Reporter Michael McAteer of The Toronto Star wrote:

"How could a benevolent, all-caring God allow it to happen? Traditional answers will get us only so far, says Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual leader of the world's 70 million [Christians in the] Anglican [Community]. The question of 'how you can you believe in a God who permits suffering on such a scale' is very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren't, indeed it would be wrong if it weren't,' Williams wrote in an article published in a British Sunday paper. The Welsh-born Williams recalled that as a teenager contemplating studying theology at university he watched a television discussion on God and suffering shortly after the Aberfan disaster in South Wales where coal waste slid down a mountain, killing 144 people, including 116 children. He watched the discussion with 'disbelief and astonishment at the vacuous words pouring out about the nature of God's power or control, or about the consolations of belief in an afterlife or whatever.'

Making sense of a great disaster is a challenge simply because those who are closest to the cost are the ones least likely to accept some sort of intellectual explanation, however polished, Williams wrote. And, he asked, why should they? The extraordinary fact is 'that belief has survived such tests again and again not because it comforts or explains but because believers cannot deny what has been shown or given to them.' Every single random, accidental death, Williams wrote, is something that 'should upset a faith bound up with comfort and ready answers. Faced with the paralyzing magnitude of a disaster like this, we naturally feel more deeply outraged and alone, more deeply helpless'." ₃

Rev. Wayne Hilliker of Chalmers United Church in Kingston ON Canada sensed that many of his parishioners have been asking themselves how an "all-knowing, all-powerful God of love" could create a tsunami to slam into some of the poorest countries of the world and cause so many deaths. He said during an interview:

"If you're looking for absolutes and certainties, then you'll find it easy to say it's the will of God. But anyone who has, it seems to me, a serious reflective mind about their faith is bound to question some of the traditional characteristics we've put upon God."

He told his congregation that:

"There are whys we just don't have answers for but we can do something. We can respond, we can help, and we can believe that somehow God is present....I saw on the news that Buddhist and Muslim university students were working together in India. They were getting along and they had been fighting each other. I'm not naive enough to think they won't go back to fighting but it is a sign to the whole world that it is possible that those who have been enemies with one another can be one in acts of compassion." ₄

Hallett Llewellyn, minister at Trinity St. Paul's United Church in Toronto, ON, Canada congratulated Archbishop Williams for openly discussing his religious struggle over the meaning of the tsunami. Llewellyn said that this is better than:

"the certainty that allows no kind of room for people to question their faith."

He said that the tragedy has challenged God'sL

"traditional attributes of omniscience and omnipotence â€" the all-powerful God. You can't help but question why they are not in play....I do tend to separate my belief in God from my faith in God trusting no matter what happens there is a supreme good purpose underlying the realities of life. It is something I continue to hold on to." ₅

Anglican Archbishop Andrew Hutchison, the Primate of Canada, said that he has never abandoned his faith, even for a moment, in the face of natural disasters. But he has wrestled with the questions now being raised about the tsunami. He said:

"How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on such a scale? How can you, indeed? There is no answer to that. And yet you do."

When asked why God did not prevent the catastrophe, he said:

"I don't know, I just don't know. Is it only so that goodness shines through the more clearly? You can't know light unless you know darkness. Somehow they co-exist." ₃

Rabbi Elliot Dorff, rector and philosophy professor at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, said:

"If God has made a finite world, then it has to suffer from the kinds of things finitude suffers from....things like: life is not forever, there is illness as well as health, and there are earthquakes and rain....The real issue is not so much how we make sense of [the tsunami], because it's quite possible we can't make sense of it. The real issue is how we respond and try to ameliorate the suffering of the people who have suffered." ₁

"As these vast continent-building processes continue, we ask for the wisdom of God to help us live within the risks, and work to lessen the conditions which leave the poor and most vulnerable of the world bearing the brunt of such destruction in the future." ₆

Ruth Barrett, a Wiccan high priestess who leads a Wisconsin temple dedicated to the Roman goddess Diana, said that the earthquake and tsunami were simply a case of:

"Mother Nature stretching â€" she had a kink in her back and stretched. Though the resulting casualties were horrendous dwelling on why people suffered was narcissistic when nature constantly reshapes itself. We're so self-centered and think we are the be-all and end-all of the universe." ₁