This is a short, accessible and hopefully quickly readable note written in order to an alternative voice to the response to Stephen Fry’s recent statement regarding so-called Natural Evil. I’m presently working on much longer and wider pieces (wider in scope, that is) not only filling out the view I present below but its place within the purpose of this life (our short life here in creation, as opposed to in eternity).

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Recently Stephen Fry, comedian, actor and writer, restated the Problem of Natural Evil in an inflammatory tone and in doing so garnered much attention from the press and social media. Fry drew particular attention to bone cancer and to an insect whose lifecycle must including burrowing into the eyes of other creatures, including humans, causing permanent blindness to its host in the process, and then stated that if God had created a world with such misery in it that is not our fault then God must be a “capricious, mean-minded, stupid God… Utterly, utterly evil”. This question that Fry is raising is known as the Problem of Natural Evil.

What has been inordinately dissapointing has not been Fry, but the Church’s defensive response. Fry merely asks a question, and we should never fear questions. We’ve seen responses from the church such as “Stephen Fry is spiritually blind” attacking the man rather than the argument, and “Fry is attacking a version of God the church doesn’t believe in”, but many within the church do believe that creation was brought into being in its present state (young and old-earth creationists), or believe in a God of meticulous control that either designed or controls cancer and these insects so that they do precisely what they do because of a secret divine reason (theistic determinists such as Calvinists, the theologically Reformed and Molonists), and so Fry’s question does form a valid challenge to many within the church - what kind of God would intentionally create bone cancer and eye-burrowing insects? We’ve also seen aggresive responses such as “Who are you to question God?” when all that is really being questioned is our theology which is, simply, our dialogue about God.

The other popular response to the Problem of Natural Evil comes out of the classical free-will branch of Christian thought. Classical free-will usually claims that creation has become corrupt because of humanity’s sin and the influence of Satan, but not only is this a very poor response (because we have very good natural reasons why cancer, insects and earthquakes exist, we don’t need to invent new ones), but it’s also an apalling exercise in victim-blaming. Earthquakes happen when giant tectonic plates move, and tsunamis when the same happens with a large volume of water becoming displaced. These are healthy functions of a normal planet like ours - did these healthy planetary functions not happen before man first sinned? Did parasitic insects not exist before satan’s influence? Did evolution work in a different way, previously selecting based on how peaceful and loving an organism was? Was humanity naturally immune to these insects? What about animals that kill? Were lions and sharks previously vegetarian? The level of wild speculation required to support this view is phenomenal.

The problems don’t stop there though - if one is to claim the universe is now corrupt, some thought must be put into the mechanism by which this corruption takes or took place. How did humanity, the occupants of a little speck of dirt, corrupt the entire universe? Have we forgotton just how big the universe is? And if their actions didn’t corrupt the entire universe, can we expect to find planets on galaxies billions of light years away where there are “uncorrupted” organisms? By what mechanism does this Satan character influence nature? Does he have a biology lab somewhere where he creates foul insects to release into the wild once their predilection for the human eyeball has reached maximum? As soon as the classical free-will view is pressed for examples of how it might work it must appeal quickly to mystery. Perhaps this view may well have been satisfactory in an age of scientific ignorance, but we no longer live in that age.

So neither the God of meticulous control, the God who made creation in its current state, nor the God presented by classical free-will have a satisfactory answer to Fry’s restatement of the Problem of Natural Evil. So I’d like to present my own which, while fitting squarely in the free-will branch of Christian thought, departs early from the classical view.

Scripture begins and ends with a wedding, book-ends that underline the anthem written throughout scripture that the reason humanity was created was to dwell with God forever, to love God and be loved by God, and to be unified with God forever. So why didn’t God create us in this state already? Why not just skip the whole creation part? The problem is love - if it is programmed or coerced then it isn’t love, it’s something else. Love has to be freely chosen and that entails the possibility of rejection, and that is a real difficulty. If God is as good as Scripture claims then any certain knowledge of this reduces our capacity to freely choose commensurately - even if the possibility of rejection exists it would never be a genuine option, and if rejection of God is not a genuine option then any decision to love God would be equally ingenuine. If we were starved to the point of death would we ever reject the offer of a banquet of the finest food? Our choice to love and live with God must be freely chosen or they are meaningless and we little more than automotive robots, and our choice to love and live with God must be based on who he is rather than what he owns and can do. One of the church’s great failings down the ages has been to promote God on the latter - punishment or bliss - rather than the former.

It doesn’t stop there though. Love grows, and free beings need to be courted and wooed. We can’t simply choose to love at the press of a light switch, and this wooing cannot take place under a commitment to the person being courted - commitment of course follows wooing. Love is a journey. So in order to allow rejection as a possibility, and to give us space where we can be woo’d, where our love for God can grow freely and we can commit to God for who he is before we ever see what he has and can do, we need our own space from which we can freely enter God’s space. (Scripture speaks of this from God’s perspective: he has made himself a home that we call creation, and that he one day will come to dwell in it with us).

But if we were to enter God’s space (or God, ours) and see, talk with, or even touch God then we’d be overwhelmed by Him. There is simply be no other way to preserve our free-will: God would need to be hidden from us.

Simply knowing with certainty that God exists would compromise our ability to freely choose him & love him. This is where we find ourselves today - in creation - in the space God created for us so that we could be free. The difficulty is that, without an awful lot of obfustication, creations tend to point back to their maker. The style of Monet or Michaelangelo is unmistakable, a singer can be identified from their voice, and a person from their fingerprints. If it could be scientifically proved that God exists through biology or astronomy, physics or chemistry for instance, then the creation project would be for nothing. The universe would have to be self-creating, and life within it would have to evolve rather than be created as finished products. It would be no good for humanity to discover God in evolution or DNA, once it was wise enough - it would all have to lead to a self-creating universe at God’s design.

Sure, in the early years everything would be attributed to God, but once science left the dark ages it would just be a matter of time before

Before we begin

This rough sketch addressing so-called Natural Evil is a part of a much larger map I hope to draw in time as a response to the wider ‘Problem of Evil’ (PoE) that I have been constructing and reconstructing over the past decade or so - that isn’t to say it is fully formed or authoritative, though I do hope it will not be dismissed out of hand, but rather that the PoE is a puzzle that I’ve journeyed through for some time and that I hope the observations, thoughts and reflections I offer from this continuing journey may be a helpful voice in our dialogue about God. I’m almost certain that this short post, and the larger “map” I hope to draw later, are not new except where, in the fullness of time, they are considered to be false, erroneous or heretical, in which case I claim full credit.

I hadn’t planned to put my thoughts to paper at this time not least because ideas can almost always be further developed (and weaknesses & counter-arguments identified) but primarily because ideas about God do not operate in isolation. If we simply pick up an idea about God and, however well it works on its own, adopt it without considering at length how it integrates with the bigger picture we very soon end up with a patchwork of disconnected or dissonant ideas. However, neither is theology written in a vacuum, but always in response to divine providence or against human error or weakness. In the past few weeks Stephen Fry, a British comedian, actor and writer, restated the Problem of Natural Evil (PoNE) in an inflammatory tone and in doing so garnered much attention through the press & social media. While I don’t consider Fry’s restatement of PoNE to be human error or weakness, there have been myriad responses to Fry, none of which have conveyed the view I have been constructing and I’ve felt a growing sense of (hopefully divine) conviction that some of what I’ve been constructing should be heard in amongst the recent popular dialogue surrounding PoNE, despite the time it obviously needs in development. I write with not insignificant reluctance and ask for its rough edges to be accomodated charitably so that my weakness in communication would not be held against the central idea itself.

Finally, I do not plan to engage with the theistic derminism camp in this post. I find the idea of divine meticulous control of every being, animal and atom together with the idea that there’s a secret divine reason for every event, good or bad, to be an idea that is very difficult to digest. I do plan to address that camp elsewhere and hope that my reasons for working within free-will theism will become apparent.

What's the problem?

The Problem of Evil (PoE) is shorthand for the statement that brings under inspection the Christian claim that God is both bonevolent and omnipotent in light of the existence of evil and suffering in the world. The types of evil we experience or purportrate fall into one of two categories: moral evil and natural evil. The first, moral evil, is, within the free-will tradition, said to be as a result of free agents executing an act of evil through weakness, negligence or a deliberate decision - free agents in this context includes both human and angelic beings. We’ve all been victims and purportrators of this kind of evil whether through deception, theft, violence, abuse or fiddling taxes - the ways in which we can cause suffering or suffer because of someone’s action or inaction are numerous. I offer no objection on this point.

The second category of evil, so-called “natural evil”, is reserved for suffering caused by creation or through natural events, for example tsunamis, mudslides, deadly viruses, birth defects, terminal illnesses or parasitic insects that cause permanent blindness to their host. The challenge to God’s benevolnce and omnicience that this category brings is called the Problem of Natural Evil (PoNE). The tradition free-will response to PoNE has become increasingly difficult to accept, and is in dire need of reconstruction. The claim is that the whole of creation was corrupted when humanity first sinned and is now held captive by a powerful malevolent agent called Satan, and that all natural evil has one or the other as its source, or as a righteous punishment from God. For now let us leave aside the often blurred lines between natural and moral evil (for instance, who was to blame for the number of deaths in the 2004 Boxing-day Tsunami? The “natural” Tsunami or the wealthy nations that did not arm poorer pacific nations with a Tsunami early-warning system?).

The immense difficulties with this view have become more apparent as our understanding of the environment, biology and physics have increased. The primary objection is that all natural evil has a natural explanation. Earthquakes, for instance, happen because of the movement of gigantic tectonic plates, and such movement is a healthy function of a planet like Earth. Tsunamis come about when this same movement of tectonic plates displaces large amounts of water. Historically people think that either God or a malevolent being was pushing tectonic plates around for the purpose of evil or punishment, but there’s really no need - we have a good enough natural explanation. Did tectonic plates not move before the fall? What exactly did our fall, or Satan, do to make them start moving?

Parasitic organisms act as such because they have the best evolutionary benefit by doing so - even ones that live by burrowing through a child’s eye - if this were not so they would have found another way to live, or would never have evolved into this mode of operation. Of course, if one believes that every creature was created by God in its present state then there are insurmountable difficulties. Other Christians believe that God created only happy, peaceful creatures and that our sin and Satan have corrupted them. But how, then, did these eye-burrowing parasites that cause blindness come to require an eye to live and grow rather than anything else? Does Satan have a biology lab where he carries out nefarious experiments before releasing the resultant corrupt creature into the wild? Of if our sin has corrupted Evolution, in what way has it been corrupted? Did creatures previously evolve based on their collective contribution and benefit to a peaceful and loving universe? Just how far has humanity’s spread of corruption gone? The whole universe corrupted because of the inhabitants of a little speck of earth? How and by what mechanism did we manage to corrupt the entire universe? We so easily forget just how big this universe is and, traditionally, the church does not have a good track record when identifying humanity’s place in the universe. Did the actions of Adam mean that life evolves differently in galaxies billions of light years away? Is Satan busy corrupting life in galaxies billions of light years away or just ours?

The classic free-will answer of pointing all natural evil to the influence of sin or Satan, (or God’s punishment) does not answer any of the practical questions about the mechanism through which sin or Satan operates, or the myriad questions that follow - it will not stand up to rigorous inspection without making highly speculative and unsupportable claims. Further to this it appears to provide redundant reasons why natural events occur, and why parasitic and destructive organisms exist.

It is clear that classical free-will theism has erred in its response to the challenge of natural evil. In order construct a free-will response that works we will need to revisit the central purpose of free-will theism.

What problem does free-will theism answer?

The point of creation & (therefore) Christianity: living in loving community with God, other people and creation. Love must be chosen, hence free-will. Also entails not living in anti-loving ways (hence the need for repentance) The integrity of free-will is compromised by God’s revealed presence - so God needed to be hidden.
How could we learn to genuinly love whilst walking with God whose mere presence causes us to act loving? How could we genuinely choose to love without the possibility of rejection? Or without the possibility of acting unloving? In the same way that it is unjust to punish someone who acts illegally through coercion, their guilty status would be invalid, someone who is coerced into acting loving could never be cosidered to be genuinely loving. (Wording !?) Instead what is needed is space to retreat into so that love can be chosen (or rejected until successfully woo’d) So divine hiddenness was not an accidental by-product of a fall, but an intentional waypoint that establishes the nessacery conditions for free will and therefore genuine love. But how to create such an environment without having it back to its maker? Creation then needs an alternate option. With a lack of scientific invention & thought people naturally assume the universe was created directly by God, designing and forming each piece of the universe with precision & purpose. This would be unavoidable. But given enough scientific progress humanity would surely progress beyond this view. The universe would have to be self-creating, and life within it self-evolving. The obvious objection to this would be “why does a self-creating universe need a creator?” - NEED TO NAIL THIS - DO WE NEED TO LOOK AT THIS OBJECTION AT ALL self-creating universe still needs to be designed to be self-creating - HAS TO BE BETTER THAN THIS? Not just this, but any time God interved he would have to do so in a way that was plausibly deniable.
It would never do for someone to cast themselves off a cliff to be caught by God or an angel and reliably expose God to the world. Similarly unnaturally halting the movement of tectonic plates (a function of a healthy crust) would be out - way too obvoius, intervening in crime would be out too - if everytime someone tried to kill another person suddenly died mysteriously the game would be up - all someone would need to do to confirm once again to themselves that God exists would be to thrust a knife at the nearest person. If people in developing nations were mysteriously fed by food falling from the sky… This would seem to be enough to answer a sub-problem of the problem of evil: the problem of suffering caused specifically by nature - tornados, earthquakes, tsunamis et al. So to maintain Divine Hiddenness God would need to limit intervention (or providence to use ye olde word) to plausibly deniable unrepeatable-in-a-test environment types of intervention such as speaking through someone who, to us, lived thousands of years ago, or through a kind of persuasion of thoughts or pictures internal to a human trying to hear God - again, always through a plausibly deniable way - as Christians we’re never quite sure if we’ve heard God or whether we just made it up - that’s by design, not weakness - not least because it forms such an important part of our communication and therefore journey with God that is unlike anyone elses and certainly in a different place on that journey too. (Could add a chapter about how our faith limits God’s intervention - could it be that God’s revelation of himself might outrun our genuine love for him, mention that we’ll get to this later)? So, Evolution in a self-creating universe would create an environemnt for us to freely and genuinely choose love and choose to live as love. Can we imagine a type of evolution that doesn’t allow the evolving of creatures that burrow into children’s eyes? Well that’s the downside of evolution (or upside depending on one’s point of view): no one type of creature has a natural right to be alive anymore than another - if humanity did have a right to some kind naturally-appearing bug deterrent it would just reliably reveal God once we understood evolution fully (and that time will surely come!) which, again, would undermine God’s love & community project which requires divine hiddenness. Why stop with a eye-burrowing insect - why not the myriad other nasty insects, or bugs, why not viruses, or dangerous lions or crocodiles? Evolution works in a very natural way - we’re all competing and for God to chop out whole branches of species for another reason would show up like a sore thumb once humankind attained the scientific development neccessary.

From here we can talk about God revealing himself at the right time - bring in Jesus here! The greater problem is actually the belief in an unchangeable eternal state such as Hell (or annihilation) for 90% of humanity. Discussion on the future eternal state? Not sure. So then the creation project we find ourselves in is not a probationary test, but a spritual nursery (move onto the spiritual nursery stuff).