"Of course this makes us doubt God's existence."

Who said that? The Most Reverend Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, as quoted and published in The Daily Telegraph (London). No, as far as I can make out, the Archbishop is not himself ready to throw away his own faith. But he is woefully unprepared to defend it, and it shows. Consider this:

The extraordinary fact is that belief has survived such tests again and again – not because it comforts or explains but because believers cannot deny what has been shown or given to them. They have learned to see the world and life in the world as a freely given gift; they have learned to be open to a calling or invitation from outside their own resources, a calling to accept God's mercy for themselves and make it real for others; they have learned that there is some reality to which they can only relate in amazement and silence. These convictions are terribly assaulted by all those other facts of human experience that seem to point to a completely arbitrary world, but people still feel bound to them, not for comfort or ease, but because they have imposed themselves on the shape of a life and the habits of a heart.

Correct as far as it goes, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. He is still judging the world, and any disasters that befall people in it, in human terms. Jesus had a few Words with his number-one guy, Peter, when he said things like this, and they were not pretty: "Get thee behind Me, Satan!"

If that sounds harsh, I have another explanation that, while not sounding quite so bracing, still points out a stark reality: Jesus asked rhetorically whether certain persons who died in a building collapse had been any worse sinners than the survivors and bystanders. His Answer: no.

The Archbishop also ignores two things which, did he fully grasp them, would have helped him greatly to explain the case for faith:

1. This life we leed isn't all there is. Another life lies beyond. We cannot communicate with those who have made the transition, but we have Jesus' Word that after that transition will come a judgment of some kind.
2. More specifically, Jesus also warned everyone to be on the lookout for signs that this age was coming to an end. He mentioned war, famine, and earthquake. The war we've got--or rather, wars, in Iraq and elsewhere. The famine we've got, too--always somewhere. And last week we saw an earthquake in a spot not usually prone to them. It made a big wave that washed out a lot of lives, most certainly. But it also did something to the earth's very equilibrium. Isaiah told us that someday the earth would stagger like a drunkard. Ladies and gentlemen, you just felt the first such stagger.

And those probably 200,000-plus people (at least, I estimate that many deaths before it's all over) who were washed to death on that day are just a taste of what this world is going to see during a period of future history called the Tribulation. They include a pandemic that will kill upward of a billion and a half people--one-forth of the people then alive. And that's just for starters.

Frankly, I have never been confident in this Archbishop. Now I see someone who simply doesn't belong in the office--not because he's deliberately trying to undermine the faith (at least, not this time), but because he is so singularly ill-equipped to defend it--shocking in one supposedly so learned. In fact, this earthquake-and-tsunami episode has a hard lesson for us all. Learn it now, before it's too late.