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.
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.
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).