Posted on: 27th August 2026

I’m writing this blog on the morning of the 27th August 2026, as we hear emerging news from a flash flood in Nepal and Tibet, seemingly caused by a ‘glacial collapse’. Information is still coming in, including a rapidly rising number of deaths. I’m just taking a deep breath and praying before I continue.

What might cause a glacial collapse? According to The Guardian website, ‘Researchers in Kathmandu found earlier this year that glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalaya region are melting faster, with ice loss rates doubling since 2000.’ Is the answer so simple? Climate change is making the world hotter. Over the coming decades, previously habitable parts of the world will become less so, causing human migration on an unprecedented scale. Like
children visiting a factory, we have pulled the levers of a complex machine, and we don’t understand (or don’t want to understand) why what has happened has happened. Viewing the world as a complex machine (sometimes called materialism or physicalism) gives us a straightforward answer but seems to reduce it somehow.

Some Christians offer an alternative explanation: God did it. They might follow that assertion with a ‘Glory to God!’, which feels to me like a challenge to anyone who might question them. I find this claim to be based on a similar view of the universe to that of the materialists: we are all just parts of a machine controlled by the great factory owner in the sky.

I don’t know about you, but I find that life is complex and multidimensional. Just getting out of the door takes a whole bunch of decisions. I am a spiritual being, which means – among other things – that I have the capacity to connect with God and other people on a level much deeper than the surface. Nothing about us can be reduced to simple cause and effect.

Jesus addresses some of these questions directly and indirectly. When asked if a man was born blind because of his parents or his own sin, Jesus dismisses the search for an easy cause-and-effect answer. Instead, he says that the man’s disability is best seen as an opportunity for him to cooperate with his heavenly father in bringing healing (John 9:3).

In a famous story about the terror of nature, Jesus commands a storm to be still. The disciples stop being afraid of the storm and start being afraid of Jesus: ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’ (Mark 4:41 NRSVUE) We might be tempted to see this as picture language, because we live in a disenchanted world, but it’s perfectly possible that the disciples believed that the wind was a spirit that might obey or disobey Jesus. We should be careful that the materialism of our age doesn’t rob us of spiritual insight into the world. A biblical worldview sees spirit (and therefore some degree of life and agency) everywhere. The world is not a machine to be controlled by humans, or even by God; it is alive and responsive: it could have disobeyed.

Famously, when Jesus returned to his home village, ‘he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hand on few sick people and cured them’. (Mark 6:5) Just like the ‘obedience’ of the wind and the sea, Jesus’s work seems to require a response from creatures. This world does not completely conform to the visions of shalom in Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21, but wherever we respond to God’s prompting, we can see signs and wonders.

Seeing these huge, catastrophic events as caused by forces beyond our control (God or climate change) stops us from seeing that actually this disaster was caused by millions of small decisions, most of which ignored God completely. As spiritual beings, made in the image of God, we have to accept that we are part of this world and therefore part of the problem. And with God’s help we can be part of the solution.

Perhaps we should stop (or at least delay) the search for a cause and someone to blame and instead ask God how we are to be involved in God’s loving response?