I don’t know what I think of the idea, but this is the most interesting thing I’ve read in a while. (In other words, it’s not about the election.)
“Re-wilding,” in the words of one of the scientists interviewed, is the “super-colliding superconducting experiment of ecology.”
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
This means that any adequate theodicy will emphasize not only that suffering and extinction occur as necessary concomitants of the evolutionary process, but also
In future posts I’ll discuss Southgate’s trinitarian theology of creation, his eschatological views, and the ethical implications he draws for human beings as participants in God’s redeeming work.
Index of posts in this series is here.
Today at the library I picked up what looks like a great new book: Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition, by Laura Hobgood-Oster. It’s a study of the role animals have played in Christian stories, art, iconography, and piety throughout the ages, with an eye toward recovering a more positive view of animals within the tradition and the life of faith. Publisher’s page is here.
I imagine I’ll be posting on this in the days ahead.
Thanks to Jeremy for tipping me off to this very interesting article about animals and religion from the Martin Marty Center. One of the issues it raises is the upsurge of interest in the “religiosity” of animals:
There are ancient precedents for the claim that nonhuman animals have a religious sensibility. Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) claimed that elephants, the animal “closest to man,” not only recognized the language of their homeland, obeyed orders, and remembered what they learned, but also had been seen “worshipping the sun and stars, and purifying [themselves] at the new moon, bathing in the river, and invoking the heavens.”
Today, scholars such as Harvard’s Kimberley C. Patton provide theologically informed readings of many traditional claims about the religious awareness of other beings. Patton deals, for example, with “ways in which animals are believed to possess a unique awareness of holiness,” noting that “in many religious worlds…mutual intelligibility obtains between God and animals that exists outside of human perceptual ranges.” Assertions of a special relationship between animals and God are routinely dismissed in our human-centered world. But the increased attendance at Jigenen temple reflects that we are fascinated by our fellow creatures and the idea of their potential spirituality. In fact, “religion and animals” themes appear in a surprising number of places—one example is Peter Miller’s article “Jane Goodall” in the December 1995 National Geographic, in which he discusses Goodall’s belief that expressions of awe by chimpanzees at a waterfall site “may resemble the emotions that led early humans to religion.”
The Bible certainly seems to suggest that animals have a relationship with God. It speaks repeatedly about the animals (along with the rest of creation) praising God, and God makes his covenant after the flood with human beings and animals. In fact, the biblical worldview in general seems to see human beings and animals as part of a single community, which is obviously closer to the view of modern science than to the Enlightenment-inspired view of human beings existing on one side of an unbridgeable gulf from “brute” creation. And just as we’ve come to see that most capacities once thought of as uniquely human have analogues and precedents in the animal kingdom, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find a religious sense among them. In fact, if, as Thomas Aquinas I think suggested, animals do by instinct what human beings have to freely choose to do, they may exist in a kind of pre-lapsarian state of grace and unity with God that we have divorced ourselves from.
(Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Reflection on the ultimate destiny of animals has not been a central feature of Christian thinking about the eschaton. Most theology in general has been relentlessly anthropocentric, and eschatology as a general rule is no different. This is perhaps especially true of post-Enlightenment theology which, influenced by Cartesian presuppositions, sharply divided the world into spiritual and material realms, with only human beings partaking of the former. Off the top of my head I can think of a few exceptions: John Wesley addressed the issue, as did C. S. Lewis. I think it’s safe to say, though, that the mainstream view has been that only human beings have an eternal destiny, either because they are specially loved by God or because only they possess immortal souls.
Polkinghorne doesn’t spend much time discussing animals, but they do have a role to play in his scheme of cosmic redemption. He balks at the notion that “every dinosaur that ever lived, let alone the vast multitude of bacteria … will each have its own individual eschatological future” (p. 122). But he does allow that representatives of each kind of animal will exist in the world to come, preserving the type if not each token. He also speculates that pets, “who could be thought to have acquired enhanced individual status through their interactions with humans,” might have a share in the new creation. This is similar to a suggestion made by Lewis, who argued that, in bonding with their human masters, pets may acquire a “self” that they otherwise wouldn’t have had.
The question of animal “selfhood” is obviously a vexed one. Some philosophers and theologians have suggested that animals don’t have selves because they lack self-awareness. But this seems wrong: just because they aren’t self-aware (assuming they aren’t) doesn’t mean they don’t have selves to be aware of. The central question, it seems to me is whether animals posses some measure of individuality and interiority. And it seems clear that they do. Modern science indicates that there is a continuity between humans and other animals in capacity for feeling and thought. This isn’t to deny that human beings have capacities that animals lack, merely to say that many animals are in fact “subjects of a life” as Tom Regan puts it. The fact of individual personality among animals is obvious to anyone with a pet, and only dogmatic materialists and behaviorists deny that animals experience sensations like pain and pleasure. The ancients were actually wiser than some moderns here: they acknowledged that animals had souls that gave them the power of self-motion, feeling, and even a measure of thinking.
It seems at least possible, then, that God, if he wished, could preserve animal “selves” in existence beyond death. Certainly if a human soul consists of an “information bearing pattern” similar patterns would exist in the case of non-human animals. But would God have reason to do so? Why would God wish to provide post-morterm existence to individual animals? One reason is simply that God loves all things in his creation:
For you love all things that exist,
and detest none of the things that you have made,
for you would not have made anything if you had hated it.
How would anything have endured if you had not willed it?
Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved?
You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living. (Wisdom of Solomon, 11: 24-26)
A related consideration is the question of animal theodicy. Will there be some recompense for the animals who have suffered through no moral fault of their own? And would a world built on such enormous suffering be worth it without restoration for the victims? It would be presumptuous to insist that God has to resurrect individual animals, but at the same time we can hope that the wideness of God’s mercy might make room in his kingdom for all creatures.
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.
A Thinking Reed 