A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

The Fall and natural evil revisited, pt. 1

Eric tipped me off to a great new theology blog, Ipsum Esse, written by a Catholic layman, David Walsh. David recently had two posts that generated some good discussion, one on evolution and the other on the idea of a “cosmic fall.”

Longtime ATR readers will know that these are topics near and dear to my heart. What we might call our “theology of nature” rests at the intersection of a lot of important and fascinating issues (theodicy, human nature, animal suffering, eschatology, creation, etc.!). Most of what follows is an expansion of some comments I left over at David’s site.

In his posts David suggests that the idea of a “cosmic fall” might provide a more satisfying account of the suffering and disorder we seem to see in the natural world. This is because such “natural evil” understood as an inherent feature of reality seems, at least on its face, incompatible with the existence of the loving God Christians believe in. With Ivan Karamazov and David Hart he wants to reject the idea that the evil of the world is instrumental to the acheivement of a greater good. This would seem to make God complicit in, if not the creator of, evil in that God would be choosing evil means to attain his ends.

This flies in the face of a many modern theodicies that take the evolutionary development of the cosmos and life to be a given, resulting in a rejection of some traditional theolgical notions such as death and suffering as the consequence of sin. The evolutionary process is instead seen as the means by which God realizes certain goods, such as the existence of persons who can enter into relationships with God. Consequently, death, predation, and suffering are part of the very fabric of life, at least as it has developed so far.

The “cosmic fall” view, endorsed by Hart, C.S. Lewis, and others, holds that the present state of things is at least in part a result of the malicious acts of supernatural agents who rebelled against God. Somehow they were able to tamper with the fabric of the physical world in such a way that it became diseased and disordered, ceasing to perfectly reflect God’s original intentions for it. Thus the evil in the natural world, such as suffering and death, isn’t God’s fault, but the fault of rebellious angels.

I’ve worried that this view, if taken seriously enough, leads to a kind of quasi-gnosticism. My reasoning is that if what appear to be such fundamental aspects of the natural world are actually the results of a fall, then in what sense can any of creation as we know it be said to be an expression of God’s will? For instance, a cat who isn’t a carnivore would have to have a radically different nature from the one she in fact has. Being a carnivore is part of her “catness.” So, can we say that God created cats? (I realize some readers will be all too ready to agree that cats are creatures of the devil.)

Needless to say, the same applies to people. An evolutionary process that didn’t involve predation, death, and suffering (assuming such a thing could be imagined) would be so radically different from the one we think took place that it’s not clear in what sense we can say that the existence of human beings was intended by God if we accept the cosmic fall hypothesis. Depending on how far back in cosmic history you think such a fall ocurred, virtually everything that currently exists would be a manifestation of a radically distorted nature.

Further, I’m not sure the cosmic fall even works as advertised in getting rid of the need to construct theodicies. David quotes John Milbank as saying “I definitely line up with the die-hards who think that death comes into the world after the fall. And I agree with the nut cases who say, ‘If you abandon that, you abandon Christianity.’ In fact, if you abandon that, then Christianity becomes really a rather nasty sort of doctrine in some ways that is going to get into all sorts of peculiar theodicies and so forth.”

However, it seems to me, that even if death and suffering weren’t part of God’s original plan for creation, we’re still faced with the fact that he has permitted death and suffering to go on for a long time. And in explaining this, aren’t we going to ultimately have recourse to some traditional theodicy strategy, such as the free will or greater good defense? Now, it may be that God is less culpable for permitting evils than choosing them, though at the level of omnipotence this distinction starts to appear less compelling. So, I guess I’m not convinced that the cosmic fall hypothesis, leaving aside what appears to many as its implausibility, even gets God off the hook, so to speak.

But this doesn’t mean that I don’t think there’s a problem here. In the next part I’ll try and dig into this a little more.

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5 responses to “The Fall and natural evil revisited, pt. 1”

  1. David

    Hi Lee,

    I responded to your comments on my site before I saw that you’d posted more about it here.

    As I said over there, I think the distinction between God’s permitting evil and death and his explicit use of them to attain his ends is one of paramount importance and whilst it does not “let God off the hook” I think it makes all the difference in the world whether these evil means are a reflection of the Creator’s will or whether they are distortions brought about by sin, yet permitted by God. I mean, that God permits evil is simply a given. I’d rather seek explanations for why this is the case (and I don’t think the free will defence can be done away with on this count) than try and see suffering and death as aspects of God’s creative will.

    The problem of evil remains, but I really think it makes a huge difference what route one takes here.

    Regards,

    David

    Reply
  2. Jack Perry

    I agree with you on the quasi-gnosticism. But we can go further. Are predation, suffering, and death evil? Yes. Are they evils willed by God? I find it hard to believe that they are not by the simple fact that even in Paradise Adam and Eve must eat something in order to survive, which leads to the death of plants if nothing else. After paradise We can explain Abel’s sacrifice of a lamb any way we want, but it still requires the death of a lamb, and it pleased God more than Cain’s sacrifice of fruits and vegetables.

    In my opinion, the problem is that we see predation, suffering, and death as absolute evils, and fail to see the potential that God has placed in them. Given the fact of the resurrection of Christ, they are not so evil as we wish to make them.

    Mere speculation, of course.

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  3. Rick Ritchie

    Good discussion. And yes, these are important topics!

    I think there are two ditches to avoid.

    One is the quasi-gnosticism view you mention. I do think it is problematic when some Christians jump on others for not toeing the party line and cite past theologians, but seem to be able to speak as if they had never seen a dinosaur skeleton.

    The other is a view that makes general revelation the only guide.

    I want to attempt to hold both general and special revelation with a tight grip. I’ll let go of what gets shaken out of my hands after a good fight.

    If I can harmonize a creation with death in it with “Since by man came death…”, I think that will be ideal. Perhaps this only looks really impossible if we read a lot into the text. Our word “death” may be a modern, scientific word that fits a discourse that is very different from that of the Bible. I checked a concordance once, and found that only once in the Bible is it said that a plant died (the one under which Jonah sat), and perhaps even that use was considered poetic (Like the trees of the field clapping their hands). Animal death may not have been in view, either. And perhaps the Garden of Eden was a special realm where the regular order of nature was suspended until the fall. (The dietary restrictions are similar to those on the Ark and in Old Testament Israel, special realms set up by God.)

    I accept the idea that Providence may have been much stronger before the fall. “He shall give his angels charge over thee” may have applied to Adam and Eve. But there is another set of passages to consider, too. 1 Cor. 15:45 suggests that even before the fall, Adam was not the ultimate goal of human creation. If that be so, perhaps “perishability” is not an aspect of fallenness as such. What the fall meant was that Adam could not partake of the Tree of Life and become imperishable as early as he might have.

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  4. lindsey

    I agree with David that the distinction between God allowing something and God willing something is quite important. If you think that God set us up in the best possible way, that may have required our ability to choose. If we (and here I include Satan and his chums) had all chosen to follow God, then the goodness in that world would far surpass a world in which we hadn’t had the choice. So to get at the best possible setup, God may have had to choose to leave some things up to us, which would include the possibility that we would mess it all up.

    And I’m tempted to agree with Jack that the redemption following our run of it on this earth may very well surpass any of what God allowed for the time being.

    Reply
  5. The Fall and natural evil revisited, pt. 2 « A Thinking Reed

    […] Fall and natural evil revisited, pt. 2 In the last post I expressed my unease with the notion of a cosmic fall, largely on the grounds that, for it to be […]

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