I've just been watching a natural history programme about parasites. Comments in the room were of the nature, "it's so cruel" and "horrible", although the child who knew the DVD like the back of his hand almost pointed out that, "some of it's cruel and some of it's beautiful", and true enough, after waiting a little while we were treated to the site of a blue butterfly whose pupa had avoided a wasp parasite.
It's not big, it's not clever, it's not original, but it remains - and I suppose will do so - the problem of natural evil.
A traditional solution is to look to an historical Fall. The Fall is part of the Biblical landscape and I've no intention of landscaping it, but a Fall which radically changed the structure of the natural world is difficult to accept. It implies that as a result of human sin - in our example - insects who formerly were not parasitic suddenly became so. Further, if one accepts that some form of evolution is likely, that the death and predation which directly led to the selection of the fittest and the production of humanity was only introduced post-Fall.
We could push the Fall back in time to before the creation of the World - an angelic Fall say, as Plantinga suggests, if I remember correctly. We could do this ... but it's all getting rather abstract!
A further option, one I quite like the sound of, is that humanity's Fall was a loss of potential: that mankind was created to redeem the world in some sense - or to participate in the redemption which Christ would work. The Fall was therefore a banishment from the Tree of Life - the loss of the potential for an eternal life which was not innately theirs but only ever a gift. Again, this is a bit extract, but it at least keeps the shape of the Biblical narrative and is not directly contradictory with evolution.
The above still leaves us with a created world which is predatory at its heart. We could say this was not God's will, that he wills better for it, but it is still - according to evolution - the tool by which we came to be and also our experience of the World uninterpreted by revelation. Is this a problem?
One is reminded again of Barth's insistence that Natural Theology should not exist as a non-Christian (or Christian, admittedly!) work: that all interpretation of the Creation and Experience must be done through and on the basis of the Gospel. The bugs just make the world appear utterly ambiguous. If one started there to describe God by His works, what would one conclude?
***
I recently read Lewis' Perelandra which is a description of a pre-Fall world and its destiny when it avoided the Fall. Lewis makes a comment about bugs and spiders and other creepy things. He comments that our perception of them makes them appear horrible: that if we looked on them 'properly' we wouldn't view them with such disgust. This got me thinking...
Why do we view all this predation and parasitic life-cycles as horrible? I'm not saying there is not something inherently troubling in these things - as perhaps Lewis was - but, rather, why do we particularly feel uncomfortable. The idea I had was that we feel this way because of our empathy. We look at the destruction of bodies, the preying of one life on another, we see the apparently pained reaction of the victims and we think this is terrible ... probably because we wouldn't want anything like that to happen to us. In other words, we're frightened of death and that is why we hate bugs. We're frightened of things which might do us harm and we're repulsed by things which remind us of the taking away of our life.
Given the above, faith in the Resurrection might offer a completely different perspective on the problem of natural evil. If we were no longer scared of death, if it was possible to be content in death, to trust God, to not feel inconsolable emptiness, to not view our or others death as the end, then there is a glimmer of hope that we might begin to view the created order in a different light. Of course, I'm not proposing anything triumphalistic. Our faith is weak, our righteousness remains alien, but we might begin to receive glimpses of a fearless view of Creation.
It's not big, it's not clever, it's not original, but it remains - and I suppose will do so - the problem of natural evil.
A traditional solution is to look to an historical Fall. The Fall is part of the Biblical landscape and I've no intention of landscaping it, but a Fall which radically changed the structure of the natural world is difficult to accept. It implies that as a result of human sin - in our example - insects who formerly were not parasitic suddenly became so. Further, if one accepts that some form of evolution is likely, that the death and predation which directly led to the selection of the fittest and the production of humanity was only introduced post-Fall.
We could push the Fall back in time to before the creation of the World - an angelic Fall say, as Plantinga suggests, if I remember correctly. We could do this ... but it's all getting rather abstract!
A further option, one I quite like the sound of, is that humanity's Fall was a loss of potential: that mankind was created to redeem the world in some sense - or to participate in the redemption which Christ would work. The Fall was therefore a banishment from the Tree of Life - the loss of the potential for an eternal life which was not innately theirs but only ever a gift. Again, this is a bit extract, but it at least keeps the shape of the Biblical narrative and is not directly contradictory with evolution.
The above still leaves us with a created world which is predatory at its heart. We could say this was not God's will, that he wills better for it, but it is still - according to evolution - the tool by which we came to be and also our experience of the World uninterpreted by revelation. Is this a problem?
One is reminded again of Barth's insistence that Natural Theology should not exist as a non-Christian (or Christian, admittedly!) work: that all interpretation of the Creation and Experience must be done through and on the basis of the Gospel. The bugs just make the world appear utterly ambiguous. If one started there to describe God by His works, what would one conclude?
***
I recently read Lewis' Perelandra which is a description of a pre-Fall world and its destiny when it avoided the Fall. Lewis makes a comment about bugs and spiders and other creepy things. He comments that our perception of them makes them appear horrible: that if we looked on them 'properly' we wouldn't view them with such disgust. This got me thinking...
Why do we view all this predation and parasitic life-cycles as horrible? I'm not saying there is not something inherently troubling in these things - as perhaps Lewis was - but, rather, why do we particularly feel uncomfortable. The idea I had was that we feel this way because of our empathy. We look at the destruction of bodies, the preying of one life on another, we see the apparently pained reaction of the victims and we think this is terrible ... probably because we wouldn't want anything like that to happen to us. In other words, we're frightened of death and that is why we hate bugs. We're frightened of things which might do us harm and we're repulsed by things which remind us of the taking away of our life.
Given the above, faith in the Resurrection might offer a completely different perspective on the problem of natural evil. If we were no longer scared of death, if it was possible to be content in death, to trust God, to not feel inconsolable emptiness, to not view our or others death as the end, then there is a glimmer of hope that we might begin to view the created order in a different light. Of course, I'm not proposing anything triumphalistic. Our faith is weak, our righteousness remains alien, but we might begin to receive glimpses of a fearless view of Creation.
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