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.'