killed worshippers in their favorite pews. Along with subsequent fires and a tsunami generated by the earthquake, it killed an estimated 60,000 people in Lisbon alone. If there was ever a message God might want to send his own people, this was not it! Who could have imagined that such a horrific event would still be told (by me) 270 years later, in 2025? It has surely turned believers away from their faith over the years.
God had plenty of ways to avoid such an utterly devastating tragedy. If he’s infinitely powerful and knowledgeable he didn’t have to create the earth with a moving crust and upper mantle, which is divided into several major tectonic plates that move relative to each other. This movement, known as plate tectonics, occurs at rates of about 10 to 40 millimeters per year (0.4 to 1.6 inches/year). As the plates move they produce earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Surely a God who reveals truth could warn people not to build cities on top of the faults in the earth’s crust, and tell us exactly where they are located. It could be written in a science book located as the final one in the New Testament itself. Instead, the earth’s fault lines attract us to build our cities on or near them, since that’s where we built our castles, and cities, near water, and other precious minerals.
If nothing else a miracle working God could have stopped the Lisbon earthquake from happening. Had he done so no one would know that he did, because it didn’t happen! God could have remained hidden for some hidden reason, and saved thousands and thousands of lives. Then, with a perpetual miracle God could make sure this earthquake would never take place, so long as the city of Lisbon existed. Oh, come on now, seriously, at the very least an infinitely powerful God could have kept it from happening on All Saints Day at the time of worship!
Out from the ashes came one of the most important counter-apologetics books to be published, Candide. Witten by Voltaire in 1759, it was provoked by the Seven Years’ War in 1756-1763, which was a conflict involving major European countries, along with the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. In it Voltaire made fun of the theodicy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had argued “this is the best of all possible worlds.” This satirical fictitious novel depicted the character Candide as a young man who had been indoctrinated in the doctrine of Leibnizian optimism. He gradually becomes disillusioned with this sanguine theodicy after coming to grips one terrible event after another. It shows him being expelled from his home, leaving him to fend for himself in a harsh world with war, poverty, and general cruelty.
In our day evangelical apologist Norman Geisler defended Leibniz by saying, “this may not be the best of all possible worlds but it is the best way to get us to the best of all possible worlds.” But such a response leaves open the objection that just one instance of needless suffering can refute such a theodicy, and there are millions of them!
God had plenty of ways to avoid such an utterly devastating tragedy. If he’s infinitely powerful and knowledgeable he didn’t have to create the earth with a moving crust and upper mantle, which is divided into several major tectonic plates that move relative to each other. This movement, known as plate tectonics, occurs at rates of about 10 to 40 millimeters per year (0.4 to 1.6 inches/year). As the plates move they produce earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Surely a God who reveals truth could warn people not to build cities on top of the faults in the earth’s crust, and tell us exactly where they are located. It could be written in a science book located as the final one in the New Testament itself. Instead, the earth’s fault lines attract us to build our cities on or near them, since that’s where we built our castles, and cities, near water, and other precious minerals.
If nothing else a miracle working God could have stopped the Lisbon earthquake from happening. Had he done so no one would know that he did, because it didn’t happen! God could have remained hidden for some hidden reason, and saved thousands and thousands of lives. Then, with a perpetual miracle God could make sure this earthquake would never take place, so long as the city of Lisbon existed. Oh, come on now, seriously, at the very least an infinitely powerful God could have kept it from happening on All Saints Day at the time of worship!
Out from the ashes came one of the most important counter-apologetics books to be published, Candide. Witten by Voltaire in 1759, it was provoked by the Seven Years’ War in 1756-1763, which was a conflict involving major European countries, along with the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. In it Voltaire made fun of the theodicy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had argued “this is the best of all possible worlds.” This satirical fictitious novel depicted the character Candide as a young man who had been indoctrinated in the doctrine of Leibnizian optimism. He gradually becomes disillusioned with this sanguine theodicy after coming to grips one terrible event after another. It shows him being expelled from his home, leaving him to fend for himself in a harsh world with war, poverty, and general cruelty.
In our day evangelical apologist Norman Geisler defended Leibniz by saying, “this may not be the best of all possible worlds but it is the best way to get us to the best of all possible worlds.” But such a response leaves open the objection that just one instance of needless suffering can refute such a theodicy, and there are millions of them!
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