Poll results at BeliefNet are discouraging.
Thirty eight percent of those who participated in the online poll said they believed that God caused the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.
Eleven percent of those said that God was either testing us or punishing us. This isn't a big number, to be sure, but the fact that anyone intelligent enough to regularly access Belief Net would think that God deliberately triggered the earthquake in order to kill so many, including so many children, is depressing. What crime were those thousands of children guilty of that God decided to destroy them? What sin had their parents committed that parents all over the world haven't committed that God chose to visit this grief upon them? To think that this horror was somehow a Divine punishment is complete nonsense.
We don't presume to possess exhaustive understanding of God's ways, of course, but nevertheless we find it most unlikely that God deliberately visits suffering and grief upon people. God has created a world that, for whatever reason, is subject to natural laws, and those laws are blind to the moral goodness of the people affected by them.
Good people sometimes suffer painful illnesses and experience horrible grief. Bad people often live opulently and die seemingly happy at a ripe age. God doesn't bring this injustice about. He may permit it to happen for reasons that have mystified believers for thousands of years, but He doesn't cause it. He may "use" it when it happens, but He doesn't make it happen.
God, we suspect, intervenes less frequently in the world than some apparently believe, and we doubt that He ever intervenes to deliberately cause innocent people harm. To think otherwise is to imagine Him to be a cruel and vindictive deity, and that is not the God of Christian belief.