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.