South East Asia The Tsunami Nature as God’s Creature: Good, but Imperfect by Marco Bersanelli Even at the dawn of the third millennium, nature unleashes its fury upon us and reaps its victims, not only in the great disasters like the terrible tsunami of December 26th, but daily, in floods, diseases, earthquakes, and fires. Just think, every year 1,000 people die from lightning strikes alone. But the natural elements that cause death (fire, water, the movement of the earth’s crust) are also the ones to which we owe our life. In particular, earthquakes are profoundly associated with the possibility of our existence. Seismic activity is the direct manifestation of the slow and mighty movements of the plates of the earth’s crust that slip along the layers under the mantle. No other planet in the solar system has a similar geologic structure, and this is one of the reasons for the Earth’s extraordinary capacity to keep the average temperature stable over the billions of years necessary for biological evolution. Thus, paradoxically, if we had sensitive enough instruments, a clue in the search for planets beyond our system capable of hosting life could be the revelation of seismic activity on their surfaces. The seismic event that devastated Southeast Asia was enormous, with a magnitude of 9.0, the fourth in order of intensity in this century. In less than four minutes, vast areas of the ocean floor were lifted about 10 yards, releasing the energy of a billion billion Joules, the equivalent of 23 thousand atom bombs. But even these dizzying numbers are a mere trifle compared to the energies normally in action on a planetary level, so the Earth as a whole did not feel the effects. There was a great deal of talk about the permanent changes following the Indochinese tsunami, but the shift of the earth’s axis (three ten millionths of a degree) and the slow-down of the length of the day (2 millionths of a second) are well below normal fluctuations, insignificant on a global level, even too small to be measured. A ripple in the ocean, or an imperceptible breath on the skin of our planet, is enough to ravage our existence. Such phenomena show the fragility and refinement of the world that we take for granted every day. The normality of the universe is not at all a calm sea teeming with life; rather, it is a boundless desert of still spaces, or the unleashing of irresistible forces. The explosion of a nearby supernova could cause our total extinction in an instant, but these same stellar explosions in a distant past released the carbon, oxygen, and other elements essential for us and for every organism. Terrestrial life exists in an exquisitely delicate niche, prodigiously carved out, exploiting the products of the entire history of the cosmos. So actually, nature isn’t cruel; it’s providential but at the same time imperfect, dangerous, and at times violent. Perhaps this poses a problem for those philosophical or religious conceptions that more or less explicitly identify nature with the divine, and that also generate some of the ideological positions currently in style. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, instead, nature is not God: nature is God’s creation, “something good,” but then mysteriously marked by evil, subject to “corruption” and incompleteness. Nature mirrors man’s condition, the condition of each of us, well intentioned but imperfect, fragile, a bit bad, and sometimes capable of terrible actions. No reasonable man, in fact, expects salvation from the forces of creation or from human capabilities. Thus, in the face of nature’s onslaught and the misery of our limit, the profound question is about the meaning of existence, a question that can only be answered by a Presence more powerful than the storm and more benevolent than us. Our shared sense of this meaning of life moves us to help the survivors, and makes us feel close to the pain of each desperate mother and each child left alone on those devastated beaches.