Why Does Creation Groan?: Scripture and science suggest that animal suffering fits into a divine artistic story
The exclamation that the whole creation is groaning as it awaits liberation from bondage to suffering and death resonates with Isaiah’s vision of the messianic realm in which animals flourish in freedom from the violence and pain of predation: 'The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together'. Hope for the inclusion of animals in the messianic heaven, then, fits naturally into the larger Christian story of creation and redemption.
JOHN R. SCHNEIDER: In 1859, Charles Darwin published his bombshell hypothesis of natural selection in On the Origin of Species. The core idea is that when animals acquire new traits that enable them to adapt to their environments, those traits are passed on to offspring. Accordingly, then, during hundreds of millions of years, the law of natural selection guided the creation of all species.
It is this relatively random, uneconomical, and inherently brutal means of creation that causes intense animal suffering. The lawlike “hand” of natural selection literally inscribes animal suffering by design into the conditions of existence for animals. Since Darwin’s time, philosophers and theologians have debated whether the God of the Bible could have employed such an inherently inefficient and brutal means of creation…
The majority of Christian thinkers who affirm Darwinism defend what I refer to as “only-way” explanations. The core proposal is that theistic evolution was the only way for God—even an omnipotent God—to create a sufficiently valuable world. Animal suffering is justified morally, then, because it will inevitably exist as the byproduct of any very valuable world that God could create. The “only-way” thesis invites predictable skepticism. Could an omnipotent and omniscient God really be powerless to create a valuable world without also causing a vast vista of suffering and death?…
As we grapple with the problem of animal suffering, it is worth considering a second approach that does not require seeing God as limited in this “only-way” fashion. Supporters of this approach appeal to the aesthetic concepts, properties, and values of great art.
What if we were to picture God as a cosmic artist acting according to artistic norms rather than as a person in executive authority acting along ethical lines? This shift to an aesthetic picture changes our understanding of the moral position that we imagine God is in when deciding to allow evils.
A key tenet of ethics is that a morally good person in a position of executive authority and power must always minimize evil so far as possible. One allows it only when absolutely necessary, such as when it is the only way to realize particular goods or to prevent particularly bad evils.
In contrast, we view artists as rightfully free to maximize goodness (beauty) even when doing so requires including evil (ugliness). Artists are justified in allowing the evil (ugliness) if they successfully integrate it into a beautiful whole that could not be as beautiful as it is without the evil. Roderick Chisholm, a prominent analytical philosopher, referred to this common artistic technique as the defeat of evil.
The importance of this shift away from a narrowly ethical picture to this sort of aesthetic analogy is immense, for it removes the need for an “only-way” explanation of animal suffering. It opens the possibility that God was not coerced by circumstances into causing animal suffering but instead employed divine artistic discretion in deciding to do so. To be justified in doing so, God would need to have the sure aim of defeating the evil…
If we may accept the strangely circuitous Christian story, with all its seemingly pointless twists and turns, as messianic art that God will integrate ingeniously in the end, then maybe we can accept the suffering inherent in evolutionary creation in the same way, in reasonable hope and faith.
Along with the supporting arguments offered by authors of “only-way” and aesthetic explanations, then, the Christian story of creation and redemption itself provides good grounds for seeing the suffering by animals as compatible with belief in the Christian God. Perhaps our biblical stories should even lead us to expect that the Christian God would create species by such seemingly random and brutal evolutionary means. For the comparably enigmatic Christian story leads us to trust that God’s sure aim is to ultimately defeat evils for human and nonhuman beings in the renewed creation.
Paul’s exclamation that the whole creation is groaning as it awaits liberation from bondage to suffering and death all but implies this ending of the story. This hopeful picture of the future for animals resonates with Isaiah’s vision of the messianic realm in which animals flourish in freedom from the violence and pain of predation:
“The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together.” (Isa. 11:6; see also 65:25)
Hope for the inclusion of animals in the messianic heaven, then, fits naturally into the larger Christian story of creation and redemption. SOURCE…