I have the bad habit of talking back to my car radio, which usually has on talk or sports talk. (Littlest thinks I'm nuts, but I'm sure this is not the only reason for her belief.) The other night I'm flipping through channels and someone is guest-hosting for Savage, and callers are talking about whether the Asian tsunamis shake one's faith in God. I, a proud Armenian and consumer of Ararat brandy, am fairly screaming at the radio "Noah's ark, you idiots!" A much more articulate answer comes David Hart. The paragraph that strikes home:

Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him--"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not"--and his appearance within "this cosmos" is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature.

I recall Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions and think that the conflict even exists among Christians. One of the items I am thinking about right now for long-run development of my thoughts and faith is how to reconcile Sowell's "constrained vision", one based on Hayekian or Friedmanite principles, with such thoughts in the church as a "theology of abundance" or Martin Luther's two kingdoms and antipathy towards reason .

But I see no reason to believe that the tsunamis prove anything about God or His love. Just as after the Flood, there will be rainbows after the tsunamis. 7.5 million of them, and growing.