The flooding in Texas that has killed at least 100 people, including dozens of little girls at a Christian camp on the Guadalupe River, is the kind of catastrophe that causes people to question the existence of God. How could a loving God allow this to happen? How can a system of Christian belief in a God of justice and mercy be reconciled with such suffering and devastation and death?

These questions aren’t new, of course. They regularly and understandably resurface at times of immense tragedy and suffering as a natural human reaction to the problem of evil and the pain of death. At such times, Christians in particular are called upon to explain how the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient God is consistent with a world beset by death and suffering.

The answers Christians often give in these circumstances are not always helpful, and are sometimes morally repugnant. During an interview on Monday, for example, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas was asked why “God doesn’t make sense” in the face of this tragedy. Instead of denying the premise of the question and affirming the orthodox Christian view that suffering and death have been conquered by Christ, Cruz gave an unfortunate answer that nevertheless reflects how many Christians deal with the problem of evil: “We have a good and benevolent God, but God allows things to happen sometimes that defy human explanation, and that’s where we need love and where we need grace.”

This of course is deeply wrong — a feeble attempt to justify the ways of God to man, which fails so spectacularly in the face of the actual catastrophe that it could easily be taken as an argument for rejecting God outright. After all, if the Christian God “allows” 27 children to die in flash floods, and the only response Christians can give is that there’s some divine explanation for it beyond human reason, some “larger purpose” that necessitates the death of innocents, a person might be forgiven for concluding, as Ivan Karamazov did, that they want no part of God’s kingdom.

David Bentley Hart made this point in the aftermath of the tsunami that struck Indonesia in 2004, killing hundreds of thousands of people. What makes Ivan’s argument so disturbing, wrote Hart,

is not that he accuses God of failing to save the innocent; rather, he rejects salvation itself, insofar as he understands it, and on moral grounds. He grants that one day there may be an eternal harmony established, one that we will discover somehow necessitated the suffering of children, and perhaps mothers will forgive the murderers of their babies, and all will praise God’s justice; but Ivan wants neither harmony—“for love of man I reject it,” “it is not worth the tears of that one tortured child”—nor forgiveness; and so, not denying there is a God, he simply chooses to return his ticket of entrance to God’s Kingdom. After all, Ivan asks, if you could bring about a universal and final beatitude for all beings by torturing one small child to death, would you think the price acceptable?

This, and not some weak atheist challenge, is the argument Christians need to counter in moments of profound tragedy. There’s a tendency, stronger in some Christian traditions than others, to treat the vicissitudes of life and the indiscriminate nature of human suffering as a kind of heavenly equation that in the end will add up to something intelligible and reasonable. According to this way of thinking, evil and death are not merely corruptions of reality that God, in his omnipotence, can redeem and use for His own good purposes, but they have some positive role to play in Divine Providence.

This is not the orthodox Christian view. Traditionally, Christians have understood evil as a disfigurement of the good, an absence rather than a presence, without any substance of its own. In the legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien, for example, evil creatures like Orcs and Trolls are depicted as corruptions and counterfeits. Morgoth and Sauron, for all their power, are incapable of creating life themselves. Of Orcs, Frodo says in The Return of the King, “The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.”

For Tolkien, a devout Catholic, the fall of man and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden loomed large. It wasn’t just that man sinned and was therefore alienated from God, but that through sin death entered the world, corrupting and disfiguring creation itself. Christ’s Passion and Resurrection reconciled man to Himself but also pointed to the coming of a new heaven and a new earth, where sin and death would be overcome. In the meantime, all of creation groans and travails in anticipation of that final victory.

Christians are not always good at talking about this essential aspect of our faith. But it’s precisely this that we need to proclaim as the floodwaters recede and we bury the dead. There’s simply something monstrous and unnatural about death and suffering. They were not meant to be part of the world God made for His children. As Hart wrote, the reality of the cross “should not obscure that other truth revealed at Easter: that the incarnate God enters ‘this cosmos’ not simply to disclose its immanent rationality, but to break the boundaries of fallen nature asunder, and to refashion creation after its ancient beauty — wherein neither sin nor death had any place.”

Simply put, it’s wrong to look upon the devastation in Texas and say that God allowed it to happen for some inscrutable or mysterious reason, as if the purposes of the Almighty require the drowning of innocent girls. We Christians don’t need — and in truth, are not permitted — to believe that. We believe and proclaim instead something yet more profound: that Christ has conquered sin and death, and they now have no power over us. That’s why, even as we mourn and grieve, we can say with Saint Paul, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”