We can’t stop earthquakes. We can save lives.

by George Cassidy Payne

970 words

There is a particular sound that belongs to earthquakes: people calling into the ruins. A mother calling for a child. A rescuer shouting for silence. A dog barking somewhere beneath the concrete. Then, sometimes, the sound everyone has been waiting for—a cry, a breath, a whisper.

Someone is alive.

After the August 10 earthquake in Colombia, rescuers heard a man calling from beneath a collapsed building. He was alive, he said, and he was with a baby. The infant and her mother were eventually rescued.

It was a moment of extraordinary hope. But hope becomes complicated when we remember that other children died. Some people were pulled alive from the rubble. Others were not. Homes disappeared. Families were separated. Communities were left searching for people who might never be found.

And this raises a question that has troubled philosophers and theologians for centuries: How can a good God coexist with a world in which innocent people suffer?

After the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed tens of thousands, Voltaire famously challenged the optimistic belief that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds. The problem remains with us. Children die without having done anything to deserve it. Animals suffer without understanding why. Families can lose everything in a matter of seconds.

I have no satisfying answer to that problem. In fact, I am suspicious of answers that arrive too quickly.

“Everything happens for a reason” is not an adequate response to a grieving parent. Neither is “It was God’s plan.” Such statements may offer comfort to some, but they can also turn another person’s suffering into an intellectual explanation.

Sometimes the most honest theological response is simply: I don’t know.

But uncertainty about why suffering exists does not mean uncertainty about what we should do about it.

We cannot stop tectonic plates from moving beneath our feet. Earth is a dynamic planet. Its crust shifts, mountains rise and erode, minerals circulate and geological forces operate over millions of years. The same restless planet that produces earthquakes is also the planet that produced oceans, forests, biodiversity and, eventually, us.

Perhaps a world capable of sustaining complex life cannot also be a perfectly safe world.

Perhaps it could.

We don’t know.

But we do know something else: the consequences of an earthquake are not determined by geology alone. An earthquake is a natural event. A mass-casualty disaster is partly a human creation.

The ground does not decide whether a building will withstand shaking. We do. The earth does not decide whether a hospital has emergency power. We do. A fault line does not decide whether building codes are enforced, whether vulnerable communities receive adequate preparation, whether first responders have the equipment they need or whether governments invest in early-warning systems. Those are human choices.

This is where the conversation about suffering needs to move beyond the question of why God allows earthquakes and toward the question of what human beings owe one another when they occur.

We can build safer structures, enforce seismic standards, strengthen hospitals and schools. We can improve emergency communications and early-warning systems. We can train first responders and ensure that medical teams have the equipment and support they need when ordinary systems collapse. We can make international agreements that allow rescue personnel, medicine and supplies to cross borders quickly when disaster strikes. And we can pay particular attention to people who are already vulnerable—the poor, the elderly, children, people with disabilities and communities living in structures least capable of withstanding disaster.

These are not vague responsibilities but expressions of solidarity.

When someone is trapped beneath concrete, the most important question is not whether they belong to our religion, nationality, political party, or economic class. The question is whether we can reach them.

This is why the image of a rescuer pulling a baby from the rubble carries such power. We can call it a miracle. We can call it courage. We can call it science, training and extraordinary human coordination. It is all of those things. But there is something else happening in that moment: human beings refusing to abandon one another. That may be the most important answer available to us.

Theologian John Hick described the world as a “vale of soul-making,” suggesting that courage, compassion and moral responsibility develop through struggle. There is wisdom in the idea that adversity can reveal our capacity for goodness. 

But we should be careful. Suffering does not automatically make us better. Sometimes it simply destroys. A child crushed by an earthquake does not become more courageous because the earthquake happened.

There is a profound difference between saying that human beings can create meaning from suffering and saying that suffering was created for the sake of that meaning.

The first honors human resilience. The second risks explaining away tragedy. I would rather leave some questions unanswered than offer certainty that diminishes another person’s grief.

Why did the earth move beneath that child’s bed? I don’t know.

Could God have created a world without earthquakes? I don’t know.

Could such a world have sustained life as we know it? I don’t know.

But I do know that we have been given a world in which our choices matter. We cannot make Earth perfectly safe but we can make human beings safer upon it. We can prepare and build wisely. We can respond quickly and rescue. We can care for the wounded and refuse to abandon the people beneath the rubble.

That is where theology and civic responsibility meet. We may never understand why the earth sometimes moves beneath us. But we can decide what happens after it does.

We cannot control the movement of the earth. But we can choose to move toward one another. And when the ground gives way, that choice may be the most solid ground we have.

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George Cassidy Payne, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Rochester-based writer whose work sits at the intersection of politics, ethics, and lived experience. A poet, philosopher, and 988 crisis counselor, he covers issues of democracy, justice, and community resilience.