Christopher Southgate
In focusing on the suff ering of God ’ s creatures, I will consider here only that branch of natural evil that can be termed ‘ evolutionary evil ’ – the harms to non-human creatures that are caused by other creatures and their environment, in ways that are characterized by the sciences as part of the evolutionary process.
I will not be considering in the fi rst instance the myriad harms caused to non-human creatures by the greed, folly and cruelty of non-human beings, though I end by touching on the implications of God ’ s care for creatures in relation to the human vocation to creation care. 1
Th e problem
Th e problem of evolutionary evil may be simply stated. A Darwinian perspective on the natural world shows us that nature is in Tennyson ’ s phrase ‘ red in tooth and claw ’ , moreover, that it ‘ cares nothing ’ for ‘ the type ’ . 2 Th e suff ering of individual creatures, and the extinction of species, is intrinsic to the way nature works.
Th is problem was evident to Darwin when he wrote ‘ what a book a devil ’ s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly
1 I thank many colleagues for contributions to my thinking, and especially Ms Nadia Marais, my
respondent at the conference where this paper was fi rst given, and Ms Bethany Sollereder who kindly read an earlier draft .
2 Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘ In Memoriam A. H. H. ’ 56.13, 16, in Tennyson: A Selected Edition (ed.
C. Ricks; Harlow: Longman, 1989).
cruel works of nature! ’ 3 Yet Darwin could also write that ‘ Th ere is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fi xed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. ’ 4 In other words, he saw the evolutionary narrative that his work made possible as ambiguous , full of disvalue, even of horror, yet also full of value of all sorts, in particular elegance of adaptation, and, when considered overall, suggestive of grandeur. 5
It is important for the ecotheologian to make clear decisions as to what constitutes value in creaturely life. In my monograph Th e Groaning of Creation (2008), 6 I located value in the individual, especially in fl ourishing (however brief that fl ourishing might be) – experiencing the full possibilities of what life as that creature might off er (ch. 4). As far as ecological systems went, I located value in beauty, diversity and complexity (p. 16) – again, ultimately, because all of these promote richness of creaturely experience. I would now be inclined to add cooperation as a value, both because cooperation in itself promotes complexity and because it opens up possibilities of self-giving. 7 But these are guesses as to what constitutes value, and other theodicists may choose diff erent values and therefore construct diff erent good – harm analyses. 8 I note also Holmes Rolston ’ s careful discussion of the possibility of claiming any objectivity for such a scheme of creaturely value. 9
Th e fi rst step in my argument, then, is to affi rm the reality of creaturely suff ering, and of the disvalue that is the (natural) extinction of species. It is
3 C. Darwin, letter to J. D. Hooker, dated 13 July 1856, www.darwinproject.ac.uk (accessed 5 July
2013).
4 C. Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 490. Fascinatingly, in the second and subsequent editions, Darwin inserted aft er ‘ breathed ’ the words ‘ by the Creator ’ .
5 Lisa Sideris, importantly, points out that awareness of the realities of a Darwinian world is a
neglected element in ecotheology. See L. Sideris, Environmental Ethics, Ecological Th eology and Natural Selection (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
6 C. Southgate, Th e Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution and the Problem of Evil (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2008).
7 Th is was recently explored by Sarah Coakley in her 2012 Giff ord Lectures. See S. Coakley, ‘ Sacrifi ce
Regained: Evolution, Cooperation and God ’ , http://www.faith-theology.com/2012/05/sarah-coakley-2012-giff ord-lectures.html (accessed 5 July 2013).
8 On such analyses, see C. Southgate and A. Robinson, ‘ Varieties of Th eodicy: An Exploration of
Responses to the Problem of Evil based on a Typology of Good – Harm Analyses ’ , in N. Murphy, R. J. Russell and W. Stoeger, SJ (eds.), Physics and Cosmology: Scientifi c Perspectives on the Problem of Evil in Nature (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory/Berkeley: Center for Th eology and the Natural Sciences, 2007), pp. 67 – 90.
9 H. Rolston III, ‘ Disvalues in Nature ’ , Th e Monist 75 (1992), pp. 250 – 75 (251 – 52).
important to be realistic about these things. We must not imagine that the suff ering of other creatures too closely resembles human suff ering, or that it contains the sort of crushing of hope that an advanced theory of mind makes possible. Nor should we imagine that pain, by itself, is necessarily always a negative element in life – it is a vital part of being alive as a complex organism.
But acute observation of animals does show us something more than mere pain – it shows us animals avoiding noxious stimuli and ‘ favouring ’ a hurt limb.
We see social animals crying out for assistance, and the distress of creatures caught in severe trauma, especially as they experience trauma from which there is no possibility of release. Death from predators is sometimes quick, but sometimes not. It may take a leopard over a minute to bring down a full-grown antelope. A whale may be literally eaten alive by sharks or orcas, over a period of hours. Neurophysiological studies on animals in distress show similar patterns of hormone and neurotransmitter release to those found in humans.
So – with all due caution – it is reasonable to regard creaturely experience as including the possibility of real suff ering, across a certain range of types of creature that are complex enough to feel such.
What of extinction? Species, arguably, have natural spans of eff ectiveness, aft er which their viability disappears because of competition or environmental change. (As an aside, a chilling possibility in the current era is that the human species may be in such a phase.) But extinction removes from the biosphere, for ever, a certain strategy of being alive, a certain way, to pick up an important motif from the Psalms, in which God is praised by God ’ s creation. So extinction is always a disvalue. Extinction may benefi t a whole range of other future species – the loss of the dinosaurs meant that other possibilities could be explored – but it remains a tragic loss to creation, the loss of a whole strain of music from the symphony of creaturely praise, a loss, therefore, also to God ’ s own experience of that creation.
It is worth noting that both natural selection of heritable variants and the processes giving rise to heritable variation are sources of suff ering. Natural selection will tend to lead to creaturely distress falling particularly on weak and vulnerable individuals, who are likely to be the least able to evade the source of trauma. But natural selection can only work on heritable variations, and we now know that these arise through various processes of mutation (including the recombination made possible by sexual reproduction). We also know that most of this mutation is either neutral or harmful; it may occasion great
suff ering, as we know from the various heritable diseases that have survived in the human. In other words, both natural selection itself and what makes it possible are sources of suff ering, and this suff ering is, as we have noted, intrinsic to the processes of creaturely change .