Now if the weather keeps on changing in the way that it seems to be going, and its effects grow yet more unpredictable and extreme, the tabloids are going to have a field day looking for someone to blame. Do they turn religious and blame God, just like in the old days, or will they turn on those scientists who insist that it's impossible to prove what people say is happening, or perhaps those spokespersons for the capitalist system who have been telling us that the rampant amorality of the free market is intrinsically the best model for human behaviour. Well if those are the alternatives, I guess it will just have to laid at the feet of God. The others would never admit to being wrong.

Torrential rain and flood disasters, gales and tornados, the earth slipping from below and uprooted trees falling from on high, the natural world around us seems fairly apocalyptic at the moment. But perhaps the worst is yet to come if that tanker, now at the bottom of the sea just off the Channel Islands, leaks its poisonous cargo into the ocean.

So “who is to blame?” I hear the tabloids cry, and thereby hangs a tale. Other occasions of huge loss of life, such as yesterday’s plane crash, or the recent railway carnage, are clearly a fault in a man-made system, and blame is readily assigned to human error. But when the weather is involved we often prefer to see things as natural catastrophes.

And though many people facing such awesome events might pray for safe deliverance even though they are none too religious the rest of the time, once the danger is over how quickly we remember who was really to blame. As the insurance companies like to say, such catastrophes are Acts of God, and that’s not our responsibility.

But Qur’an says “Whatever affliction may visit you is for what your own hands have earned; and God pardons much..…..and, apart from God, you have no protector nor helper”.

“When the earth has taken on its glitter and has decked itself fair, and its inhabitants think they have power over it, Our command comes upon it by night or day, and We reduce it to stubble …….. Even so We distinguish the signs for a people who reflect”.

Such destruction may be a key to understanding our lives, but of course we don’t reflect. In fact we rarely remember long enough to prevent us from instantly making the same mistakes again, rebuilding on top of the volcano, the fault line or the flood plain. And we don’t understand why we should change if God was the One to blame?

In fact, if such things happen, why believe in God at all? How many use the starving children of Africa to justify denial of God’s existence? How could a caring God let such things happen?

Well, if there is no God, and no Afterlife, what does anyone’s death matter. Life is only given meaning by the Justice of the Afterlife. “And God is the most just of Judges” says Qur’an.