On December 26, 2003, over 30,000 victims perished in the Iranian earthquake in the town of Bam. To explain the vast death toll inflicted by an earthquake no stronger than that which struck the Californian town of Paso Robles within a few days, Iranian authorities pleaded poverty. It costs considerably more to engineer large-scale nuclear capability as Iran has done, than it costs to retro-fit buildings for safety in an earthquake-prone zone. The problem is not poverty, it is priority.
Here in the United States, the standard-bearer of Western civilization, we have two cultural imperatives imbedded deeply within our national DNA. Both flow from the Bible with which our founders were intimately familiar and by means of which they sculpted their world views.
Our first distinctive cultural imperative is to render ourselves less vulnerable to nature. We believed we were following Divine will when we developed medicine and medical technology to dominate disease. We found insecticides to protect our food supply, and we built dams to control rivers. We took seriously the commandment in the twenty-eighth verse of the Bible, “And God blessed them (Adam and Eve) saying ‘Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.'”
We never understood “subdue the world” to mean obliterate nature or otherwise despoil the environment. We knew it meant responsible stewardship and making ourselves less vulnerable to nature. We knew we were pleasing God by making ourselves safer and more secure, and this knowledge lent added urgency and meaning to our efforts. Not by coincidence did the overwhelming majority of these scientific and technical developments take place in the West.
Western civilization’s second distinctive cultural imperative is the importance of preserving human life. This too derives directly from our biblical roots and distinguishes us from the peculiar fatalism toward death found in so many other cultures.
Together, these two values enshrined in the West in general and in America in particular, are chiefly responsible for the vastly diminished impact that natural disasters inflict upon our society.
God runs this world with as little supernatural interference as possible. Earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and, yes, tsunamis happen. It is called nature, which is not always benign. Fortunately, God also gave us intelligence and commanded us to make ourselves less vulnerable to nature. He also implanted in us a culture in which each and every life is really important. That is why Deuteronomy (chapter 30) states, “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your seed may live.”
God may have allowed the earthquake to happen, just as he has allowed germs to exist and just as he has allowed cold weather each winter. But under the influence of biblical culture, people have defended themselves against germs and they have learned how to produce energy to defeat winter’s frigid conditions. A long time ago, God in His book provided the incentive and encouragement to survive nature. He isn’t to blame for the deaths in the Asian disaster. Many of those fatalities are attributable to misguided cultures.