A volume dedicated to ‘ current paths and emerging horizons ’ is a helpful place to explore what are the motifs that are currently attracting the energy of scholars, and which themes will shape the future debate. Among current paths I identify four. Th e fi rst is the persistence of fall-language among those who simply cannot accept that violent and (to human eyes) ugly infl iction of suff ering can be part of God ’ s economy of creation. We can pass rather quickly over two somewhat bizarre models. Th e fi rst is that of retro-active causation off ered by William Dembski in Th e End of Christianity , 20 which I discard not just because of its sheer oddness, but because for all its appeal to stretch of logic it does not do work towards a theodicy of non-human suff ering. A God who
17 Southgate, Groaning of Creation , p. 15.
18 Rolston, Science and Religion , p. 140.
19 R. Page, God and the Web of Creation (London: SCM Press, 1996).
20 W. A. Dembski, Th e End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (Nashville: B&H
Group/Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2009).
would infl ict suff ering on myriad creatures over millions of years simply so that the fi rst humans could refl ect on this and see it as a possible consequence of their sin, does not seem like a God of either love or justice. Th e second is that of Stephen Webb in Th e Dome of Eden , 21 with his sense that issues of good and evil were wrestled out with the fi rst humans in some sort of protected space, while beyond that space evolution was profoundly tainted by the activity of Satan. In both Dembski and Webb, a hankering for biblical literalism leads to a position plagued by all the scientifi c and theological problems I outlined earlier when discussing the Fall.
A much more sophisticated fall-based account is found in the writing of Neil Messer, who draws on Barth ’ s concept of das Nichtige to explain how disvalue can enter creation without its being an expression of the divine will. 22 David Clough indicates in On Animals that this is also where his sympathies would lie. 23 I am concerned that Messer ’ s scheme accords neither with the evidence of the Hebrew Scriptures (unless these are all to be read through the lens of Isa. 11.6 – 9), nor with the scientifi c narrative of the co-emergence of values with disvalues, nor indeed with a theology that takes divine sovereignty seriously. 24
Mention of the work of David Clough takes me to the second current path in this area – that of the extrapolation of theological discourse previously reserved for humans, to include other animals. Most of this extrapolation stresses the qualities and moral stature of other animals as subjects and, indeed, as created in some measure in the image of God. 25 But there is an interesting subsection of this work around the question of whether other animals can be said to sin. 26 I myself doubt whether this language can be usefully extended far beyond our most immediate primate relatives. It will not, therefore, be able to form the basis for a theodicy reliant on the free choices of creatures. 27 What sense does it make to say that a tiger can choose to eat grass rather than goats, or that it
21 S. Webb, Th e Dome of Eden: A New Solution to the Problem of Creation and Evolution (Eugene: Wipf
27 Contrary to the view developed by Joshua Moritz, in his ‘ Evolutionary Evil and Darwin ’ s Black Box:
Changing the Parameters of the Problem ’ , in G. Bennett et al. (eds.), Th e Evolution of Evil (G ö ttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), pp. 143 – 88.
sins by not so doing? Explorations of ‘ sin ’ in other primates may, however, shed important light on the emergence of the property of sacrifi cial self-giving, a property that, in humans, made humanity a vehicle for God ’ s gift of the divine Son in the incarnation.
Messer ’ s ingenious attempt to bring Barth ’ s language of ‘ nothingness ’ into the service of a theodicy has intersections with a third current path in the debate, that of the invocation of mystery. Just as we cannot quite grasp Barth ’ s Nichtige as invoked by Messer, so also Celia Deane-Drummond and Nicola Hoggard Creegan both acknowledge the extent of the disvalues in evolution and off er parabolic description, rather than explanation. So Deane-Drummond talks of the inevitability of ‘ Shadow Sophia ’ . 28 Nicola Hoggard Creegan invokes the parable of the wheat and the tares, 29 without making it clear who is the ‘ enemy ’ in relation to evolutionary evil, or indeed what can be regarded as tares and what wheat. Th is formulation, elegant as it is, seems not quite to do justice to the intrinsic nature of the connection between values and disvalues – that it is the very speed of the cheetah, the power of the orca, the ingenuity of the primate group, that gives rise to suff ering in its victims. Arguably, this same category of appeal to mystery also applies to the use of the term ‘ cruciformity ’ in the writing of Rolston. To call nature ‘ cruciform ’ , or ‘ a passion play ’ , is not so much theodicy as mystical description, though I off er below a further comment on cruciformity that may prove helpful. 30
Hoggard Creegan ’ s book contains a fi ne account of the shift s in evolutionary theory brought about by an increased emphasis on cooperation 31 – the fourth and last of my ‘ current paths ’ . It is worth examining in a little detail the claim that, because there is more cooperation in evolution than is sometimes claimed in hard-line neo-Darwinism, the problem of theodicy in respect of evolutionary suff ering is lessened. 32 Th e fi rst observation to make is that the
28 C. Deane-Drummond, Christ and Evolution: Wonder and Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
2009), pp. 185 – 91; ‘ Shadow Sophia in Christological Perspective ’ , Th eology and Science 6 (2008) pp. 13 – 32. I remain unconvinced that this attractive terminology gives any reason for disvalue, as opposed to appealing to mystery.
29 N. H. Creegan, Animal Suff ering and the Problem of Evil (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013).
30 Rolston, Science and Religion , p. 144.
31 Creegan, Animal Suff ering , chapter 8.
32 Coakley, currently the most signifi cant theologian refl ecting on evolutionary cooperation,
acknowledges that ‘ Th ere is no less suff ering or “ wastage ” on this [a more cooperative] model of evolution ’ . See S. Coakley, ‘ Evolution, Cooperation and Divine Providence ’ , in Nowak and Coakley (eds.), Evolution, Games and God , pp. 375 – 85 (383).
presence of cooperation does not prevent natural selection from operating, any more than the phenomenon of fl ight negates gravity. Th ere will still be winners and losers, even in an evolutionary game in which cooperation is abundant. Th e observations of Martin Nowak, as interpreted by Coakley in her 2012 Giff ord Lectures, are extremely interesting, and may, in time, off er fascinating insights into the emergence of sacrifi cial behaviour – voluntary losing – within evolution. 33 But the point remains that traits will still be selected for, and against. Cooperation in groups may confer advantage in the use of ecosystemic resources – it may even sometimes allow a resource to be useful that could not be so to individuals in isolation, but because, in the end, these resources are always fi nite, this advantage will always be at the expense of other individuals or groups. In the end there will always be losers, and it is in these individuals that the balance between suff ering and fl ourishing may be particularly adverse. Th us the instance of the insurance pelican chick could be represented as an example of cooperation – the parents cooperate with the elder chick (if healthy) in ensuring the exclusion and therefore the starvation of the younger. Th is is an eff ective strategy in maximizing the effi ciency of food use, but it is not a strategy that eliminates losers, or mitigates suff ering. Indeed, this (slightly mischievously chosen) example shows that cooperation might seem to make the moral problem for God, of creaturely suff ering, worse rather than better. It is not merely the weak or the unlucky that suff er, but the many who happen to fall outside the networks of cooperation that such an evolutionary system engenders.
Refl ection on cooperation may, however, clarify the issue of parasitism, one of the most disturbing causes of suff ering in nature. Darwin himself was much disturbed by the behaviour of the Ichneumonidae , wasps that hatch their progeny in caterpillars that nourish this incubus and are then progressively eaten away from the inside. Th at may trouble the aesthetic sensibility of the human observer, but it is not necessarily a particularly problematic example of suff ering, depending on the complexity of pain-sensing and inner life in caterpillars. Unquestionably, however, the parasitizing of higher animals by
33 I am inclined to agree with Coakley ’ s intuition that ‘ the cooperative tendencies of evolution
themselves suggest a natural praeparatio in the processes of selection for the potential later heights of saintly human self-sacrifi ce (only ultimately comprehensible as a response to the divine grace) ’ . Coakley, ‘ Evolution, Cooperation ’ , p. 382.
various pathogens causes great suff ering. 34 Parasitism may be regarded as an inevitable by-product of evolutionary systems that predispose to cooperation, and indeed to ‘ sacrifi ce ’ – ‘ voluntary losing ’ , as I called it above. Where such conditions pertain, involuntary losing, because symbionts ‘ cheat ’ , can and does readily occur. Parasitism may evolve out of symbiosis, or may indeed evolve into it again, as with the many intestinal fl ora in the human gut. In respect of parasitism, then, one might construct what Robinson and I have called a ‘ developmental by-product ’ good – harm analysis 35 – the good of all sorts of possibilities of creaturely cooperation is, or may be, accompanied by the harm of the suff ering caused by evolutionary cheats. Such cheating is not intrinsic to an evolutionary process that allows cooperation but is a near-inevitable by-product of it. As I indicated above, such thinking does not constitute a complete theodicy – that would make God only a consequentialist calculator of goods and harms, but it makes a contribution to an understanding of how God might have come to allow such phenomena to occur within creation.
Th e status of predation is slightly diff erent. Strategies of cooperation could, theoretically, develop without parasitism. But it is very hard to imagine some of the properties of the higher animals evolving without the stimulus of predator – prey relationships, both in creating evolutionary ‘ arms races ’ that refi ne the abilities of creatures to extraordinary extents and in providing large sources of pre-packaged nutrition for the successful predator. 36 So predation looks more like an instrument of the generation of certain types of evolved value than a by-product of that generation. It requires, therefore, a slightly diff erent good – harm analysis, one that emphasizes to the full the inextricability to which I referred above. 37 Th is is the problem of evolutionary theodicy at its sharpest – what I have called elsewhere the teleological aspect of the problem, suff ering as the instrument of the generation of value, and therefore, presumably, a means to divine ends. 38
34 See the comments of John F. Haught in ‘ Th e Boyle Lecture 2003: Darwin, Design and the Promise
of Nature ’ , Science and Christian Belief 17 (2005), pp. 5 – 20 (8). Holmes Rolston is less exercised by it.
See his ‘ Disvalues in Nature ’ , pp. 255 – 56.
35 In Southgate and Robinson, ‘ Varieties of Th eodicy ’ .
36 Rolston, ‘ Disvalues in Nature ’ , pp. 253 – 54.
37 Disvalue ‘ close-coupled with value ’ – as Rolston puts it in ‘ Disvalues in Nature ’ , p. 254.
38 Southgate, Groaning of Creation , pp. 9 – 10.