From Edward Correia of Uncertain Believer:

The earthquake in Haiti is one of the great human disasters of this young century. Imagine how many thousands of times Haitians have asked themselves: Where is God? Why did God allow this to happen? That is a natural reaction, based on centuries of looking to God to explain natural disasters. But as I discuss in The Uncertain Believer, man has steadily looked to science to understand the phenomena of nature, from the beautiful to the terrible. But this intellectual advance is not universal and, even among those who tend to reject “divine” explanations, it still may be difficult to think God has nothing to do with such overwhelming destruction and loss of life.
Consider three possible roles for God in the Haiti disaster.
The first is the one we associate with our primitive ancestors who understood natural disasters as punishment by God. Evangelist Pat Robertson is a good example of someone who takes this position. On his television show, The 700 Club, he claimed that the disaster was God’s revenge for a “pact with the devil” that Haitians had made to gain their independence from France more than 200 years ago.
One of the few virtues of this explanation is that it is dramatic, much more interesting than a scientific analysis of the tectonic plates beneath the Caribbean. Another is that it assumes a rational cause and effect calculus by God that is part of the complex rules that govern the universe: If you make a pact with the devil, God will punish you. This at least means that God is not handing out suffering arbitrarily and on a whim, as the Greek gods sometimes did.
On the other hand, how can Robertson or anyone else love (or at least respect) a God that is too weak to prevent a pact with the devil in the first place and is so cruel as to inflict this level of suffering 200 years after the transgression. Wouldn’t a loving God have simply used God’s power to prevent the pact in the first place? And, while at it, give Haitians the education, health care, and economic development to prevent the squalid poverty in which they have lived for centuries? If we go down this road with Robertson, we arrive at a conception of God that is so far removed from a loving God that we may have a sense of despair.
Another approach is to say that God is nature itself, both the terrible and the beautiful. This is the conception the Vatican sees in the movie Avatar (and was concerned enough to issue a statement condemning this vision). It is certainly possible to conceive of God as nature. We can be particularly attracted to this vision when we experience spectacularly beautiful or amazingly complex phenomena. They literally take our breath away. Some philosophers (Spinoza for one) held that God is nature, and primitive pantheism finds God in rocks, trees, and rivers. If we go down this road, we see the Haitian earthquake as one of the infinite aspects of God, but there is no rational cause and effect calculation, no idea of punishment. God is simply God—beautiful and ugly, destructive and constructive, life-giving and life-taking. Step back and behold.
But if we go down this road, we begin to see all the problems with this conception, too. If God is everything we see around us, what guidance does that give us about our lives ? Is there a framework for living in the mountains, rivers, and earthquakes? How does this idea of God help us in our relationships? How does it lead to a better world? We are at a dead end because once God becomes everything, the idea of God fades into the background of everyday reality, and, paradoxically, God can become nothing.
The third conception of God is the one that makes sense to me, and this God is glaringly evident in Haiti. This is God as the ideal of unqualified compassion for others. I argue in The Uncertain Believer that this is the central unifying idea of all major religions. If we conceive of God in this way, we see God at work in the heroic efforts of rescue workers and in those who comfort the dying and those who have lost loved ones. We even see God in the response of nations throughout the world to send rescue ships and supplies and to commit resources to rebuild a devastated society. Yes, there is self-interest at work in much of this, as there always is, but there is genuine compassion, too. This idea of God does provide a framework for living. It provides hope for the future of the world.