In a TV broadcast following the horrific earthquake in Haiti on 12 January, the billionaire televangelist Pat Roberson told his audience that the Haitians had brought it on themselves by making a pact with the devil when they gained their independence from France 200 years ago.

The Archbishop of York (No 2 in the worldwide Anglican hierarchy) was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 about the Haiti earthquake. The interviewer John Humphries asked him: Where was God?

The archbishop’s answer was somewhat convoluted (I am being kind) but boiled down to this: God created the world, and we know what God is like because we have seen Jesus. He is with us. But having created this wonderful world, it is a world where bad things happen, and when they do God does not intervene to prevent the innocent from suffering.

This God is clearly different from the God of Pat Robertson who believes that bad things only happen to bad people. But however inhuman it may seem to blame the victims for their misfortune, this is logically more consistent with the idea of an all-powerful God who could have prevented the earthquake but chose not to. But can we really accept that every one of the 50 000 men women and children who died in the earthquake deserved to die? Such a thought is truly inhuman.

If, however, they did not all deserve to die, then can a God who chose not to intervene be all loving? At the very least it suggests that if he is all loving, he is also utterly incompetent.

The Christian answer to this that I have heard is that death is merely the beginning, a release from our suffering here on Earth. In that case, what of the tens of thousands who were not killed but badly injured, many of whom, given the complete lack of decent hospital facilities in Haiti, will no doubt die slow and agonising deaths? Does God not care for them?

One of the first scenes on our TV screens after the earthquake was of a group of young orange-clad missionaries boarding the first plane out of Port au Prince. They no doubt believe that God was calling them away from helping the victims because their prayers were needed back home in the Bible Belt.

But to return to the logical fallacy of an all-powerful, all-merciful God. A more tenable hypothesis is surely that no God had anything to do with the earthquake; it was the result of tectonic forces stressing the crust of the Earth below Port au Prince to breaking point. Maybe science will one day enable us to predict earthquakes, but until it does we are on our own.

Please give what you can to the earthquake victims. Disasters will happen, and no God is going to intervene to prevent it, or help the victims. It’s up to us.

Roy Brown is immediate past President of IHEU and IHEU's Main Representative at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva