God and Nature in Genesis
When God has made each new feature in His Universe, He is described in chapter one as seeing that it was good. This belief in God as Creator is fundamental to Christianity, and distinguishes it from other philosophies of existence such as Hinduism or Buddhism. But in Genesis this belief leads to another one : God is responsible for all that happens in nature, and therefore is the agent in all great natural disasters too. The writers of Genesis do not regard the Flood, for instance, as an unfortunate event for which no-one can be blamed. The Flood, we are told, was sent by God. Perhaps the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah is in the same category : though here we cannot be sure. It may be that the writers of Genesis 18 and 19 would have protested that this was a supernatural event. But the majority of the commentators ever since have treated the event as a natural disaster and explained it as such. In any case both the Flood and overthrow of Sodo...