Natural disasters bring incomprehensible suffering. In this, they differ from manmade calamities. If you believe in free will, you can at least allow that human beings are capable of inexhaustible evil when they turn away from God, and that innocents suffer as a consequence. Even if God exists, free will makes the Holocaust, Pol Pot and Stalin possible. But when the plates of the Earth's crust shift suddenly, plunging whole populations into desperate agony, there are no moral lessons to be drawn. This solid Earth can become a monster, snatching babies from their mothers' arms and drowning saints and sinners...