Monsignor Pope’s OSV column Ping!
And since Job's time scientists have pretty much figured out how stars work and where our seas came from, but haven't really figured out why all the natural disasters.
Here are some other "problem of evil" ponderables:
1. Why create thousands of species and have them suffer and die over eons of time, only to have them go extinct?
2. What about intelligent near-human creatures such as neanderthals, the "hobbits", etc. Why allow them to thrive for hundreds of thousands of years only to have them die off?
3. Why the nastiness and crippling capabilities of certain bacteria, viruses and insect bites?
For over a century now physicists have had to deal with some real strangeness when it comes to their line of study. Rather than just throwing their hands up and saying "Wow that's crazy," they have worked hard to come up with some explanations and put some bounds on the craziness of quantum mechanics and relativity.
There seems to have been no similar effort on the part of theologians to come to terms with the "problem of evil".
The stock answers are:
1. Free will. But this doesn't explain natural disasters.
2. Secondary effects. But physics has turned out to be so weird that it's not obvious that we need earthquakes in order to have a magnetosphere.
3. Original sin affected the natural world as well. But as far as we can tell there were earthquakes and meteor strikes, etc. before Adam and Eve.
4. God moves in mysterious ways. So it's OK for theologians to spend centuries working out the philosophical problems associated with Jesus being both God and Man, the nature of the Trinity, etc. but not particularly interesting to attempt to grasp some of the details associated with the problem of evil?
More work needs to be done here.
If we saw and understood everything that God sees and understands, we would realize that when a bus full of children plunges into a ravine, it’s not that important an event. They were all going to die someday, anyway. Ultimately, the only thing that matters, as with all people, is whether they went to Heaven or Hell.
GOD doesn’t plan disasters.
If you receive Christ as your Savior, no disaster can keep you from the LOVE of CHRIST. Whether you survive or not, the goal is to KNOW CHRIST; then, you don’t have to worry.