A Thinking Reed

Category: Science and Religion

  • The Groaning of Creation 6: Priests of creation

    Having offered an account of why God permits the suffering and frustated lives of so many non-human animals, Southgate turns to the question of what role humans might play in alleviating their plight.

    Key to his understanding once again is the notion of creation in travail, or “groaning.” Creation is good, but it’s destined to be redeemed, to be made into something better.

    Southgate’s touchstone biblical passage is from Romans 8:

    I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (vv. 18-23, NRSV)

    Southgate suggests that we can understand “futility” here as the evolutionary process with its attendant death, suffering, and frustration. Yet this process has led to the incarnation of the Son of God and the new age that his dying and rising inagurates. New possibilities for transformed living have been made available, and humanity is called to participate in God’s redeeming work.

    In light of this, Southgate goes on to consider what role humanity has with respect to the rest of creation and non-human animals in particular. Human beings can’t bring in the eschaton–that’s God’s job–but they can anticipate it to some extent and live as signs of the dawning age. And this includes “having some part in the healing of the evolutionary process” (p. 96).

    What does this mean, specifically? Southgate suggests that humanity actually has several different roles in respect to creation:

  • First, we are responsible for the well-being of the entire biosphere, simply because our actions can affect and profoundly change it (as in the case of climate change). So, we’re called to preserve the biosphere’s ability to support and nourish a wide diversity of life.
  • Second, we are called to make room for wilderness, for parts of the Earth that serve no utilitarian human purpose. These serve as a reminder that creation doesn’t exist solely for our sake and that other creatures have a right to live flourishing lives in our shared world.
  • Third, we need to find ways of living with our fellow creatures that are respectful of their God-given natures and existence. Our occupation of much of the Earth’s surface requires us to live alongside with–and make use of–our fellow creatures, but this isn’t a license for exploitation. Southgate quotes Wendell Berry: “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such a desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want” (quoted on p. 106).

    • Southgate proposes two ethical concepts to illuminate these duties: ethical kenosis and priesthood. Ethical kenosis means just what it sounds like–a kind of self-limitation; we have to limit our own desires and will to mastery to make room for the flourishing of the rest of creation. This includes

  • kenosis of aspiration–or the desire to grasp at a role for ourselves that fails to respect other creatures;
  • kenosis of appetite–our seemingly bottomless desire for the good things of this world; and realtedly
  • kenosis of acquisitiveness–our desire for the material trappings of life (see pp. 101-102).

    • Priesthood is a way of understanding our role in God’s world that stands somewhere between anthropocentric views of creation as existing solely for humanity’s sake and the radically egalitarian perspective of “deep ecology” that sees humans as merely one species among others.

    Against the second view, Southgate points out that humans are the de facto stewards of creation simply in virtue of our ability to understand and affect the workings of nature, and that, contrary to deep ecologists, the workings of nature can’t provide us with ethical prescriptions.

    While the notion of priesthood doesn’t offer any neat ethical prescriptions, it does suggest some broad themes in our relation to the non-human creation (Southgate is drawing here particularly on Eastern Orthodox theology):

  • Humans can reshape the world in certain ways, through agriculture, culture, scientific understanding.
  • Humans can bless creation and offer it back to God in contemplation and worship.
  • Humans can sacrificially offer themselves for the good of creation.

    • There is a tension here between a more passive and activist stances. To the extent that creation is good, we receive it and contemplate it with awe and thanksgiving. But to the extent that it is “groaning” we may be called to a more activist intervention in light of the norms of God’s promised new creation. In the next post I’ll discuss what Southgate thinks this might look like in particular cases.

    Index of posts in this series is here.

  • The Groaning of Creation 5: Heaven can wait

    As we saw in the previous post, Southgate affirms some kind of afterlife as an eschatological recompense for non-human animals who were deprived of the opportunity to flourish in this life, a strategy taken by many theodicies that focus on human suffering.

    But, as Southgate recognizes (and as we’ve discussed here before), “if an altered physics makes possible an altered and pain-free cosmos, why did God not create this in the first place?” (p. 90)

    His response is another variation on the “only way” argument–that such a process, full of suffering and frustration as it may be, was the only (or perhaps best) way available to God to create finite creaturely selves:

    We know that, in the physics with which we are familiar, self-organization–and hence the growth of complexity, and the origin of complex selves–depends on so-called dissipative processes, in turn based on the second law of thermodynamics. This is the way creaturely selves arise. Since this was the world the God of all creativity and all compassion chose for the creation of creatures, we must presume that this was the only type of world that would do for that process. In other words, our guess must be that though heaven can eternally preserve those selves, subsisting in suffering-free relationship, it could not give rise to them in the first place. (p. 90)

    I think there’s something to this if we specify that what we’re talking about are biological selves of the kind we’re familiar with. Creatures not embedded in a biosphere like ours, with similar evolutionary histories, would be radically different from life as we know it, assuming that it’s even possible. Animal selves (both human and non-human) are indelibly shaped by their embodiment, which is a function of this biospheric embeddedness and history. If God wanted to create selves like that, then it’s very difficult to see what other way was available.

    Still, Christian tradition, along with many others, has long held that there are finite selves who don’t require a physical biosphere–at least not one like ours–to exist. I’m talking, of course, about angels and other finite spirits that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have seen as intermediaries and messengers from God and fellow-citizens in God’s kingdom. If God can, as these traditions hold, create finite non-embodied spirits by fiat, then it was possible to bring creaturely selves into existence without the evolutionary process.

    So, a critic could maintain that a heaven populated by such never-embodied spirits who aren’t heirs to the frailty of flesh would be superior to one populated by creaturely selves brought into existence by a long evolutionary process with its attendant suffering and frustration.

    The only way to deflect this criticism that I can see is to maintain either 1) that God couldn’t create finite, non-embodied spirits (thus contradicting the tradition) or 2) that, even if God could create such never-embodied spirits, the specific goods of embodied creaturely selves outweigh the disvalues of the evolutionary process.

    I’m inclined to favor option 2, though, to put it mildly, it’s not clear how you would weigh up the relevant values and disvalues. That said, however, one line of thought suggests itself. It’s been said about the communion of saints that each saint reflects, in his or her own unique way, the glory of God. By analogy, then, we could say that each kind of embodied creature reflects in its own unique way, and perceives from its own unique perspective, that same glory.*

    To use an over-familiar metaphor, a universe of diverse kinds of creatures is like a stained glass window that refracts white light into different colors. Similarly, the multiplicity of creatures “refracts” God’s glory in ways that would be unavialable if there were far fewer, or even just one, kind of finite spirit in existence. Or, to revert to the terminology of an earlier post, the variety of species resemble, participate in, or give expression to different facets of the divine logos.

    Index of posts in this series is here.
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    *If memory serves–and it’s been a while–Leibniz says something along these lines: that each finite spirit (“monad”) is its own unique reflection of the divine being.

  • The Groaning of Creation 4: There’s a wideness in God’s mercy

    In Chapter 5, Southgate directly takes up the question of an afterlife for non-human animals. This is another main plank in his evolutionary theodicy, alongside the “only way” argument. Even given that the evolutionary process is necessary to give rise to the values of finite creatures, countless animals still lead lives best described in Hobbes’ terms–nasty, brutish, and short.

    An example Southgate returns to repeatedly is the pelican’s “insurance chick”–the “extra” chick that is hatched but which in most cases is pushed out of the nest by its sibling and subsequently ignored and left to perish by its parents. “Its ‘purpose’ is merely to ensure that one viable chick survives. It has only a 10 percent chance of fledging” (p. 46). This is an animal that has virtually no chance of living a flourishing life according to its kind, but is a byproduct of the process that gives rise to the possibility of flourishing life in the first place. What can be said, in terms of theodicy, for such victims of the evolutionary process?

    Southgate marshalls three general considerations for positing an afterlife for non-human animals:

  • Passages from the Bible that suggest a redeemed future for all creation, not just humanity
  • The Bible pictures humans themselves as existing in a deep relationship to the surrounding creation
  • God’s goodness suggests that the Lord in his infinite mercy would not condemn his beloved creatures to permanent frustration

    • Once again Southgate recognizes that he’s on speculative ground here; neither the Bible, nor tradition, nor reason provide knock-down arguments for animal heaven. And yet, taken together, these considerations provide, at the very least, hope that God will provide a chance at ultimate fulfillment for all God’s creatures.

    Southgate considers various versions of what eschatology for animals might consist of, such as species immortality vs. individual immortality and “objective” immortality in the mind of God vs. “subjective” immortality for individual creatures. He tentatively comes down on the side of some form of subjective, individual existence.

    Picking up on the previous discussion of creaturely self-transcendence, Southgate admits that heaven for animals might seem to require a radical transformation of their natures. “It is very hard to imagine any form of being a predator that nevertheless does not ‘hurt or destroy’ on the ‘holy mountain of God’” (p. 88). He suggests that predators and prey might enact a playful version of their relationship that doesn’t involve pain or death, but admits this is, again, sheer speculation.

    Nevertheless, he returns to his three lines of consideration for animal immortality: Biblical promises, the interrelatedness of humans and the rest of creation, and the goodness and mercy of God. We might add that it’s not much less difficult to imagine what heaven for humans will be like and how our natures and environment would have to be transformed to make it possible. For Christians, the hope for such immortality–or, better, resurrection–depends not on anything intrinsic to our natures, but on the faithfulness of God. Should we hope for anything less for our animal kin?

    Index of posts in this series is here.

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  • The Groaning of Creation 3: God so loved the world

    In Chapter 4, Southgate develops a trinitarian “theology of creation,” an admittedly speculative enterprise that seeks to shine some light on the relationship between the triune God and an evolutionary process that operates according to Darwinian principles.

    Taking up the theme of kenosis, Southgate suggests that God’s self-emptying love is foundational both to intra-trinitarian relationships and to the relationship between God and the world. God the Father pours out his love, the essence of his being, giving rise to (begetting) God the Son, who, in turn, returns all that he is to the Father. And this intra-divine relationship of self-emptying love constitutes God the Holy Spirit.

    Southgate suggests that this inherently self-emptying, or kenotic, character of the divine love is the ground of God’s desire to create the genuinely other. And this desire is realized in the creation of the world and in the evolutionary process where God “lets be” a great variety of creatures.

    Following Irenaeus, Southgate calls the Son and the Spirit God’s “two hands” in creation. The Son, or Word, provides the intelligible pattern for species, which, in tune with modern biology, Southgate sees not as static essences, but as “points and peaks” on an ever-shifting “fitness landscape.” The Spirit, meanwhile, both provides creatures with their “thisness,” or particularity as unique individuals, and lures them onward toward new possibilities of fulfillment and self-transcendence.

    At any given time living creatures are in one of four states:

  • fulfilled (flourishing as the kind of creature they are)
  • growing toward fulfillment
  • frustrated (prevented from flourishing)
  • transcending themselves (either by chance mutation or some new learned capability)

    • While God takes delight in fulfilled creatures, there always remains an ambiguous note in creation. As Southgate observes, the divine love may be kenotic, or self-emptying, but Darwinian pressures require organisms to be self-assertive, if not downright aggressive. So, while the creatures praise God simply by flourishing as the type of creatures they are, there is a tension between their self-assertive fulfillment and the kind of selfless love that God is.

    This is where the element of self-transcendence comes in: Southgate sees God as luring creation– through the messy, ambiguous, and painful evolutionary process–toward a point where genuine self-giving love becomes possible: love of the other for its own sake. We see traces of this love in some of the higher animals, perhaps, but only in humanity, Southgate maintains, does this kind of love become a permanent possibility (though one that is all too infrequently realized).

    As God draws creations forward toward self-giving love, however, God endures the persistent self-assertiveness of creatures. If flourishing as the type of creature it is can be seen as the creature’s “Yes” to God, the “No” is a refusal of God’s invitation to self-transcendence, rather than selfish and preferential behavior:

    God suffers not only in the suffering of myriad creatures, each one precious to the Creator, and the extinction of myriad species, each a way of being imagined within the creative Word, but also the continual refusal–beyond creation’s praise–of God’s offer of self-transcendence, the continual refusal, beyond all creation’s flourishing, to live by the acceptance of the divine offer that would draw the creature deeper into the life of the Trinity itself. It will be apparent anew how paradoxical the theology of evolutionary creation must be, given the Christian affirmation that a good God has given rise to a good creation, and yet as we have seen the creation is shot through with ambiguity. The purposes of God are, and are not, realized in the life of any given creature. God delights in creatures in and for themselves, and yet longs for the response of the creature that can become more than itself, whose life can be broken and poured out in love and joy after the divine image. (p. 68)

    This creaturely “no” is experienced by God most powerfully on the cross of Jesus. In sketching a theology of the Atonement, Southgate says that the cross is God bearing the brunt of creation’s “no,” and taking responsibility for the pain and suffering etched into the process of life. In becoming incarnate in Jesus, God identified not just with humanity, but with all creaturely suffering, loss, and failure. “The Incarnation is the event by which God takes this presence and solidarity with creaturely existence to its utmost, and thus ‘takes responsibility’ for all the evil in creation–both the humanly wrought evil and the harms to all creatures” (p. 76)

    Southgate calls this “deep incarnation”–“the Christ-event takes all creaturely experience into the life of God in a new way.” In dying and rising, God in Jesus inaugurates a new age in which creation will be freed from its travails–humans freed to love selflessly, and non-human animals freed from the ambiguous nature of the evolutionary process in which they are caught up.

    Questions and considerations:

  • Does it make sense to say that creatures who aren’t capable of self-transcendence are frustrating God’s intentions for them?
  • How does Southgate’s theology of creation relate to a scientific explanation of the evolutionary process? Are there “gaps” in the process that require divine intervention to move it forward? Or does it operate according to purely naturalistic laws? And, if so, what explanatory power does the theological description add?

    • Regarding the first point, Southgate acknowledges that, of course, no moral blame attaches to creatures for failing to transcend themselves. However, he says, it still makes sense to speak of a certain “recalcitrance” in nature as it presently exists that resists the shape of the “peaceable kingdom.” This is in keeping with his general emphasis on creation’s “groaning”: of being in process toward something that will be fully transparent to God’s will and is foreshadowed in some of the eschatological passages in the Bible.

    In response to the second concern, Southgate says in a footnote that “theology of creation is a different sort of discourse from scientific explanation […], so the two can coexist without there necessarily being conflict between them” (fn. 56, p. 161). This needs to be fleshed out more, however. Does he mean that the two “discourse” are just two ways of describing the same phenomena? In which case, why prefer one or the other? Or does he mean that the theological discourse gets at an aspect of the total process that the scientific discourse leaves out, and is therefore necessary to give a complete account?

    Index of posts in this series is here.

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  • The Groaning of Creation 2: The Only Way?

    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.

  • The Groaning of Creation 1: Intro

    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

  • the existence of countless creatures who live frustrated lives and are never able to fulfill their God-given natures (what we might call cases of pointless suffering) and
  • the extinction of species, or entire ways of being in the biosphere. An adequate theodicy must take these disvalues into account, which will require what he calls a “compound evolutionary theodicy.”

    • This means that any adequate theodicy will emphasize not only that suffering and extinction occur as necessary concomitants of the evolutionary process, but also

  • that God suffers alongside God’s creatures (the “fellow sufferer who understands” in Whitehead’s terms) and
  • that there will be some form of eschatological redemption for creation, possibly including those individual creatures who lived frustrated lives of pointless suffering.

    • 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.

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  • Big questions

    ATR favorite Keith Ward also has a new book out – The Big Questions in Science and Religion. You can read a lenghty excerpt here (I haven’t read the book or the excerpt yet).

    I’m guessing it will cover a lot of the same ground as his recent Pascal’s Fire, though it looks like this one takes a more “comparative religions” approach.

  • Directing traffic between science and theology

    The other day I asserted that Christian theology still hasn’t fully absorbed the insights of Darwinism, even where it claims to have accepted them. This Christian Century article provides a good overview of some attempts to do just that.

    I think there are two issues that stand out as particular challenges for theology here: the nature of divine action and providence, and the nature of human beings. This article deals mostly with the former, though it touches on the deeper connection between human beings and the rest of creation that Darwinian science discloses.

    There is also an epistemic question here of exactly what kind of status theological and scientific claims have and, in cases of apparent conflict, which should give way. Ultra-fundamentalists might say that theological claims always trump scientific claims, whereas many secularists would say the opposite. But most of us, I think it’s safe to say, reside somewhere in the middle: we recognize that new knowledge of the physical world requires at least some modification (or at least re-interpretation) of certain traditional theological claims. On the other hand, a lot of dubious claims have been passed off as the assured findings of “Science,” which are nothing of the sort.

    A concrete example might help us see the problem a bit more clearly. Much traditional theology taught that death was, in some mysterious sense, the result of sin. This could be understood in different ways: death could be seen as the punishment for our disobedience of God’s commands, or it could be seen as the inevitable result of humanity’s turning away from communion with God (or some combination of the two).

    The picture given to us by evolutionary theory, however, tells a very different story. In this telling the existence of death long preceded human sin, or the existence of human beings for that matter. In fact, given our understanding of the evolutionary process, it seems that death is something like an inextricable aspect of the process by which new forms of life come to be. Far from being a punishment imposed from without, death is a necessary condition of human existence (at least in this world).

    How theology negotiates this apparent conflict has far-reaching implications. It affects our understanding of providence, sin, atonement, and redemption. For instance, if death is, in some sense, a “natural” part of existence rather than a punishment for sin, does this affect how we understand what it is Christ is supposed to save us from and how he does it? Or what does the omnipresence of death say about God’s power and goodness?

    There isn’t, it seems to me, any single “correct” way for proceeding here. The Christian metaphysic (or narrative if you prefer) isn’t a single monolithic whole, but a mutable cluster of views some of which are more central than others. To what extent it can be changed without surrendering something essential is something about which there’s been a lot of disagreement. Reinhold Niebuhr, for instance, has been alternatively praised as providing a successful re-interpretation of some central Christian claims, and criticized as someone who essentially abandoned those claims. (See, for instance, Was Reinhold Niebuhr a Christian?)

    At the same time, Christians looking to be up-to-date have at times been too quick to embrace claims that are properly speaking philosophical rather than scientific. A lot of revisionist theology which denies God’s intervention or the possibility of miracles falls into this category; it has embraced a philosophical naturalism which isn’t mandated by scientific findings, even if it may be compatible with it.

    In his short book An Examined Faith, the Protestant ethicist and theologian James Gustafson identifies three strategies theologians use in dealing with scientific and other “secular” sources of knowledge: rejection, absorption, and accommodation. Rejection subsumes scientific claims to theological ones, whereas absorption does the reverse (perhaps with the creation of a “nature spirituality”). But accommodation of some kind remains, for Gustafson, the most viable strategy.

    Within the “accommodationist” strategy Gustafson distinguishes between approaches in which scientific findings primarily limit religious claims and those which authorize them. Limiting approaches means, essentially, that religious claims need to be re-visited primarily where they conflict, or appear to conflict, with the well-founded findings of science. Authorizing approaches go further in using science to inspire or shape the character of theology. For instance, a limiting approach might acknowledge that biological and other sciences show certain things to be true about human beings, but deny that they give an exhaustive account of human nature. An authorizing approach might, on the other hand, seek to provide an overview of human nature entirely legitimated or inspired by scientific considerations (see Gustafson, pp. 90-91).

    As Gustafson says

    Few, if any, Christian thinkers use only one criterion or rule to direct the flow of traffic in any intersection where theology and ethics meet scientific and other secular traffic. Interest in different Christian doctrines determines which secular traffic has to be directed, as I have shown above. Accommodation to traffic from astrophysics is different from accommodation to psychoanalysis: the former, prima facie, intersects with the doctrine of creation, the latter with theological anthropology. (p. 91)

    A further implication, I think, is that there is no general a priori way of determining how “science” should relate to “theology.” Rather, the approach should be more piecemeal, by identifying specific doctrines which seem to intersect with particular scientific findings (be they physical, biological, social, etc.), each of which may be more or less well-founded. The challenge is that it would seem to require that religious thinkers be well-informed about particular scientific disciplines and findings and not rely exclusively on generalized characterizations of what “science” does and doesn’t do.

  • The end of the world as we know it (6): animals

    (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.

  • The end of the world as we know it (5): New creation

    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.