In December of 2004, a Sumatran-Andaman earthquake caused tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. Prompted by the earthquake, many people, including the New York Times, asked the philosophical problem of evil: How could this world be the work of a benevolent God when nature destroys human lives?

The program interviews Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Ursula Goodenough to examine the scientific causes of the earthquakes and using earth sciences to answer religious questions. Just as in the program, we will start with Jelle Zeilinga de Boer.

De Boer is a Dutch geologist who grew up in Indonesia, a region of the world with routine seismic activity, including live volcanoes. At Wesleyan University, he designed a course that traces the short-term and long-term effects of seismic events. De Boer is fascinated by the movements of tectonic plates as manifestations of a living earth and has spent his life studying their collisions. He says that in millions of years, these fractures will ultimately make our world inhabitable and hospitable to life on earth. De Boer clams that the long term effects of a volcanic eruption are good, but most people don't realize them because they are concerned about the short term affects. A volcano creates new fertile earth on which new plants can grow and people or animals can then eat the vegetation that grows on these new land masses. Volcanoes ultimately provide food for future generations, if the land was actually used, but because of the tragedies that occur, people feel like the land shouldn't be touched. Many people believe that earthquakes and volcanoes are punishment from their god/gods. De Boer uses the analogy of a guitar string vibrating to describe the affects of the shifting tectonic plates. Just as a guitar string vibrates when plucked, the movements of the tectonic plates vibrate the earth, depending on how hard the string is plucked, the string will vibrate longer or shorter. How hard an earthquake hurts the human population, the longer it takes to rebuild. De Boer says that the Japanese built paper houses to make it easier to rebuild after and lower the death count from earthquakes. Paper doesn't crush as many people as bricks and concrete. The Japanese also realized that they were unable to control what happened under them and described the cause of the quakes as a giant catfish moving under the earth. De Boer likes this explanation because it didn't say anyone was at fault, a catfish is in nature, and the quakes were out of their control, the catfish has to move. De Boer believes that religion is important to answering some questions, he says it is impossible to avoid the religious questions, giving the example of evolution, in which he is a firm believer, no matter how far science gets, no one has found the zero point for all species. His main message is that we are all living in earthquake zones, physically and metaphorically. Life itself is driven by change and decay. The very ground we stand on, like our individual lives, is formed by the changes in geography and personality alike. Religion helps give insight to what these changes mean.

Ursula Goodenough, a non-theological philosopher searching for answers about morality and morals, makes the suggestion that we don’t need theology to provide insights to the problems of nature. The natural world is all, she says, we need to use to help us decide about what theologians call natural evil. She calls nature sacred, but to see nature as sacred she says the word sacred doesn't mean happy. Sacredness is both good and bad (click each for an example) in human life. She has a notion of transcendence as "horizontal" rather than "vertical". We look to God for an explanation of a natural disaster, because we think that we are part of something larger than ourselves. She says this is an essential human need, as deeply rooted as our tendency to put ourselves at the center. Goodenough believes that we can also find transcendence by forming a relationship with the whole world, including other human beings. She says we need to get away from the data from an experiment as the answer to a small question and move towards using that data and the data from other experiments as a whole to answer a much bigger question.