#163 – Evolution, a “good” creation, and the problem of pain

Can we say God used evolution to produce a “good” creation if it involves so much pain, suffering, predation and death?

Our listeners asked us to do an episode on how to rationalize Christian faith with all the pain and suffering that is brought on by the process of Evolution.  We spoke to Dr. James Stump, whose recently released book — Sacred Chain: how understanding evolution leads to deeper faith — puts a spotlight on that question. Jim grew up in a very Conservative mid-west American world, but wasn’t personally committed to Young Earth Creationism, and never really encountered anything either overtly for or against the Theory of Evolution.  While getting a PhD in Philosophy of Science, and then splitting his career between teaching at a Christian college and writing for Biologos, he did a deep-dive into what Evolution was all about.  He became fully convinced by the data and made that clear in his writing.  However, this did not sit well with the College, and he was politely squeezed out (much like the story we heard from Joel Anderson a few weeks back, and from Peter Enns a couple years ago).

We spent some time talking about the first three quarters of his book, including a bit about scripture, divine inspiration, and Concordance between modern science and the ancient worldview. But we reserved most of our discussion for his fifth chapter: the problem of pain and suffering, which for many people doesn’t square up with God referring to creation as “good” let alone “very good.”  Jim first pointed out that declaring something “good” doesn’t mean that it’s “finished,” and that a baby becoming a full-grown athlete or a young prodigy becoming an Olympic athlete or a concert musician may be “good” at first but will encounter a lot of pain and suffering in striving to achieve their full potential.  God’s command to his new creatures to “be fruitful and multiply … have dominion over earth” reveals that he wanted it to grow, to develop, to change.  Humans could never be created with moral maturity: that needs to be grown into and earned through experience and choice-making.

We also looked at the full meaning of the Hebrew word (tov) that gets translated into English as “good.” It doesn’t just mean cute, cuddly, and happy smiley faces all around …. it also carries a nuance that means “something that fulfills a purpose for which it was created.”  With this more nuanced understanding of tov/good, we gain a whole new perspective.

Death is tov!  Without death, the world would very quickly be overrun by a seething mass of living organisms: we’d now all be trying to squeeze our way through a soup of insects and animals. Death is also the business end of the filter that selects out the more fit.  Some people find it to be so wasteful that 99% of all species have gone extinct: but another way to look at this begins with recognizing that all the animals and species that have ever existed could not possibly all live on earth at the same time, so this process of species coming and going allows a hundred times as many different forms of life to have their time on the stage.  This gradual appearance and disappearance of so many different life forms produced a much more dynamic and lavish show.

Predatory-prey relationships are also tov!  We talked about how the gazelle and cheetah each influenced each other’s evolution over millions of years: their speed, strength and agility were honed by that tight relationship.  We also unpacked a phenomenon observed in Yellowstone National Park that was representative of other parks all around North America.  For a long while, wolves threatened people and livestock alike, until local people completely exterminated that predator threat.  But then the elk population exploded, in part because so many individuals with diseases and broken limbs were able to survive: the elk herds started to look very sickly!  Without wolves around, the larger herds left the protection of the hills and pine forests, opting instead for the convenience of willows, aspen and poplars next to flowing waters.  The loss of those groves eliminated nesting sites for song birds, as well as the beavers.  The loss of beaver dams allowed the rivers to flow faster: their banks started to erode, marshlands disappeared along with their distinctive wildlife.  Then the wolves were introduced (against much opposition) and all those ecosystem collapses completely reversed.

We started talking about meaningless and wasteful suffering (tsunamis; the Holocaust).  This is a completely different question: it’s not about evolution, and humans with their free will and agency bring a whole new dynamic to this problem. And this bigger question has two parts: there is natural evil (kids with brain cancer) and moral evil (kids killed by a deranged school shooter).

We finished the conversation with a lighter question: if it were possible to “re-wind the tape” on evolution and let it play out again, would we still get humans.  Stephen Jay Gould famously said no, but Jim explains how he thinks that God had always intended for there to be image-bearers with a moral maturity, which Jim calls “human,” but that those image bearers might not necessarily have been Homo sapiens (perhaps Neanderthals instead?).  Luke pushed the point: could it have been dinosaurs/reptiles that instead filled that role of image bearers if the Chicxulub impactor asteroid never hit Earth?  You’ll have to listen to the episode to hear Jim’s response.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more information about Dr. James Stump at his Biologos web-page, and his book at HarperCollins.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also episodes in our mini-series looking at various aspects of evolution.

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