A Theological Foundation for Evolution, Part III

In my previous post I followed prominent atheists in observing that nature in both its historical and contemporary states does not seem to be reflective of an all-good, all-loving Creator God of the kind Christians claim to worship. Rather, nature is full of violence and unjust cruelty. This is a fact that special creationists seldom mention or discuss, perhaps for the obvious reason that they have no good response to it.

But perhaps there is a more justifiable reason. As a commenter suggested to me, perhaps in labeling nature as violent and cruel, I have made an unjustified judgment call that isn't really mine to make. Perhaps nature looks violent and cruel from my all too human perspective, but not from God's. Perhaps from God's perspective Trypanosoma and other nasty bugs are beautiful creatures that work for God's glory. This reasoning goes hand in hand with the classical Augustinian solution to the problem of evil - that what looks like evil is really good from God's perspective - a view I am heavily critical of. But if we did accept this for the moment, my equation of violence with imperfection could just be a matter of personal taste.

Fortunately, the Bible is very explicit about the fact that God did not intend a violent creation.* Referring to both God's past creative acts and his future restorative ones, the Bible clearly describes God's perfect creation as a wholly non-violent creation. In Genesis 1, for instance, God creates the creatures of the earth as well as humankind, and he explicitly tells them what they are to eat for food:

Then God said, 'I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.' And it was so. (Genesis 1:29-30)

According to this passage, God's intention was for every living creature - humans, beasts, birds, and other creatures - to subsist entirely on plants. No creature was to commit violence against another for the purpose of sustaining its own existence. God's creation is a vegan creation. It was only later, after the corruption of sin set in, that animal-on-animal violence becomes the norm. It is significant that when God ejects Adam and Eve from the garden after their disobedience, he drapes them in the skins of dead animals (Genesis 3:21).

Apart from Genesis, the Bible is also fairly explicit that this non-violent existence for creation was not only God original intention, but is also his future intention once creation is restored. In Isaiah 11 the prophet writes of 'the branch of Jesse,' a reference to the Messiah, and the great works that he will accomplish in bringing God's justice to the earth. Among other things, a result of the Messiah's work will be the restoration of a non-violent creation:

6 The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them.

7 The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.

8 The infant will play near the hole of the cobra,
and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest.

9 They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11: 6-9)

Once God's full intentions are carried out, lions won't eat calves. Rather, lions will eat straw and lion cubs will take naps with calves. While the language here is poetic, the message is clear: violence is not something God plans to preserve as creation is restored, and this is just as much true for the violence of nature as it is for the violence of humanity.

Both of the above passages are strong arguments that applying the classical view of evil-as-misunderstood-good to violence in creation is a mistake. The violence we observe between the lion and the zebra as well as the violence in the very existence of Trypanosoma are instances of real evil in the world. Moreover, this is evil that God never intended to exist in his creation. God intended lions and zebras to get along without one killing the other and, possibly, he never intended that Trypanosoma should exist at all.

But we are still stuck with the fact that they do both exist, along with millions of other instances of violence that seem to be inherent to creation. In this post, I have argued that God is not to blame for this violence - that he never intended it to exist. So how did it get here? And how did it get so deeply ingrained in creation that it seems nearly impossible to find any creature on earth that does not do some violence to another creature? The answer, I think, has to be that God is not the only cosmic force out there influencing the progress of creation. The identity of such forces and how they might be working in history will be the topic of the next post.

*I owe a great deal of understanding of the arguments in this post to their 'warfare theodicy' articulation by Greg Boyd in his books 'God at War' and 'Satan and the Problem of Evil.'

A Theological Foundation for Evolution? Part II

While the term "creationism" is bandied about a lot and with much derision, this term is actually much too general. After all, even Christians like myself who accept evolution would not consider themselves "anti-creationists" because along with our belief that the conclusions of science regarding biological change and diversity must be accepted, we also hold strong to the belief that God is the Creator of all things. We are thus "creationists" in a general sense.

But what is meant by "creationism" is usually belief in what is known as "special creation," the idea that God created all living things as we find them today. Or to put it in the terms of intelligent design, "that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact: Fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks and wings, etc." [Of Pandas and People]. Now there are various sub-groups of special creationists, from the Young Earth Creationists who think the world is at most 10,000 years old to the proponents of Intelligent Design who seem to subscribe to a kind of "progressive special creationism" that maintains that God continues to create today, creating new species from time to time. Some special creationists even allow for the ideas of evolution to an extent, claiming that evolution may be responsible for the general appearance of a species over time, but cannot result in speciation.

Despite their differences, however, all special creationists have a theological assumption in common: they all grant the perfection of nature as it is. Fish, vertebrates, plants, etc. all are as they should be - they are as God created them. Interestingly, this assumption, while rarely explicitly discussed by creationists themselves, is often one of the central arguments made by vocal atheists for the inexistence of God. As notables like Dennet and Dawkins have discussed at length, what we see around us does not look at all like the result of the perfect creative act of an all-powerful, all-loving God. Rather, it is full of merciless, brutal violence and always has been. Anyone who has seen lions take down their prey knows this in a particularly graphic way. Lions aren't interested in killing their prey, just stopping it from moving long enough so they can start eating it. Zebras and wildebeast are often still bucking and braying as their entrails are being consumed. Even better examples of the raw brutality of nature is found at the lower levels of the biological spectrum in the form of various kinds of parasites. Consider the protozoa Trypanosoma, for instance. This one-celled organism is transmitted to people by tsetse flies in Africa. For those infected, a simple fever turns into extremely swollen lymph nodes, anemia, and cardiac and kidney problems. Then the organism gets really nasty as it passes through the blood-brain barrier. It disturbs one sleep cycle and induces forgetfulness and confusion, causing bouts of manicness and fatigue (which is why it is known as sleeping sickness). Eventually, the victim goes into a coma and doesn't wake up.

There are millions of other examples we could bring up and all of them beg this question: if God is the all-knowing, all-loving Creator who made this world we live in, why in the world would he create something like Trypanosoma? Why would a God who is life-giving make creatures whose sole purpose is to bring death? If God is so good, why is nature so full of suffering and violence? Atheists argue that if there were such a God, he would obviously be intelligent enough to avoid such outcomes to his creative acts, and that therefore no such God exists. While I don't think that's a necessary conclusion to draw here, the question itself is a very good one - and one which those who ascribe to special creationism have no good answer for. If one assumes that God created all living things more or less as we find them today, then one must admit that God created Trypanosoma and that God designed the lion to eat zebras alive. God might still exist, but if he does then he creates just as much out of cruelty and violence as out of love.

The assumption of special creation, then, leads to the assumption of a God that doesn't seem consistent with the God of the Bible, the God Christians presume to worship. But is there another answer to the objection above? Is there a solution to the problem of natural evil that doesn't require cruelty in God? I think that the Bible suggests one, and I'll turn to it in the next post.