Month: September 2008

Before moving on, it’s worth spending a post on what Southgate calls the “only way” or the “best way” argument, which is, in his view, “the starting point for any evolutionary theodicy that does not allow itself to be lured down the blind alleys–such as a spurious appeal to fallenness–that I explored in Chapter 2” (p. 47).

In broad terms, the argument is that, in order to create a world with the kind of life that ours exhibits, it was necessary for God to do so by means of the evolutionary process. And, while this process brings in its trail a host of apparently negative side-effects–suffering, premature death, extinction–these are necessary aspects of that process, and life couldn’t have arisen without them.

Or, as Southgate himself puts it:

I hold that the sort of universe we have, in which complexity emerges in a process governed by thermodynamic necessity and Darwinian natural selection, and therefore by death, pain, predation, and self-assertion, is the only sort of universe that could give rise to the range, beauty, complexity, and diversity of creatures the Earth has produced. (p. 29)

Southgate calls this an “unprovable assumption,” but it’s worth considering reasons to support it. One, I think, is that the processes he refers to (“thermodynamic necessity” and “Darwinian natural selection”) are the only ways we know about whereby biological creatures have come into being, and we have no idea of what a universe governed by radically different laws would look like.

Everything we know about the development of life on Earth presupposes these processes, so it’s initially plausible to say that this is the only way life could have developed. Given this, Southgate concludes that “a good and loving God would have created the best of all possible universes, in terms of the balance between its potential for realizing creaturely values and the concomitant pain” (p. 48).

It might seem, given traditional notions of God’s omnipotence, that this account imposes an external constraint on God by saying that God “had to” create things a certain way. But it should be remembered that even traditional accounts of omnipotence concede that God can’t do what is simply (or logically) impossible.

It may well be that it’s impossible in the strong sense to have a law-governed universe in which life arose by non-Darwinian means. So, it doesn’t impugn God’s omnipotence to say that life had to evolve by broadly Darwinian means, given that God chose to create a law-governed universe.* (I’ve covered this ground a bit before; see here for a more in-depth discussion in conversation with Keith Ward’s Pascal’s Fire.)

However, Southgate doesn’t think that such a “developmental good-harm analysis,” as he calls it, is sufficient to account for some of the evils we see in the evolutionary process, particularly what I earlier called pointless suffering (animals living lives of frustrated potential and/or unrelieved suffering) and the extinction of entire species.

In a variation on Ivan Karamazov’s complaint, Southgate deems it unacceptable that God would create by means of a process that left countless individual creatures to permanently frustrated lives of unrelieved suffering, even as a means to the greater good of a universe of complex and diverse creaturely values. This leads him to introduce two other crucial components of his evolutionary theodicy: God’s co-suffering with creatures and the promise of redemption for those creatures who’ve been denied the opportunity to flourish.

The idea that God suffers along with those of his creatures who suffer has been a motif in much modern theology, particularly in the wake of the World Wars and the Holocaust, despite its challenge to traditional views of divine impassibility. And when it comes to human suffering, we can understand, I think, how the idea of divine co-suffering can provide comfort. Anyone who has taken solace in the presence of Jesus, the “man of sorrows,” in the midst of suffering knows this.

However, in the case of non-human creatures, it’s less clear how the divine co-suffering could mitigate the problem. Recognizing the limits of what we can say about both animal experience and divine experience, Southgate tentatively suggests that the divine attention lovingly focused on the suffering creature “at some deep level takes away the aloneness of the suffering creature’s experience” (p. 52).

This is obviously quite speculative, but Southgate also offers another angle on the divine suffering that will be explored in more detail later: in entering into the suffering of creation, especially in the cross of Jesus, God “takes responsibility” or “pays the price” for the necessary suffering that accompanies the evolutionary process.

Second, the suffering and frustration of individual creatures–the vicitms of the evolutionary process–could be compensated for by positing an “eschatological compensation,” or animal heaven in other words. This has been invoked to address human suffering, so is there any reason to exclude the possibility for animals a priori? This will also get more detailed treatment later on.

So, to sum up: Southgate’s evolutionary theodicy for non-human suffering affirms that a world of evolving life, with all its attendant pain and suffering, was the only way, or at least the best way, for God to bring into existence a diversity of life-forms to realize complex values in a law-governed universe. However, the suffering of individual creatures who never get the chance to flourish cries out for both divine compassion and solidarity as well as the possibility for redemption in the next life.

Index of posts in this series is here.
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*Southgate deals with the question “Why did God not just create heaven?” in a later chapter, and I’ll discuss it when I get there.

I’ve been reading a very cool book by Christopher Southgate called The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. This short book hits on several topics that I’ve discussed here: the relation between evolutionary and theological accounts of nature, the understanding of sin and redemption in the context of an evolutionary universe, and the problem of animal suffering.

It’s the last that makes Southgate’s book unique. While most theodicies focus (understandably) on human suffering, Southgate, who has a background in both biochemistry and theology, has chosen to write a book about the suffering of non-human animals, and whether it is reconcilable with the existence of a loving God. This is what he means by “evolutionary theodicy.”

In carrying out his project, Southgate pursues a strategy that has been used by others. The evolutionary process, a process by which certain values are realized, such as the existence of a diversity of sentient creatures, contains, as a necessary component, a certain amount of suffering. If God wanted to create a world with such creatures, Southgate suggests, it had to take place by means of a process very much like the Darwinian one that modern biology investigates. Southgate calls this the “only way” argument, as in, this is the only way God could bring into existence the kind of creatures that exist in the world, so some amount of pain and suffering is necessary if there’s to be a world like ours. He calls this an unprovable, but reasonable, postulate, given what we know about how life developed.

Along with other proponents of evolutionary theodicy such as Holmes Rolston, John Polkinghorne, and Arthur Peacocke, Southgate rejects a historical “fall” as an explanation for the suffering that exists in the natural world, whether in its more literalist, creationist forms or as a “cosmic” fall as suggested by thinkers like David B. Hart. There is simply, he says, no evidence for such a fall. Certainly it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the story of life’s development as presented by modern biology with the idea that the sin of the first human beings was the cause of nature’s “fallen” condition.

However, Southgate also rejects “cosmic” fall narratives on the grounds that they posit a kind of dualism within creation: there are good parts and bad, “fallen” parts. In Southgate’s view, the good and bad effects of natural processes are far more tightly bound together than cosmic fall proponents recognize. They arise from inseparable aspects of a single creative process: “it was the same type of tectonic movement in the Indian Ocean that did so much to make the Earth’s surface what it is, with its extraordinary diversity and richness of biosphere, that caused the tragic and devastating tsunami of December 2004” (p. 34).

And yet, Southgate doesn’t simply affirm that “whatever is, is good.” After all, his book is called “The Groaning of Creation,” and he takes seriously the notion that the natural world is in travail, a state from which it is waiting to be delivered. Creation is good, but it is incomplete and contains persistent evil. More specifically, he thinks there are kinds of suffering and disvalue that standard evolutionary theodicies don’t adequately deal with. These are