Voltaire, Catastrophes, and Job

In our secular univeristies, the answer to “why is there suffering” is the standard enlightenment atheist answer. We suffer because we need to “innovate” and learn to reduce our suffering by engineering the world. At best, it offers a slight decrease in our suffering. At worse, it gives us an empty but comfortable life without any meaning or purpose.

Here is my latest over at RealClearReligion

On All Saints’ Day, 1755, the city of Lisbon shook, burned, and flooded. A powerful earthquake devastated the capital of Catholic Portugal while worshipers filled churches. Thousands died. Fires raged. The sea swallowed others whole. Across Europe, the tremors were not only geological — they were philosophical.

This tragedy became a turning point for the Enlightenment. Voltaire, the sharp-tongued French writer and critic of organized religion, saw in the Lisbon disaster a clear rebuke to the dominant theology of his day: Leibnizian optimism — the belief that this is “the best of all possible worlds” and that, in the grand design, all things work out for the best.

Voltaire didn’t buy it.

In his Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, he seethes at the suggestion that such horror could be justified in a cosmic ledger:

“Will ye reply: ‘You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God’?
Say ye, ‘God is avenged: the wage of sin is death’?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?”

Voltaire’s fury is aimed not at nature — but at theologies and philosophies that try to dress up disaster as part of a divine master plan. He asks what any honest observer must: If God is good and all-powerful, how could He allow this?

He concluded that God, if He exists, is not a moral being, and certainly not a present help in time of trouble. Rather than await divine rescue, Voltaire suggested that our only hope is human effort, modest improvement, and pragmatic reason. “We must cultivate our garden,” he wrote in Candide, rejecting both heavenly idealism and fatalism. Just do what good you can, and don’t expect answers from above.

These are not abstract objections. They echo from the pages of history into every scene of devastation and loss. And they demand a response. But not all responses are equal.

You can read the rest here:

https://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2025/07/07/voltaire_catastrophes_and_the_problem_of_job_1121102.html