The Sacred Chain | The Challenge of Pain and Suffering

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump, here with the third and final installment of episodes about my new book, The sacred Chain: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith. The book tells some of my own story of growing up in a conservative Christian community that kind of bristled at any mention of evolution, and then how I came to accept the science but still had some challenges to overcome and reconciling my faith with it. I think there’s a popular opinion that in order to reconcile faith with evolution, you have to denude your faith or somehow gerrymander it beyond recognition, which results in a flimsy or superficial faith. I claim instead, that once you really work through the challenges, it leads to a deeper faith that better accounts for the truths we find in Scripture and the truths we have found in the world God created. So I covered the first two challenges in earlier episodes on the podcast. The first one was the Bible, which I claim we can’t read as a contemporary answer book, but rather an ancient text that God has taken up into divine service. And then the challenge of time where even if you go away from thinking the Bible gives answers about how old the Earth is, there’s still a conceptual challenge of these very long ages of the earth and universe, and what that says about God ‘s priorities and our place in things. And I tried to give some answers there that capture the idea that God didn’t create things originally the way they were intended to be, and that God cares about lots of other stuff besides Homo sapiens. 

The next two challenges in the book are about species and souls. The species challenge is asking whether we humans differ only in degree or whether we differ in kind from other species that we’re related to. And then for the challenge of the soul, I’m not asking whether we have a soul, because I think it’s better to say that I am a soul. It’s a unique center of consciousness a perspective on the world, the really interesting capacities that we have that contribute to that. But then the challenge is how could such a thing evolve. And for my answers to those challenges, I encourage you to read the book. 

That brings us to the final challenge, pain and suffering. In an earlier version of this manuscript, I had set the whole book much more explicitly into the framework of the hero’s journey that was popularized by Joseph Campbell, as the only real story. He was mythologist and claimed that you go through and you read all the classic stories, and they follow a predictable pattern, which is the hero is first called to an adventure. Think of Harry Potter getting all the letters from owls telling him to come to Hogwarts, or Luke Skywalker being told there’s more out there that he should go see and investigate. But then the hero isn’t really sure whether he can do this. Then he meets a mentor who guides him in the process, and then has to embark on a series of tests that he passes. But then ultimately, there is one big culminating test. the ordeal. And once that has passed, he can return to his community with a reward or with new knowledge that helps other people out. 

So we ended up not taking that as the framework for the entire book, it’s a little over worn and probably not entirely accurate. But if it stayed, the challenge of pain and suffering would have been the central ordeal that the hero has to face before returning home. The point here is that the problem of evil, I think, is the biggest challenge that evolution poses to Christian faith. And I think expecting me to completely solve the problem of evil is probably setting the bar a little too high. But I do need to say something about it. So I want to start by distinguishing between moral evils and natural evils, as they’re sometimes called. Think about the tragic event of a house burning down and killing the people inside of it. It’s tragic, no matter what, but I think we evaluate it a little differently. If the cause is say an arsonist who has a grudge against the family, as opposed to a lightning strike that hits the house and burns it down, the former of those, where we have an arsonist, is an example of moral evil. And the response to it is typically, and the one I actually subscribe to as well is called the Free Will defense. God gave us free will and that’s an important good and perhaps a more important good than the result, which would be a bunch of robots that just worked things out according to their programming. And the free will defense, I think, makes the problem of moral evil a little less problematic. It’s still awful. And it’s still very difficult in the existential sense when evils happen to us from other people. But I don’t think it’s as difficult as natural evil. 

Now, some critics of evolution want to go further and claim that evolution will make you a bad or an immoral person. Survival of the fittest doesn’t sound much like Jesus, right? The meek and lowly preferential treatment for the poor and such things that Jesus stood for doesn’t sound very much like the survival of the fittest, the brush with which evolution is often painted. Furthermore, they may claim Darwin was a racist, and the eugenics movement of the late 19th century up through Hitler was inspired by evolution. Okay, yes, it would be bad if the theory of evolution, the scientific theory of evolution, led to us becoming worse people. And it is true that Darwin said some racist things about the obvious superiority of Europeans. But it must also be noted he was against the slave trade, which makes his views on race fairly complicated, even for his day. And let’s remember that racism and eugenics were around for a long time before Darwin, it’s just that there were scientists who latched on to evolution in an attempt to justify their own racism and their own eugenics policies. Interestingly, I found a study done in 2022, that finds that people who don’t accept the science of evolution are more prone to believe and act in discriminatory ways toward their fellow humans than those who do accept the science of evolution. So let’s not blame evolution for what is more fundamentally a misuse of human freedom or what my theological tradition calls sin. 

But that leads us to the problem of natural evil, which is the more difficult one particularly for the problem of evolution. And I think we can set it up with a quote that’s often used from Richard Dawkins describing the state of the natural world. He says, “during the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, 1000s of animals are being eaten alive. Others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear. Others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites. 1000s of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so if there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.” Well, that’s a grim picture of the natural world. First, though, let’s get clear that pain and suffering and death are not actually part of the scientific theory of evolution. To get evolution, you just need variation and heritability between parents and children, which we now know comes through DNA, and then natural selection, which means some individuals will have more offspring than others. There’s nothing in that about some things needing to die and especially to die gruesomely. Now it’s true that if things didn’t die, the world would get pretty crowded when you’ve got life going on for billions of years. But in that respect, the pain and suffering faced by evolutionary creationists like me, is no worse than that faced by old earth creationists. Even if each species was created separately from scratch the way older the creationists might believe. The individual organisms still have a lifespan and will end up dying, some by disease, some by predators. It’s simply a fact of having very long ages, where lots of things live and die. It’s the way the world is. So it’s fair to ask, why in the world, would God create a world where there are things like lightning strikes and hurricanes and cancer and viruses and predators?

Again, these are not easy questions for us to answer. But we can point toward some possible answers in noting that, well, dynamic weather patterns are needed to sustain life. And if you have dynamic weather patterns, turns out you’re going to get hurricanes and lightning sometimes. And we need a system of heritability that allows for some variation, so that we can adapt to different circumstances. And it turns out that when you have DNA replication do that, sometimes you get cancers and viruses. Predators: do we need these? Well, everything has to eat. But maybe we’ll come back to that point. 

We could ask, Why didn’t God just create a final perfect heaven to begin with? I think that’s an interesting question, what is the purpose of this order of things? And I like to answer that by further asking a further question, which is, well, what kind of people does God want to populate such a place, this final perfect, eternal heaven? And there we have to think of the difference between the popular vision of Heaven versus the Christian vision. The Christian vision is that we will be co-heirs with Christ, reigning and ruling. We, God’s image bearers here on Earth, we’re not going to be just whisked away to heaven in the clouds, where we play harps for all eternity, but rather heaven comes to earth. And we’re part of this new creation. And we’ll have important work to do. For that, we need certain capacities and abilities. Primarily, I think we need to be made holy. And for that in the Christian tradition, it’s God who makes us holy through the work of Christ. But I wonder if there are some precursors or necessary conditions for that. Maybe being morally mature, is one of those necessary conditions for bearing the image of God? And maybe God can’t just create such beings and put them into heaven straightaway. 

Maybe we need to back up here, because it sounds heretical on the surface to say there are some things to say there are some things that God can’t do. But the Bible says that. Hebrews chapter six says God can’t lie. This contradicts the divine nature. I think we might also say that God can’t make square circles, saying a square circle is just gibberish. And it’s no limit on Omnipotence to say God can’t do that logical contradiction. Well, how about moral maturity? Can you create a morally mature being immediately? Well, what does it mean to be morally mature? I think it means you have a record of responding to challenging situations with wisdom and insight, you consistently choose what is good? Can moral maturity, in that sense, just be gifted to someone? Maybe not. Maybe moral maturity, by its very definition means that we have to be involved in that, in creating that record of responding to challenging situations with wisdom and insight. 

So can we read our natural history as a record of our ancient ancestors, by which I mean even before they were human, a record of our ancient ancestors responding to challenging circumstances in ways that developed certain capacities, which in us eventually blossomed into moral into moral maturity and moral responsibility. We see in other species today, hints of altruism, maybe a sense of fairness, cooperation, for sure, maybe empathy. 

I’ve been reading a lot of books on how the proto-morality we find in other species today might have been developed into fuller forms in our ancestors. One of these books is by the archaeologist, Penny Spikings. It’s called How Compassion Made Us Human: The Evolutionary Origins of Tenderness, Trust and Morality. In it, she documents the surprisingly high incidence of ancient human fossils that show evidence of injury or disease. And you might look at that and say, “wow, what a painful difficult world they lived in.” And that might be a correct judgment. But I think it’s an incomplete judgment. Because what Spikings finds when she looks in more depth at these fossils is that many of those people who were injured or diseased beyond their ability to take care of themselves were somehow kept alive sometimes for years in those conditions. That doesn’t sound like a survival of the fittest strategy, which would have dictated that the weak be discarded. And it might not seem consistent with conferring the kind of reproductive advantage that’s necessary for evolution until you zoom out further and recognize that communities that care for the weak are the ones that might be developing other capacities that do have more direct survival advantages. I think this understanding of our evolutionary history is really fascinating and ripe for further investigation into how we became the kind of people we are, how our pre-human evolutionary history was necessary for developing moral capacities, and how our ancient ancestors responded to the challenges that they faced. 

For example, there’s a skeleton of a Homo erectus female, probably 1.6 million years ago, discovered in Kenya in 1974. It has this abnormal outer layer of bone which would have developed over time from heavy bleeding, probably in excessive intake of vitamin A, they think. For weeks or months, she would have suffered from abdominal pain, dizziness, nausea, headaches, blurred vision, even impaired consciousness. These are hardly the recipes for success on the savanna of East Africa. Yet she did survive long enough for these effects of her disease to become preserved in her skeleton. Someone must have been taking care of her. And this isn’t some glaring exception to the rule of what we find in the fossil record. Fossils have been found from people who had lost their teeth years before their death, which would have required help in preparing food that they could eat. Others have been found with arthritis so severe that it would have prevented independent moving around for years. And such people were not abandoned or left alone, but were provided for almost certainly cared for with compassion. Why else for example would Benjamina have been kept alive. She was a Homo heidelbergensis child who died between the ages of five and eight, about a half a million years ago. Her skull was found in the Sima De Los Huesos site, the Cave of Bones in Spain, along with about 7500 fossils from at least 28 different individuals. She had a rare condition called cranial synostosis, in which some of the bony plates of the skull fused together before she was born, which results in a misshapen head stunted brain growth. Today when this happens, it’s treated with skull reshaping surgery. If it were left untreated, pressure builds up as the brain tries to grow, usually leading to severe complications like blindness and seizures. And yet Benjamina received enough care from her community to live five to eight years. 

There’s evidence that risky savanna environments that our ancestors found themselves in several million years ago put selection pressures on the need to form lasting partnerships to form parental bonds with their young, even to fall in love, as romantic love between mates would ensure that they’d stay together and protect their young. Well, one of the striking aspects of this development of greater emotion and compassion is that it was occurring just as the living conditions were becoming more difficult. The climate was becoming more variable causing food sources to be less predictable. In this increasingly harsh environment, was it the strongest and meanest who survived? Probably some of them did, taking advantage where they could, but it’s out of this pressure cooker that modern humanity emerged. Spiking shows that the difficult conditions in the natural world pushed us to develop emotions and learn to control them to develop art and appreciate beauty, to become compassionate. These are the capacities we tend to think of as most uniquely human, at least in their fully developed forms. And they came about because of the challenges.

So I’m saying it’s a response to the problem of natural evil to say that maybe God used these long ages of evolution, to bring it about that creatures like us would exist and come to have the capacity for moral responsibility. I think this is a better answer to the problem of natural evil than old Earth creationism has because the challenging circumstances in our world history were directly contributing to the kind of creatures we would become through the evolutionary inheritance of these properties from our ancestors. I also think it’s a better answer than young Earth creationism has because they have to deny the clear record of Earth’s history before human beings were around to sin. And I think there are all sorts of problems in saying that all the bad things started happening in the natural world when Adam and Eve, who were portrayed as two innocent and naive humans who didn’t yet know right from wrong, when they ate a piece of fruit. How about atheists? Do we have a better answer for the problem of pain and suffering that atheism has? Well, this is the rationale that many atheists use for why they came to their views. But I wonder if they have an equally difficult problem of goodness. That’s another topic I suppose. 

[musical interlude]

Stump:

Now, there are some challenges to the position that I’ve tried to lay out here. First one, we might say God used evolution. Isn’t that also a contradiction in terms like square circles? I’m trying to, I’m trying to affirm that God intentionally created humans. But is that like saying God creates square circles? Because isn’t evolution inherently random? And how could God intentionally use it to create something? Well, that’s some of the rhetoric that’s been used to claim that it’s illogical to affirm both the science of evolution and a creator God who might somehow bring about a desired conclusion. If evolution is random, they argue, then it could end up anywhere. And it’s not hard to find legitimate evolutionary scientists who have said essentially that. Back in the 1980s, the great American evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that if we could rewind the tape of life and play it again a million times, we wouldn’t end up with anything like Homo sapiens again. But then more recently, Simon Conway Morris, a paleo biologist at the University of Cambridge has become the poster child for convergent evolution. Convergent evolution is the phenomenon that the same structures evolve independently from different starting points. For example, wings have evolved independently on birds and bats and insects. The eyeball of a giant squid looks and functions very much like ours, even though our common ancestors had nothing of the sort. Conway Morris and his colleagues have found hundreds and hundreds of these convergences, and he thinks they point to some deeper constraints in how things evolve, perhaps responding to this challenge that evolution is inherently random. I talked with him on the podcast about his newest book called From Extra-Terrestrials to Animal Minds, Six Myths of Evolution. And one of those myths is that evolution is random. What’s most amazing about the history of life to him is how few of the possibilities for how life could evolve, have actually occurred. Here’s what he says.

Conway Morris:

I entirely agree that there are things which in principle ought to evolve which haven’t. But when I consider the overall ubiquity of convergent evolution, I’m more persuaded that in fact, the number of options available is really very small indeed. I say that in a context to do with sort of what’s called combinatorics. In other words, if you think about all possible alternatives in a biological system, the numbers turn out to be staggeringly big. I mean, cosmologists get very excited about the number of elementary particles in the visible universe, it is something like 10 to the 90. That, from a biological perspective, is small change. No, no, no. We’re dealing with truly immense numbers, 10 to the 200, 10 to the 250. These are unimaginably gigantic spaces, so to speak. The received view, possibly correctly, is that on any particular planet, perhaps because the starting conditions are slightly different, you’ll end up with a set of solutions, but they will be utterly unlike what we see on this planet. But all we can say so far as the Earth is concerned, is that it looks as if the number of habitable nodes is a minute fraction of all theoretical possible alternatives, it’s absolutely tiny. It’s, let us say, 10 to the 4 versus 10 to the 250. Anybody who’s familiar with orders of magnitude and so forth will realize that one is infinitesimally tiny and the other one is immensely enormous. My view would be that overall, the number of total solutions is a very, very small fraction of what in principle might evolve, but in point of fact, never can.

But the other thing would be that I would certainly go so far as to say, and as I have tried to articulate in a very unsatisfactory manner, could it be that convergence is reflecting a deeper order of organization? I think probably a physicist or a cosmologist would agree to some extent, that there might be some underlying views. So when we talk about Martin Reese’s six numbers, which allow our universe to exist with stars and galaxies and gravity and all those sorts of things. Then in a way which I could not otherwise articulate, it would be possible to imagine the nature of the cosmos to be such as to be propitious to the evolution of life. Not only that but to ultimately allow the emergence of intelligences and ultimately, from my perspective and I think yours, somebody who wishes to worship. From an evolutionary viewpoint, one could point out, which I think is sometimes a little bit under appreciated, that a good part of the heavy lifting you need to make complex forms, or complex structures such as a nervous system, have actually evolved in relatively simple organisms. I say relatively simple, so in other words, some of the building blocks for the nervous system have evolved in single celled creatures. There’s nothing very mysterious about this. They need these vesicles and things like that in the same way as we employ them as part of the operation of our nervous system. But, having said all that, I think that, although as I’ve argued in the past, I’m very happy to see a congruence between the nature of how we find ourselves to be, I would not myself wish to use these as arguments in any sense for a designer. I think that appreciation has to come from a metaphysics. And of course, you know, if one subscribes as I and you do to the Christian narrative, to indeed historical evidence and all the rest of it. But that is a property of humans. In other words, we can explore that in due course. It’s not to say the animals are, in some sense, irrelevant. In fact, rather the reverse. But even so, once you see a sort of fine tuning argument beginning to sort of wedge its way in here, I am not so much nervous, as I just say, well hang on, let’s step back a minute and decide, what is the totality of what we’re trying to understand? And how come we ourselves have even the glimmerings of understanding it?

Okay, so you at least suggested in the book and mentioned a little bit earlier that there very well could be deeper principles at work in biology than we have yet discovered. In the book you compare this even to something like the periodic table of elements in chemistry that gives this underlying order. What would this look like in biology? Or if we can’t answer that, what would a deeper order help us understand in biology?

Conway Morris:

Well, if only I could answer that question I’d probably have a telephone call in the next 10 minutes from the Nobel Committee in Sweden. 

Stump:

Here’s your Nobel. [laughs]

Conway Morris:

Yes, sorry, I really must go, I do apologize [laughing]. The idea of a sort of something analogous to a periodic table, I think, goes back to a very remarkable Soviet biologist called Nikolai Vavilov, who actually basically perished in Stalin’s Russia in the Second World War. He was interested, in fact, in the evolution of grasses as it so happened. But again, he realized there were an awful lot of excluded forms which might exist, but don’t, and therefore saw a recurrence of pattern. And if you see a recurrent pattern, then you might, as you already have suggested, see something which hints at a deeper order. But how to articulate that order, of course, is much more difficult, because I can give an empirical description at some level, but the problem with biology, at least in part, is that it’s comparing apples and oranges, and one thing which really doesn’t look very similar to another. We can go and look at a cellular level, and where there is a basic identity, and we can look at convergences, so things which look rather dissimilar turn out, in fact, to be remarkably similar. But mixing that into a general theory… I, to date, have not been able to articulate it in any coherent fashion at all. It is almost an instinct, that underneath what life evolves along, there is, if you like, an underlying melody for want of a better word.

Stump:

Okay, another challenge to saying God used evolution to bring about creatures like us is that it seems like it makes all those other creatures who lived and died over billions of years that it took to get to us, it seems like it makes them expendable. That contradicts another of the principles I brought up in the challenge of time, that God loves all the things, not just us. But now it sounds like I’m saying that, well, we had to have this kind of world where all those other things suffer and die so that we Homo sapiens could become morally mature. What does that do to these other things and their value? In an episode from our very first season of Language of God, I talked to theologian Bethany Sollereder, about her book, God, Evolution, and Animal Suffering. As part of that conversation, I asked about this problem of other creatures suffering, noting that it kind of sounds loving and compassionate that God knows even when a single sparrow falls to the ground. But how does that actually help the sparrow? Bethany gave a really interesting answer.

Sollereder: 

One of the strategies that theologians often use, and I’m thinking of people like Holmes Rolston,  is to say, well you know in evolution actually nothing is wasted. So the sparrow falls but you know, a fox comes by and is able to feed its children, and to the life of the sparrow is redeemed in the life of the fox and its in its cubs. And that’s great to a point.

But you have this question of the individual suffering, and I think Jay McDaniel really brings us to light in his book, Of God and Pelicans. He talks about how pelicans tend to have two chicks, lay two eggs, both hatch and the parents have the strategy of only raising one. So generally that’s the older chick who will push the younger chick out of the nest or sometimes the parents will just stop feeding the younger one, ignore it until it dies of starvation. And you sort of think here’s this poor little chick and its primary categories of relationship, it’s parents and sibling, will not care for it, have no fellowship with it, its life is one of neglect. And so Jay McDaniel kind of throws this down as a gauntlet, like tell me what you’re going to do with this. (He actually wouldn’t do that, he’s such a lovely guy.)

But I think the question of individual suffering is where this gets the most real. And apart from those sort of ideas of ecological redemption, that its life will not be wasted, you then need to move beyond the realm of what we see. And so several theologians, like McDaniel, like Christopher Southgate, have said we need some sort of pelican heaven. We need some redemption that goes for the individual where they experienced the flourishing that they didn’t have. 

And I think that’s really good. The one thing I would say is that doesn’t go far enough. Redemption isn’t just compensation. Redemption is a whole new creation. So it’s not…if we have an animal heaven it can’t just be for those who suffered and didn’t find flourishing here. It needs to be for every creature God loves, which I think is every creature. So I’ve played with the ideas sort of bio-universalism, leaving a human exception, where humans have a choice whether they want to buy into this or not. But for the rest of creatures, that there will be a future flourishing for them where the suffering will be transmuted into something glorious, the same way that the tragedy of the cross, the tragedy of the innocent suffering of Jesus becomes something glorious after the resurrection. 

That’s a beautiful vision of the Kingdom of God in its fullness. And then the question might become what is it for a predator to flourish in the kingdom of God? Are there still prey for that predator or is that too transmuted into something different that the lions do start eating grass? 

Sollereder:

There’s great disagreement about this. I mean any theological topic there’s usually great disagreement, so the disagreement is, and it’s really I think it’s sort of David Cluff and Chris Southgate as primary sort of people who disagree on this is. David Cluff says, “If it’s God’s kingdom it has to be a peaceable kingdom.” And I go, “Yeah that’s right.” And then you have Chris Southgate saying, “well a Lion devoid of all of its instincts, how is that still a lion?” You know to what extent is identity tied up with the instincts and the body, the whole sense of its body is made for this sort of thing. 

So he would suggest that well there might still be hunting in heaven. It will be devoid of all the pain and the suffering and the anxiety of starvation on the part of the lion and of and of anxiety and fear and the sense of needing to survive on the part of the prey. So it may be more like a great game of tag and I’ve…you know the eternal pursuit in the eternal hunting and all a joyful relationship. I’ve sort of taken that and said, You know actually we have an analogy of that here on Earth. Humans used to use their athletic ability to hunt primarily. That’s what it was for. You know fighting for a mate or something like that. We don’t usually do that anymore. We use that for sport. So maybe there’s some analogy of you know lion tennis in heaven, because if you look—I don’t know if you’ve seen Simone Biles do her stuff in the Olympics. She’s I mean an extraordinary gymnast and I think what she is doing with her body is the human body transcendent. It’s more amazing than any hunter or any warrior has ever done throughout all of history. So I think there’s actually a place where that idea of it will be used for some other capacity, some other end, that will actually exalt the skills that they have rather than reduce them. 

Stump: 

I think that’s a really beautiful picture of all creation flourishing. Does that meet the objection and solve the problem of natural evil once and for all? Probably not. Again, I think that’s setting the bar a little too high since we have grappled with this problems for as long as we have records. However, I still hear somebody objecting, but is it good? Is that world that Dawkins describes where animals are all dying horrible deaths? Is that really a good world as we’re committed to believing God would create? 

Well, I have one more response. Like all of these challenges I faced in the book, I find a guide to help me sort things out. The guide for this last challenge is the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil. Central to her understanding of pain and suffering is the claim that the act of creation of giving existence to something else must be understood as God withdrawing the Divine Being from that creation. 

Now that might sound strange or heretical, but she doesn’t mean it in the sense that God abandons creation. It’s more like the idea of kenosis, found in the New Testament book of Philippians. God emptied himself. That’s how most English versions translate the kenosis passage, God emptied himself to become human in the person of Jesus Christ. But according to Christian theology, Christ was still God, right, just now with certain limitations that go with being human. Well, how much more emptying must it take to give existence to something that isn’t God? God is supreme goodness. And created things are not God. To say otherwise, that would be heretical. So according to Weil, giving created things, their own existence has to make them something other than the absolute goodness of God. It shouldn’t surprise us then to find suffering and pain in the created order. But that doesn’t mean God has no love for creation, just the opposite. In fact, in an essay called Some Thoughts on the Love of God, and Simone Weil wrote, “it was by an inconceivable love that God created being so distant from himself. The evil which we see everywhere in the world, in the form of affliction and crime is a sign of the distance between us and God. But this distance is love, and therefore it should be loved.” This does not mean loving evil, but loving God, through the evil. 

I’m still not sure we should call the difficult and painful parts of creation evil when they result from natural processes. The lightning that burned down the house was tragic. But I don’t think it’s morally evil in the same way that the arsonist is evil. Weil’s point though is that these difficult parts of creation should be seen as signs of God’s love. To love is to will the good of another thing. And for God, to create another thing to love, it would have to be distinct from God, and therefore less than the absolute goodness of God. And there’s some sophisticated and tricky metaphysics going on here from Simone Weil. And it raises all kinds of questions to which we won’t find definitive answers in her writing. But she’s trying to sort out how a good and loving God can create a world with pain and suffering. And her account suggests that suffering and love are intimately entangled, just as they were in the ultimate example she cites of suffering and love, Christ on the cross. The cross of Christ also points to the fact that creation was not intended to stay in this state forever. 

Remember, God didn’t create things initially the way they were ultimately intended to be. In this sense, too, we might understand how the initial creation could be pronounced good. Even though it wasn’t yet the good it was supposed to become. Think of this like a baby who’s pronounced by the doctor at her six month checkup to be healthy and in very good condition. But she doesn’t yet have any teeth, she can’t walk, she can’t talk. If she’s still in that condition at her six year checkup, the doctor will probably give a very different assessment of her condition. So what I’m saying is that when we look at the world today and see all the pain and suffering, our assessment of it as ‘not good’ is because we know it should be something different by now. Its initial condition was good for that stage of development. It produced an astounding lavishness of life as well as the capacities and us for moral maturity. But it wasn’t intended to stay that way. And it was our sin that has prevented it from becoming what it was intended to be. But we’ve been prepared through our evolutionary journey to contribute to the world becoming what it was ultimately intended to be. So let us exercise that role even as we wait for God’s ultimate consummation of history. Well, that’s about all I have on the topic. Again, the book is called The Sacred Chain: How Understand Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith. I’d be incredibly honored if you gave my book a read, and I’d be very happy to hear what you think about any of it. I’m pretty easy to find on the BioLogos website and there’s contact information there. Drop me a line. Let me know how it strikes you. Thanks for listening.

Hoogerwerf:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations who are applying spiritual solutions to society’s toughest problems. Get involved at fetzer.org. And by the John Templeton Foundation, which funds research and catalyzes conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder. And BioLogos is also supported by individual donors and listeners alike you contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Brakemaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode, find the link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum. Or visit our website biologos.org, where you’ll find articles, videos, and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening