Moving in strange ways

Another Life: The storms left great stretches of the strand heaped with glistening kelp - Laminaria of science, sea-rods of folklife, tangle of poets. The tangles were massive, knee-deep, wrenched up with their holdfasts from seabed reefs and rolled ashore in the biggest surf in years.

I trod among them carefully, wary of ending up sprawled across a cold and slithery mattress, rank with salt and iodine.

Kelp is generally slippery, but Laminaria hyperborea is the slitheriest of all. Its coating of mucus has a function, protecting its fronds against wear as they rub back and forth in the turmoil of passing swells.

I enjoy such adaptive demonstrations. The wonder of evolution and other awesome revelations of science are what I make do with instead of God, and what can occupy wanderings on the shore that others, on the pious side, might fill with praise and prayer. Nature's beauty is also a durable source of uplift, however mysterious it may be. Neither of these, alas, suggests any particular purpose to human life, except in human terms. But "alas" may hold the key to why one goes on worrying about the world, while knowing that the planet can get on perfectly well - even better, probably - without us.

The public debate about faith in God that has followed the tsunami has quite startled this outsider. In a typical comment: "Great suffering of this immensity must challenge religious belief in, above all, divine control and intervention." But why should the deaths of 300,000-odd innocent humans originating from a natural phenomenon present any more of a religious problem than the fate of one virtuous person snatched off a rock at Achill, say, by a rogue wave? Are there rules about the amount of human anguish compatible with divine assent?

Father Sean McDonagh, the Columban missionary whose eco-warrior writings I discussed here recently, argues that God works through the processes of nature and his omnipotence "doesn't allow him to click his fingers and stop the earthquake". The MA course in Ecology and Religion that McDonagh directs for the Columbans at Dalgan Park, Navan, has produced an even more passionate book than his own Death of Life. Nellie McLaughlin, a Sister of Mercy from the storm-swept peninsula of Inishowen, Co Donegal, teaches cosmology, ecology and sustainable living there, and her paperback Out of Wonder: The Evolving Story of the Universe (Veritas, 14.95) is a heady blend of exposition and lyricism that hitches God's Creation to the Gaian metaphor of a living, self-regulating Earth. The book's range and poetic energy are remarkable, and as eager as any New Age testament to celebrate "the oneness of all". Sister Nellie's sense of relatedness to nature is refreshingly eclectic for an Irish Catholic nun: "The spirituality of the great goddess, of Gaia, Mother Earth, is dancing into life, inviting us back to our roots . . ." And some sort of rapture - spiritual, scientific, aesthetic - seems, indeed, quite necessary to an accepting reconnection with the planet.

Richard Dawkins, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, is an evolutionary biologist whose atheism has recently taken on an almost fundamentalist evangelism. He thinks that religion has held people back from a proper understanding of the world - an understanding that might, indeed, have warned at least some of the tsunami victims.

Dawkins' rationality is nobly expressed but as daunting to live by as the figure of St Simeon Stylites preaching from his pillar. To believe, as I try to, that my life is entirely a product of genetic chance, may be suitably modest but not always much fun. Connecting to nature, on the other hand, is to be in on the buzz of Gaia, and when stuff happens - as it will - to presume to understand why.