In the last post I expressed my unease with the notion of a cosmic fall, largely on the grounds that, for it to be radical enough to exculpate God from creating an order shot through with suffering, death, parasitism and predation it would risk creating a gulf between God and his creation. If fallen angels or other spiritual beings are responsible for much of the shape of the created order as we find it, then I worry that we come eerily close to attributing the shape of creation to a kind of malevolent demiurge with God floating distantly in the background.

Not that I don’t think there’s a real problem here. How do we reconcile the existence of the world as we find it with the existence of a benevolent creator? In his post David refers to Andrew Linzey’s concern that if we take predation to be “natural” then we are less likely to be concerned about animal suffering. (David offers an illuminating comparison with Thomas Aquinas’ attitude toward animals.) And you know I’m a sucker for this stuff.

And in fact Linzey himself does address this issue and emphasizes the importance of the fall as a reminder that creation isn’t as it should be and is groaning in bondage waiting for its redemption, just as we are. In his book Animal Gospel, Linzey says this:

What is at stake in the question of the Fall is nothing less than our imagination, that faculty which can help us…to hold “in mind the completeness of a complex truth,” and at the same time our fidelity or–more often than not–infidelity to the moral insights to which it gives rise. In theological terms the complex truth to which this debate corresponds is the dual recognition that God as the Creator of all things must have created a world which is morally good–or at least be justified in the end as a morally justifiable process–and also the insight that parasitism and predation are unlovely, cruel, evil aspects of the world ultimately incapable of being reconciled with a God of love. (Animal Gospel, pp. 27-8)

Linzey is right about this in my view. He points out that the denial of this complex truth can have morally abhorrent consequences such as the denial that there is evil in the natural world, that there is possible redemption for nature, that human beings have an obligation to cooperate with God in the redemption of nature, and even that there is a morally just God. If what is, is good, then we have sacrificed any moral standard existing over and above the empirical world to guide our actions.

But Linzey also provides a hint here of a possible “third way” between merely accepting what is as good and positing a state of perfection “once upon a time.” It’s no secret that many of the ancients valued the notions of eternity and permanence and that more recent thought has emphasized becoming and process. The traditional creation account was often interpreted as God creating a perfect state of affairs whence there was nowhere to go but down. Adam and Eve were sometimes thought of as having virtually superhuman abilities, complete control of their physical faculties, and to enjoy blessedness in the presence of God. Likewise, nonhuman nature was understood to be endowed with fixed (and pacific) natures rather than being part of an ever-changing process.

But if there’s one respect in which science has influenced a lot of contemporary theology it’s in taking the categories of change and process much more seriously. And this goes beyond process theology which, unwisely in my view, makes change an elemental aspect of God’s being, and thus seems to trap him in the flux of events. But you don’t have to accept the process view of God to recognize that it’s now much more common than it was in the ancient world, or even the world of the Enlightenment, to see nature as fundamentally a historical process.

If nature is a process, then the idea of an initial state of perfection becomes much less intellgible. If modern cosmologists are right, the initial moments of creation consisted of a super dense infinitesimal speck. To realize the existence of the manifold variety of creatures that exist today required almost unimaginable stretches of time. And life on earth, we think, went through its own process of long development, with earlier lifeforms dying out to make space for later ones. There is no single slice of time that we could identify as the ideal state of unfallen creation. In other words, the universe has a history.

It might be, then, that the inherently temporal nature of created reality means that its consummation could only occur by means of a temporal process that would necessarily contain states of lesser good. This is what I take Linzey to be getting at when he says that God “must have created a world which is morally good–or at least be justified in the end as a morally justifiable process….” As the title of the chapter from which the quote above comes from has it, creation is “unfinished and unredeemed.” Linzey is, I think, agnostic about whether there was a historical Fall, but he definitely sees Eden as a symbol of what creation is destined to be. Creation is inherently on its way toward something else.

Of course, even if that’s right the obvious question is “was this trip really necessary?” Or why the long slog of blood, sweat, and tears to get to the New Jerusalem? And will all that suffering be seen to have been worth it – morally justifiable as Linzey says? Could God not have simply created a state of affairs all at once that was perfect and complete? Is the long arduous process of cosmic and terrestrial evolution necessary to get to where God wants the universe to be?

Here we get into a very sticky wicket, for the question, in essence, is what kind of universe was it possible for God to create? This may sound like a silly question, for if God is omnipotent, then presumably he could’ve created any kind of universe he wanted. But the Christian tradition of thinking about these things has rarely held that God can do absolutely anything without qualification (though there is a minority report that seems to take this ultra-voluntarist line). It has usually been said instead that, for starters, God can’t do evil, since that is inconsistent with his nature. Also, that he can’t do the logically impossible, not because logic is “outside” of or “above” God but because what is logically impossible is simply not something coherently describable or thinkable.

With respect to the physical world there is a legitimate question as to how many combinations of physical laws or fundamental physical facts are possible which would give rise to a universe ordered in such a way that the existence of life is possible (or likely). For instance, cosmologists hold, as I understand it, that, were certain fundamental physical constants even slightly different from what they are, the universe would’ve expanded either too rapidly or too slowly for life to develop. Our existence, in other words, is rather more closely tied to the fundamental facts about the physical universe than we might’ve thought. So, if God wanted to get us (not to mention all the other creatures that we know of), it may be that he had to choose a universe very much like the one we inhabit.

Now you may say, dear reader, that God could simply have created us with a snap of the fingers, so to speak, without going to all that trouble. But I’m not sure that such creatures would in fact be human beings, as opposed to a very well-executed simulation of human beings. Our history and our interconnections to other forms of life on earth, and to the earth itself, are part of what we are as a species. It’s not clear to me that God could get us without the whole messy history that goes along with it. (Incidentally, it’s even more doubtful that he could get you and me specifically since our identities are tied pretty darn strongly to our particular histories.)

I’m not at all confident that this is right. It may be that there are no constraints on the kind of world God could create and still get all the creatures he wanted in it. But I’m not confident it’s not right either. And if it is, we can at least begin to tell a coherent story where the only means available to God for realizing certain great goods (i.e. the existence of the myriad creatures that populate this universe, including us as intelligent personal ones capable of entering into a loving fellowship with their creator) involve some degree of suffering on the way to realizing those goods. This doesn’t involve God choosing evil means when he could’ve chosen good means, but choosing unavoidable evil as a necessary concommitant (or side-effect) of great good (perhaps not unlike the doctrine of double-effect).

So, I’m not really sure where this leaves us. On the one hand, a doctrine of a cosmic fall saves God from complicity in evil, but at the cost (or so I maintain) of removing him from much of the process of creation, especially if modern science is correct in seeing all of life as inherently bound up with processes of decay, dissolution, suffering, and death. On the other hand, if we say that God was bound by a finite set of possibilities, thus limiting what kinds of universe he could actualize in choosing to create a universe with life, are we tying God’s hands and diminishing his omnipotence? I’m not totally happy with either option, frankly.