A Thinking Reed

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

The Groaning of Creation 9: Concluding thoughts

As a wrap-up to this series, I thought I’d offer some concluding thoughts on Christopher Southgate’s The Groaning of Creation.

Just to briefly review: the problem of animal theodicy as Southgate sees it is that the evolutionary process seems to grind so many sentient creatures under its wheels and to doom so many species to extinction (something like 98 percent of the species that have ever existed are extinct). Given what appears to be a vast and pointless waste of life, can we believe that this process is intended by a good creator?

As we’ve seen, Southgate’s response has three main components:

  • The evolutionary process, or something very much like it, was the only way (or at least the best way) for God to bring a variety of finite selves into existence, given the constraints imposed by a law-like universe.
  • God is present to, and participates in, the suffering of every creature; this reaches its turning point in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus where God identifies by “deep incarnation” with all creaturely life and inaugurates an age of redeemed existence.
  • Those animals who were denied any chance at a flourishing life will, we can coherently hope, be given a chance for a redeemed and fulfilled existence in some kind of postmortem state, and extinct species will be represented as well.

    • The question is: has Southgate made his case? Has he justified God’s ways (with animals) to man?

    Southgate is appropriately modest about what he has shown and admits in several places that he’s speculating, so let me just offer some questions about things that might need to be pursued further. (Hey! Possible topics for future posts!)

  • Divine action: Southgate holds that God is deeply involved in the evolutionary process (see the post on his trinitarian theology of creation). But he doesn’t really specify the nature and extent of God’s involvement and how it relates to a scientific or purely naturalistic understanding of the process. If God can shape and guide the process, at least to some extent, then why can’t God reduce the amount of pointless suffering and frustration? Not to fault Southgate for not offering a complete theory of divine action, but the extent to which God can or does intervene in creation seems like an important question.
  • Possibility and omnipotence: Southgate commends the “only way” argument as a plausible assumption. That is, it’s reasonable to think that a loving God would only choose this means of creating life if there was no other way to do so with less suffering. But are there stronger reasons for thinking that it really is the only way? Answering this question would seem to require more developed thinking about what philosophers call “modality” (i.e. the nature of possibility and impossibility) as well as the nature of God’s omnipotence.
  • Redemption and eschatology: As I mentioned in my last post, Southgate has a strongly eschatological reading of history; he thinks that the resurrection of Jesus inaugurated a new age in history in which creation is moving toward a reconciliation of all things in Christ. How does this sit with the fact that life on earth will eventually become extinct? Should we expect that God will miraculously intervene before that happens? Or will the forms of beauty and goodness we create now will be “taken up” into the divine life in some trans-historical fashion?
  • Animal selves and animal immortality: One of the biggest challenges for believers in animal immortality is that it’s unclear whether animals have the kinds of “selves” about which it makes sense to say that they can survive death. Even if we grant, as most modern theologians are wont to do, that human selves (or souls) have no natural immortality but are entirely dependent on God for their continued existence, the problem with animal selves/souls is a distinct problem. That’s because it’s uncertain whether many animals have a unified self connecting their experiences and therefore whether there’s any “self” that even could persist beyond the death of the body. Does this threaten to undercut animal immortality as a strategy for theodicy?

    • Overall, I think Southgate’s study points in the right direction for thinking about animal theodicy; this is more a matter of filling out the details in a convincing way. This general perspective allows us to see the evolutionary process as the creative intention of a good God and as in need of redemption.

    Index of posts in this series is here.

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    3 responses to “The Groaning of Creation 9: Concluding thoughts”

    1. Marvin

      Augustine was influenced by Neo-Platonic thought, which held that the universe existed as a series of emmanations from the center, and that there was a necessary diminishment the further you got from the center, like the way that a flashlights’s beam inevitably diminishes the farther away it travels from the source.

      From this Augustine concluded that all the evils in the world–sin death, pain, and suffering–had no substance. They merely represented a privation of the Good.

      Now it’s a long way from Augustine’s cosmology and theodicy to say that this world we live in, with so much apparent waste and futility, is the best of all possible worlds, but somehow I see some connections there. If I weren’t so tired, maybe I could articulate them better.

      Reply
    2. Lee

      Augustine somewhere uses the analogy of a painting: the shadows, while “dark” in themselves, are necessary for the beauty of the overall composition.

      Later you get G.W. Leibniz, who was an Augustinian Platonist of sorts, proposing the idea that each possible world that God could have chosen to create comes as a package deal of sorts because of its own internal logic. You take the good with the bad as it were. Hence, God, being all-good, would’ve chosen to create the best of all possible worlds.

      This was understandably lampooned by Voltaire, but I think it makes a little more sense if you put the stress on “possible” rather than “best.”

      Reply
    3. onscrn

      “God is present to, and participates in, the suffering of every creature”

      That very thought came to me a few weeks ago as I lay in bed hearing the cry of some animal dying in the jaws (probably) of another. I wrote about it in a post called “Cries in the Night” on my blog onscreen-scientist.com. Glad to learn of the Southgate book, which sounds very interesting. I’ll be reading earlier posts.

      Reply

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