Rep. Michelle Bachmann suggested (or joked) that Hurricane Irene and the August 23 Mineral, Virginia earthquake may be a warning from God to America; specifically, a warning that we must control our spending. My immediate reaction, as I posted on a friend's facebook comment about this, was to wonder if these disasters are a warning from God not to take dimwits like Bachmann seriously as presidential candidates. But the suggestion that God might conduct business in this way deserves some discussion.
First, it's easy to say that Bachmann's suggestion (if serious) is offensive on the face of it. Irene is blamed for a number of deaths, including a 20-year-old woman found drowned in her car hours after her desperate cell phone call for help. I cannot worship a God who would kill people so cruelly, and it is superstitious to invoke God as an explanation for natural disasters that are well explained by science.
It turns out that there was a specific event, a terrible event, that helped convince European intellectuals that earthquakes or other natural disasters are not acts of God and have no moral meaning. This was the earthquake that destroyed Lisbon on All Saints' Day in 1755. (The city was destroyed with catastrophic loss of life by the earthquake, a tsunami and fires.) Lisbon was devoutly Roman Catholic, and that such a disaster could strike on an important holy day in the church calendar made no sense. Philosophers such as Emmanuel Kant sought natural explanations for earthquakes. His explanation, which involved subterranean gases, was not correct, but it was reasonable and pointed the way to the modern explanation involving plate tectonics.
But is there ever a moral content to natural disasters? The answer may be yes, if the disaster is connected to a human failing. It's not difficult to think of examples: epidemics caused by poor sanitation or breakdowns in public health vigilance, or earthquake deaths caused by weak building codes or building codes not enforced due to corruption. More ominously, there is the continued lack of progress in mitigating climate change, expected to lead to increasingly intense storms or droughts. There may already be such disasters happening now that are tied to global warming, such as the historic drought in Texas. Many conservatives, including most of the Republican presidential candidates, question climate science. They also often disregard concern about world overpopulation, but the planet may be past its carrying capacity; at the least, the margin for safety (for world food supplies) is dangerously thin. Now I cannot blame anyone for sincerely believing that world overpopulation will be mitigated by an increase in prosperity, and I can't blame anyone who has sincere and informed doubts about anthropogenic climate change. But there is certainly moral blame for someone who deliberately misrepresents science in service of a special interest. We now know that the tobacco companies engaged in a decades-long effort to deceive the public about the medical research on smoking, knowing full well all the time that their products were deadly. If a similar 'tobacco strategy' is being followed by the fossil fuel industry, I suspect it would not look much different that we actually see today---a network of think tanks and media that share the same talking points on global warming, and which are very adept at injecting their point of view in the mainstream media. If this is in fact what the fossil fuel industry is doing, their moral responsibility would be great indeed.
Added 2011-08-31: Seth Stein, in his book Disaster Deferred, mentions the observation after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that a large whiskey warehouse survived the earthquake, which prompted a local wit (Charles Kellogg Field) to write: If, as they say, God spanked the town / for being frisky, / Why did He burn the churches down / And save Hotaling's whiskey?