Recently Camassia posted on how children’s stories can inculcate a sentimental view of animals and the natural world that is neither realistic nor truly compassionate. This led to a discussion about in what sense death and predation in the natural world are an essential part of the created order and what our attitude toward them should be.

As it happens, a book I just picked up from our local library – Animals on the Agenda: Questions About Animals for Theology and Ethics, edited by Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto – has a couple of essays that address this very question. In “Is Nature God’s Will?” philosopher Stephen R. L. Clark criticizes a fairly common form of nature mysticism or pantheism that equates what’s good with what’s “natural.” Well-meaning environmentalists may embrace this kind of worldview because of the damage they think, rightly or wrongly, has been done to the natural world because of the Judeo-Christian understanding of reality.

But, as Clark argues, if whatever is natural is good, then we really have no grounds for condemning anything:

If Nature’s Way is to be our guide, it is pointless to complain of mass extinctions, or pollution. In a mechanistic universe terms like ‘pollution’ (which implies that there are preferred states, or real goals) are out of place: there is only biochemical change. But ‘pollution’ is also out of place in a pantheistic world: there are only openings up of new ecological niches, the testing of old-established kinds against new challenges. It is the office of each kind, each ‘separate’ organism to maintain its own as best it may, so that the glory of the whole be made richer through the war of its parts. So the worship of Nature which has been so popular a response to environmental catastrophe bids fair to explain such things away. Think of it – and of genocide – as evolution in action, to no human end. Environmentally-minded theologians often suggest that it is ‘natural’ (and so commendable) that gangs of dogs, for example, should pull down, kill, and disembowel their prey. Human predators are just as ‘natural’, and it is quite unclear what limits they should put upon themselves, or what would count as ‘unnatural’ greed. If nature is unambiguously God’s will, God apparently wants us to be predatory nepotists. (p. 130)

Even granting that there is cooperation as well as competition in nature, it’s clear that nature is a mixed bag morally and certainly does not unambiguously reflect the character of the God revealed in Jesus. And, far from being the necessary source of a deprecation of nature, a distinction between the natural and the divine is necessary to properly value the created world. Nature is good, but fallen: “We are, as it were, in receipt of a divine revelation in the natural universe, but that revelation is obscured and twisted by the effects of some primaeval sin” (p. 135).

The point is echoed by Michael Lloyd in his essay “Are Animals Fallen?” The existence of predation and animal suffering, Lloyd argues, is strong prima facie evidence against the existence of a benevolent creator. Much more so is it evidence against a specifically Christian theology which depicts God as self-giving love. Lloyd rejects any view that attempts to depict violent predation as a positive good or even a necessary evil. Surely an omnipotent God could, if he wished, create a world without such features.*

Lloyd considers the process theology view that God isn’t omnipotent, but must work with the built-in limitations and unpredictable freedom of creatures to try to realize positive values. But he rejects this view on the grounds that it compromises the biblical understanding of God, who is Lord of all creation, and that it seems to make any kind of eschatological hope difficult to sustain.

Instead, Lloyd settles on the fairly traditional idea that the fallenness of nature is attributable to the agency of intelligent beings who sinned. Since modern evolutionary theory makes it impossible to suppose that human sin was the cause of nature’s fall (since predation, violence, and suffering long predate human existence), he argues for the view that “death, disease, division, and predation are … consequences of the angelic Fall rather than part of the good order of creation” (p. 159). Lloyd concedes that there’s not much, if any, direct evidence to support this view, but contends that the overall plausibility of the Christian “package of beliefs” allows this relatively unsupported assertion to be carried.

Whatever we may think of the idea of a “primeval sin” or “angelic fall” as explanations for the state of nature, I think Clark and Lloyd are right that Christians can’t simply affirm the natural order as it stands as unqualifiedly good. Certainly, being qua being is good, but not everything created beings do is good. If we think that all of creation is going to be redeemed (rather than that human beings will merely escape creation into a disembodied heaven), then it seems we have to say that creation will be radically transformed in some way (even if we can’t say how this is going to happen, or exactly what it entails). Whatever else we may say about God’s kingdom, violent predation hardly seems like it should have a place there.

This doesn’t mean, though, that we should try to “fix” nature by, say, making our pets into vegetarians or that predation might not be the lesser evil in many cases. It’s God who will redeem creation, not us. However, neither should we appeal to “nature” to justify human practices which clearly inflict unnecessary suffering or exacerbate nature’s fallen state. This would seem to have implications for farming, breeding practices, and other ways we interact with the natural, and especially animal, creation. St. Francis even reputedly convinced a wolf not to attack people!

Christians, it seems, need to tread a path between the denigration of nature that has characterized some traditional theology and an uncritical embrace of whatever seems “natural.”

As G. K. Chesterton wrote:

The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a stepmother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. (from Orthodoxy, p. 112)

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*One caveat here: I’m not sure we can so confidently say that it was possible for God to create a radically different world such that, to use Lloyd’s example, there would be a vegetarian analogue of a tiger. Not that I deny God’s omnipotence, I’m just not as confident as some that we have a firm grasp on what would or would not be possible under radically different conditions. The laws of nature may be interconnected in ways that we have at best a partial grasp of, so that certain states of affairs that we seem to be able to imagine obtaining are not, in fact, possible states of affairs.