(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.
At the end of the previous post I wrote that Polkinghorne sees embodiment as essential to what it means to be human, partly because of the interrelatedness that is an intrinsic feature of all things. A self existing in isolation is, if not a contradiction in terms, at least living an extremely diminished and attenuated life. Consequently, the biblical image of the “new creation” points toward a very different state of affairs than the ethereal bodiless idea of heaven we sometimes imagine.
Polkinghorne thus suggests “a destiny for the whole universe beyond its death” (p. 113). To create a suitable environment for a resurrected humanity, God will transform the entire physical cosmos into a new form. Just as the matter of Jesus’ dead body was transmuted into the stuff of his glorified risen body, so the humble material of the cosmos will be taken up into an everlasting destiny.
Just as the matter of our present universe possesses specific properties that allow for the development of life, the matter of the new creation will be specially suited to life there. And moreover, the entire cosmos will be “transparent” to the divine presence: “The new creation will be wholly sacramental, suffused with the presence of the life of God” (p. 115). And the “laws” of this new universe will, unlike our present world, be adapted to unending life rather than intrinsically involving the cycle of life and death.
Polkinghorne insists that there will be both continuity and discontinuity between the old and new creations, in keeping with his central principle. The new creation is not another creation ex nihilo, but a redemptive act that draws the new out of the old. The old creation provides the “raw material” for the new creation, one that will continue to be constituted (though in a new way) by space, time and matter. Polkinghorne denies that the new creation will be an eternal (timeless) state of being; instead, he says following Gregory of Nyssa, we will spend everlasting ages moving more and more deeply into the inexhaustible mystery of the divine nature.
One of the consequences of Polkinghorne’s view that the old creation is, in some sense, the raw material of the new is that it gives some account of why God created this world in the first place:
The pressing question of why the Creator brought into being this vale of tears if it is the case that God can eventually create a world that is free from suffering, here finds its answer. God’s total creative intent is seen to be intrinsically a two-step process: first the old creation, allowed to explore and realise its potentiality at some metaphysical distance from its Creator; then the redeemed new creation which, through the Cosmic Christ, is brought into a freely embraced and intimate relationship with the life of God. (p. 116)
What makes this an explanation of the sufferings of the present world? The idea seems to be that, in order to allow creation to develop freely, God had to hide, or at least dim, the divine presence. This allowed creaturely freedom, but also introduced the possibility of sin. At the same time, the laws that govern the development of the cosmos seem to intrinsically involve the possibility of suffering. “Its unfolding process develops within the ‘space’ that God has given it, within which it is allowed to be itself” (p. 114).
This is a question we’ve tackled here before: is suffering an intrinsic feature of life in this universe because of the constitution of the laws that govern it? Or is the world as we experience it fallen from a primeval state of perfection? Polkinghorne opts for the first answer, but with the proviso that the universe is on its way to being something different. His proposal has the virtue of investing what we do here and now with a certain importance: there are aspects of the present world that will persist in the world to come. If we foster beauty, harmony, and excellence in this world, we can hope that they will be drawn up into the next and reflect the divine glory.
Considering animals in relationship to God is not something extra or foreign to Christianity. In my opinion, a serious doctrine of Creation cannot ignore the rest of the living world and the Creation as a whole and finally be Christian. Even rocks glorify God. And frankly, neither can a complete doctrine of Redemption or Sanctification. Indeed, to set up one’s “serious” theology in such a way that one can ignore, dismiss, or deride creatures great and small, organic and inorganic, is a sign of the Fall and the effects of sin, alienation and division. The rest of Creation pays dearly and regularly for our lack of relational recognition and failures in thankfulness.
Maybe this is just special pleading on my part, but I think he’s absolutely right. In fact, I’m not sure Christian theology, much less Christian practice, has even begun to move from a thoroughly anthropocentric perspective to one that is more properly theocentric. Even churches that pay lip service (or more than lip service) to “the environment” remain steadfastly human-centered in their concerns. To some extent this is inevitable, but I wonder if we end up pushing a very thin gospel that essentially addresses only human concerns, and that often in a very therapuetic individualist way. And, if so, isn’t this a denial of the Lordship of Christ over all creation?
What would theology and practice look like if they genuinely incorporated the cosmic aspect of the biblical story that we so frequently downplay? My sense is that we in the mainline ignore this cosmic dimension out of embarassment. After all, a faith that is confined to fostering psychological well-being or political action is much more respectable than one that talks about the redemption of all creation. We have very little idea, I think, of what that would even look like.
If mainliners want to criticize fundamentalists for believing that we’re about to be whisked away in the Rapture, leaving the earth a smoldering cinder, maybe the proper response is to have a counter-story about the destiny of creation. Not to mention a counter-story to the post-Enlightenment industrial view of nature as a vast repository of resources for our exploitation. After all, isn’t there ample biblical and theological warrant for saying that creation – including our animal cousins – has a destiny in God’s kingdom? And doesn’t that imply that it matters now what happens to creation, since those aspects of the present age that serve God’s purposes will be preserved and transfigured (in ways we can scarcely being to imagine) in the age to come?
I actually am not sure how far we can push the de-anthropocentricizing (is that a word?) of Christian theology; this strikes me as still relatively unexplored territory. Some eco-theologians have tried it in ways that seem to me to sacrifice too much of traditional Christian belief. On the other hand, someone like Andrew Linzey is doing it in a way that builds on traditional orthdox trinitarian theology. I think this is the more promising route for a variety of reasons, maybe most importantly because traditional doctrines of creation and incarnation provides what I think is the strongest foundation for taking the created world to have permanent value for God.
Carl Braaten has published a spirited defense of natural law ethics at the Journal of Lutheran Ethics with which I’m in substantial agreement. I think that if natural law ethics didn’t exist we’d have to invent it, and that people who claim to be deriving their ethics solely from uniquely Christian principles have usually smuggled covert premises in from other sources. So, best to be above board about the whole thing.
However, toward the end of his article Braaten goes on what can only be characterized as a tirade about homosexuality, and this makes me think that he’s working with a defective notion of natural law. Now, Carl Braaten has undoubtedly forgotten more about theology than I’ll ever know, so I enter here with trepidation, but his account of the ethical issue here strikes me as tendentious and inaccurate.
Braaten writes:
We know by reason what the natural law tells us — the sexual organs are designed for certain functions. God made two kinds of humans, “male and female created he them.” (Gen. 1: 27) By the light of reason human beings the world over, since the dawn of human civilization and across all cultures, have known that the male and female organs are made for different functions. Humans know what they are; they are free to act in accordance with them or to act in opposition to them. The organs match. What is so difficult to understand about that? Humans learn these things by reason and nature; no books on anatomy, psychology, or sociology are needed.
Nor do people first learn what the sexual organs are for from the Bible. Scholars say there are seven explicit passages in the Bible that condemn homosexual acts as contrary to the will of God. This is supposed to settle the matter for a church that claims its teachings are derived from Scripture. But for many Christians this does not settle the matter. Why not? The answer is that they don’t believe what the natural law, transparent to reason, tells us about human sexuality. In my view the biblical strictures against homosexual acts are true not because they are in the Bible; they are in the Bible because they are true. They truly recapitulate God’s creative design of human bodies. The law of creation written into the nature of things is the antecedent bedrock of the natural moral law, knowable by human reason and conscience.
The problem with this passage is that both the argument from reason and the argument from Scripture elide crucial factors. Let’s start with the argument from reason. It’s undoubtedly true that human sexual organs have particular functions. But does it follow straight away (pardon the pun) that human beings must always use their sexual organs in those particular ways, or that it’s never permissible for them to be used in any other way? Anyone who thinks that it’s morally ok to have sex for non-procreative reasons is conceding that it’s permissible to use one’s sex organs in a way that doesn’t constitute their primary function.
But this doesn’t get at the deeper issue. What gives natural law ethics its traction isn’t that it asks what the purpose of bodily organs are. It functions as an ethic because it asks: what is good for human beings (and the rest of creation)? To ask what the functions of sexual organs are is only part of the broader question of what is good for human beings. To say that organs function in a certain way and so must (only) be used in this way is actually to revert to a rather crude version of divine command ethics – God created them that way, so that’s the way you have to use them, and don’t bother asking why.
If we do ask why, however, we see that human sexuality functions to further the good of human beings, individually and as members of a series of ever-widening communities. But then any particular sex act is necessarily subordinate, in terms of moral evaluation, to this broader notion of what is good. And determining what this broader good is requires the use of our reason and powers of observation to understand what kind of life is good for human persons. Non-procreative sex was long held by the Christian tradition to be immoral, but seen in the broader perspective of what’s good for individuals, communities, societies, and creation as a whole, we can see reasons why it can be moral.
Braaten assumes that because sexual organs are made to function a certain way that they can therefore only be used that way, morally speaking. But if we can simply read our ethics off of nature in this way, what do we do with the fact that there are people who find themselves exclusively attracted to members of the same sex? They’re just as much a part of “nature” as the particular configuration of human sexual organs, at least in the sense of being something naturally occurring (if not statistically “normal”). If what is given is the standard for what is right, how do we decide between two seemingly incompatible natural givens?
What a more “holistic” natural law ethics needs to ask, it seems to me, is this: Given that gay people exist, what is good for them (and the communities of which they are a part) and how should their sexuality be ordered toward those distinctively human goods that we are all called to realize? The fundamental question then, is not: what are sexual organs for, but what are people for? As Keith Ward puts it “[t]he physical and biological structures of the natural world must always be subordinated, in morality, to the realization of those universal goods which all free agents have good reason to want” (“Christian Ethics” in Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi, Geoffrey Wainwright, ed., p. 232). The kinds of goods that free personal beings are naturally oriented toward realizing take moral precedence over the biological processes that constitute the substratum of those persons.
Again, this is something that can only be answered by reason and experience. Some conservatives have contended that gay sex is intrinsically ordered toward narcissism or other anti-social tendencies, which is at least the right kind of argument, since it claims that homosexuality is inherently opposed to human flourishing. But it simply doesn’t measure up to empirical reality. Gay people’s sexuality is capable of contributing to the building up of relationships that exhibit all the virtues that straight ones do and in my view the onus is on those who would deny this fact.
Regarding the argument from Scripture, Braaten surely knows that there is widespread disagreement not so much about whether the Bible condemns certain same-sex acts, but whether the kinds of monogamous faithful relationships exhibited by many gay people fall under that condemnation. Again, the question can’t be settled simply be saying that the Bible forbids x until we ask further why does it condemn x? What underlying reason is there for a given prohibition and does it apply to this particular case?
Natural law ethics is animated by the idea that creation is rational and that it mirrors, if imperfectly, the mind of God. A corollary of this is that God’s commands aren’t inscrutable demands, but are intended to guide us toward our ultimate good and are, in principle, transparent to our understanding. To understand what that good is requires the exercise of our own reason, which partakes, at least in some small way, of the Divine Reason. This doesn’t mean that our reason is perfect or that it doesn’t require additional illumination from God, but there is an underlying rationality to the moral principles that arise out of the fact that we have been created in a particular way.
Braaten seems angry that the ELCA should even take up this issue, since the right answer is so obvious (to him). But it’s only obvious (if at all) if one adopts the biological reductionism that he (erroneously in my view) identifies with natural law ethics. A more holistic view sees biology in service to the realization of distinctly human goods and, as such, doesn’t give it the last word in determining what is right. Straight people who think of themselves as safely “in” the charmed circle of being approved by God might consider what it would mean to adopt this biologistic ethic in all its rigor.
I’ve been reading this abridged Institutes of the Christian Religion that I referred to in the last post and liked this passage quite a bit:
Since complete happiness is knowing God, in order that no one should be prevented from finding that happiness, he has kindly put in our minds the seed of true religion we have already spoken of and has also displayed his perfection in the whole structure of the universe. So he is constantly in our view and we cannot open our eyes without being made to see him. His nature is incomprehensible, far beyond all human thought, but his glory is etched on his creation so brightly, clearly and gloriously, that no one however obtuse and illiterate can plead ignorance as an excuse. So with absolute truth the Psalmist exclaims, ‘He wraps himself in light as with a garment’ (Ps. 104:2). It is as though he was saying that when God created the world for the first time he put on outer clothes. He hung up gorgeous banners on which we see his perfection clearly portrayed. In the same place the Psalmist aptly compares the spread of the heavens with God’s royal tent and says he ‘lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters. He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind’ (Ps. 104:3): sending out the wind and lightning as his swift messengers. Because the glory of his power and wisdom is more ablaze in the heavens it is frequently called his palace. Wherever you look, there is no part of the world however small that does not show at least some glimmer of beauty; it is impossible to gaze at the vast expanses of the universe without being overwhelmed by such tremendous beauty. So the author of the epistle to the Hebrews sensitively describes the visible world as an image of the invisible (Heb. 11:3). The superb structure of the world acts as a sort of mirror in which we may see God, who would otherwise be invisible. (pp. 32-33)
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.
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.
A Thinking Reed 