A wave of hot air: after the deluge, the God talk.

• Author: Young, Cathy

LAST DECEMBER, AS the world tried to grapple with the devastating scope of the tsunami that hit South Asia--at last count, the death toll stood at nearly 300,000--the tragedy became fodder for fatuous religious discussions, focusing on an ancient question: How can a just, good, all-powerful, all-loving God allow evil to happen and innocents to suffer?

"Very hard to square with an involved Deity," John Derbyshire wrote on National Review's weblog, The Corner. "I can't do it myself, yet I am constitutionally unable to NOT believe in that Deity. I think I'll go lie down for a while."

Perhaps due to a different constitution, I can't really relate to his dilemma. My own agnostic view is that if there is a deity, He, She, or It probably isn't a hands-on manager of the world's day-to-day operations; this spares me the need to grapple with Derbyshire's paradox. Which is not to say that the post-tsunami God debate hasn't been enlightening.

For one thing, it should--but won't--lay to rest the notion that the mainstream media treat faith and its adherents with scorn, and that talk of God is somehow marginalized in our secular public square. In fact, in the aftermath of the tsunami, religion held a distinctly privileged place in America's public discourse. Numerous papers around the country ran stories on post-disaster soul searching about evil, suffering, and the meaning of life that usually gave only passing mention to nonreligious philosophies.

On the op-ed pages and on the airwaves, there were plenty of voices representing various faiths, with little if any input from humanists, agnostics, or other secularists. On CNN, Larry King convened a panel composed of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler Jr., left-wing rabbi Michael Lerner, bestselling guru Deepak Chopra, a Catholic priest, an adviser to the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and a Buddhist monk. On MSNBC's Scarborough Country, a similarly ecumenical gathering generously included a token atheist who could barely get in a word edgewise.

What did all this faith-based commentary offer to--as Milton put it--"justify the ways of God to man"? Most of it amounted to well-worn banalities: God's ways are mysterious and cannot be fathomed by the human mind; we know God loves us because he told us so in the Bible. There were a few half-veiled suggestions that the tsunamis were a punishment from God, or an expression of his well-deserved wrath.

The evangelist Anne Graham Lotz...