The stupendous Asian tsunami has raised anew ancient and frustrating questions about why there's evil in the world.
Theologians refer to this as the problem of theodicy, and many acknowledge it's the best argument atheists have for denying God's existence. Scholars outline it this way:
An all-powerful God could prevent evil.
An all-loving God would want to do that.
But evil and suffering exist.
So should we conclude that God is weak, not loving or simply nonexistent?
"There are no easy answers to such questions," says John E. Thiel, professor of religious studies at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Conn., and author of ``God, Evil, and Innocent Suffering.''
Still theologians, philosophers and others who represent many religions wrestle with questions about suffering because they get asked so often in a world full of crime, natural disasters, terrorism, war and malevolence. Scholars have filled bookshelves with their attempts at answers.
Thiel approaches the question from a Christian perspective:
"The great Christian thinkers of the past, like St. Augustine," he says, "typically explained evil as something God allowed in order to bring a greater good from it. But this explanation can be emotionally difficult for believers because it means that God indirectly causes evil to occur.
"Does the death of tens of thousands of people in the Asian tsunami justify the goodness of the relief effort? Often this explanation ends in the view that God's ways are mysterious. But this is small consolation in the face of the innocent death that is evil's clearest symptom."
Thiel says Christianity has a better explanation: "God does not cause death in any way, and there are no higher or mysterious purposes in death at all. Death is a tragic fact of life that God regards as an enemy that eventually will be defeated," and God has demonstrated power over death in Jesus' resurrection.
Others suggest that the process of creation that God began continues and has not yet reached its goal of beauty and perfection.
"God created - and is still creating - a world that has marvelous properties of power and force," says Molly T. Marshall, president of Central Baptist Theological Seminary of Kansas City, Kan.
"Because, as the Bible puts it, God `lets be' a creation that God does not dominate but lets function freely, these powers can interact so as to produce unexpected natural disasters that bring suffering to many."
However, Marshall says, God "does not will such tragedy, but chaos and order are always intermingled in the lively processes that move creation to its ultimate goal of beauty and unity.
"In a sense," she says, "God does allow it, for God has called into being such conditions through which a tsunami could occur. Why is this? Freedom for humans must be presupposed by freedom all the way down to the atomic level of life. This God does will. Tragic suffering can never be `rationally' explained, only set in some larger interpretive framework."
One aspect of that larger framework is the book of Job in the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament. It tried to counter the prevalent attitude that suffering was an indication of sinfulness. The story of Job was the Bible's way of saying that suffering is not necessarily evidence that the sufferer is being paid back for sinning.
As terrible as it was, the Asian tsunami is just one example of how natural forces sometimes cause unimaginable horror. In China in 1887, for example, the Hwang-ho River flooded and killed more than 1 million people. Also in China, in 1920 more than 200,000 people died in an earthquake in Kansu province.
In fact, if the recent Asian tsunami had occurred 10 years ago, and if its final death toll reaches 120,000, it would rank no higher than 39th on the list of the most deadly natural disasters (counting epidemics and famines) of the 20th century.
This rampant destruction - coupled with all kinds of evil directly caused by human beings - has brought forth many explanations of the source of evil and suffering.
Christianity and Judaism both speak of suffering caused by a world fallen into sin and rebellion against God, though within both faiths one can find many explanations of evil.
For instance, while most Christian and Jewish theology describes God as omniscient and powerful, Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his book ``When Bad Things Happen to Good People,'' says "there are some things God does not control." God, in fact, "is not perfect" and has "limitations," Kushner says.
For its part, Hinduism contends that the ego, or ahamkar, is the root cause of suffering.
Mahanz Shabbir, president of the Heartland Muslim Council, says that because "in the Quran, God is all-knowing and all-aware ... whatever is happening is not like circumstance." Rather, God ultimately is in control, she says.
One reason for such disasters may be "to make you stronger and not lose your faith in God. There's a reason, but we don't always know what the reason is. You have to let go of the constant desire to try to control it and to know. You'll never know."
But, she says, whatever the reason, the Asian disaster "has us focusing our energies on helping one another," and that must please God.
Buddhism acknowledges that suffering is universal and offers its Four Noble Truths to resolve it. Guo Yuan Fa Shi, a Chan Buddhist monk, wrote in The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine in 2002 that minimizing threats from the environment "is relatively easy" compared with preventing suffering caused by "human or social relationships." Buddhism, he wrote, "shows us how to be our own masters, how to eliminate suffering by transforming ourselves no matter the situation and even in adverse environmental situations."
Lama Chuck Stanford of the Rime Buddhist Center of Kansas City says: "We don't know why these things happen. We don't even know why we're here. From the Buddhist perspective, the important thing is to recognize the interconnectedness of all things and the importance of compassion.
"The best Buddhist response is trying to respond with kindness and compassion."
Because evil and suffering seem so prevalent, explaining them often has humbled people of faith.
For example, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Rev. Billy Graham acknowledged that he has never found a fully satisfactory answer to the question of why God permits evil in the world.
Others suggest that may be the wrong question.
"I don't think it's ever helpful or necessary to ask, `Why did God allow or cause a natural disaster?' " says the Rev. Greg Boyd, senior pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minn., and author of ``Is God to Blame? Moving Beyond Pat Answers to the Problem of Evil and Satan and the Problem of Evil.''
"If a person's faith is rooted in the New Testament, as mine is," Boyd says, "then their picture of God is centered on Jesus Christ. And Jesus didn't go around causing natural disasters. So I don't have any grounds for assuming natural disasters are ever God's will."
Because the first humans sinned, Boyd says, "the laws of nature have been corrupted (and) don't all operate now the way God originally intended them to. Now that doesn't mean there's a demon behind every tsunami or hurricane, but it means that if it wasn't for the angelic and human rebellion, we wouldn't have tsunamis or hurricanes or AIDS or anything of the sort."
When people wonder why God doesn't prevent evil, some theologians ask us to imagine a world in which God, in fact, did just that.
"Do we really want God to prevent things from happening ... by manipulating the laws of physics in such a way that we would never know from one moment to another which were working and which had been suspended?" asks author and teacher John Blanchard.
In his booklet "Where Was God on September 11?" Blanchard writes that "if God tweaked the laws of nature billions of times a day merely to ensure everybody's safety, comfort or success, science would be impossible.''
Some people have suggested that God permits evil to show it can be used for good.
Examples used to buttress this argument are numerous - the heroism of firefighters and police officers on 9/11, people moved to charitable actions after disasters and so forth.
Even in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, there was a report of a surprising good coming out of the evil. In one of the world's oldest civil wars - in Indonesia's Banda Aceh province, which was badly damaged by the raging sea - the warring sides agreed to suspend hostilities.
A Banda Aceh police official, quoted by The Associated Press, put it this way: "We're not going to arrest the rebels. They're looking for members of their families, just like many of our police members are looking for theirs. We're all crying together."
In the end, people face the simple question posed by Kristen E. Kvam, associate professor of theology at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City: "What do we say when confronted with the enormities of suffering?"
Kvam says any answer runs the risk of "trivializing" the losses. But "words must be offered," even though "rapid responses tend to offer solutions that are not only simplistic but also misguided and problematic," she says.
Those solutions, writes William Hart in his book ``Evil: A Primer,'' should not lose sight of the fact that "mind-numbing catastrophes can distract us from everyday evil that permeates our lives and from the links between vast eruptions of wickedness and the chronic, low-level moral disorders that together pose greater challenges to our modest efforts to live well together."