(Un)natural Evil

I noted some dissatisfaction the other day with David B. Hart’s suggestion in his Opinion Journal piece that natural disasters like the recent tsunami can be explained, at least in part, by the fallenness of creation. Hart says:

Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to “powers” and “principalities”–spiritual and terrestrial–alien to God.

Hart intends, I take it, to distinguish himself from those who think that the world necessarily contains some evil, even if that evil is balanced by good. In fact, he makes this explicit in some remarks at Mere Comments:

What is essential—and this is all I ever meant to say—is to distinguish between two understandings of God’s power over creation. In one—a deist understanding—the world was created from eternity to be an intricate machinery of good and evil, darkness and light, exquisitely balanced between felicity and moral gravity, wherein death and suffering constitute necessary elements of God’s creative purposes, without which he could not bring his purposes to fruition, and wherein every event is part of a perfectly coherent scheme of cosmic and spiritual harmony. In the other—the Christian understanding—God creates us for union with himself, requiring no passage through evil to realize the good in us and to divinize us, but we fall away into the damnable absurdity of sin, death, and hell, from which God then rescues us; while indeed God, in the economy of salvation, makes even death obedient to his saving purposes, he does so as the one who on the last day will judge and damn the meaningless brutality and absurdity of fallen existence, and—far from disclosing the inherent rationality and moral necessity of death—will conquer it utterly on behalf of its victims. Yes, God uses suffering and death for the good; but, no, in themselves they are contrary to the nature of the world, in enmity to God’s goodness, and “meaningless” (that is, they do not possess that ontological or moral necessity that either a deist or a semi-Hegelian theologian would assign them).

Hart’s point is that the evil of the world is a contingent fact, not a necessary one. And this implies that creation, at least “originally,” was devoid of evil. So the question then becomes how evil entered into it. Since natural catastrophes and the general structure of the world that brings them about cannot plausibly be based on human sin, Hart adverts to the demonic powers that are in rebellion against God.

The strength of this view is that it denies God’s complicity in the horrors of our world. If the world’s evil is somehow a necessary feature of creation, then how can we deny that God is responsible for it? On the other hand, if evil is the result of the free actions of creatures (whether human or demonic), then God would not seem to be directly responsible and we could affirm that evil is opposed to the nature of creation.

The weakness is that most of us, I suspect, have a hard time making sense of the notion that demonic powers are responsible for natural evil, or we just don’t find it plausible. We see the world from a scientific perspective as an interlocking series of causes and events, a series that inevitably involves a certain degree of suffering. The very structure of our world, it seems to us, creates the possibilty that sentient creatures will suffer, and we have a hard time imagining how it could be otherwise.

And yet, the biblical promise is that God will redeem his creation, so the idea of a creation devoid of evil (natural or moral) must, according to the Christian tradition, be possible, even if we can’t see how. Nor do we have much idea about what relation the new heavens and earth will bear to our present reality. But the bottom line is that a creation free from evil (which presumably includes death, decay, suffering and other “natural” evils) is God’s ultimate intention.

So, does this mean we have to suppose that creation would have been free from evil if no creatures had disrupted it by the misuse of their free will? Or was it not possible for God to create a world without natural evil even if no creature had sinned?