Program / Course 15: The Problem of Evil and Suffering / Lesson 3.1
What you will learn
- Define natural evil and say why the free-will defense does not directly address it.
- Explain the argument that a world of stable natural laws necessarily includes some harm.
- Describe why animal suffering and deep time are especially hard for Christian replies.
- Weigh the main replies and the objections to each.
The big idea
Natural evil is suffering that comes from nature and not from human wrongdoing: earthquakes, floods, cancer, famine from drought, and the pain of animals across millions of years. The free-will defense does not touch it directly. One reply says that a world governed by stable laws is needed for knowledge, planning and moral choice, and that such a world will sometimes hurt. Critics reply that this does not explain the amount of pain, nor the suffering of animals long before humans existed. The question remains one of the hardest in the course.
Key terms
- Natural evil
- Suffering and loss whose causes lie in the natural world rather than in anyone’s wrongful choice.
- Laws of nature
- The regular patterns by which the physical world works, such as gravity, which scientists describe in general rules.
- Predation
- The killing and eating of one animal by another.
- Deep time
- The vast ages of Earth’s history, billions of years, during which life developed and died long before humans appeared.
- Sentience
- The capacity to feel, including pain and pleasure.
- Evolution
- The process by which living things change over generations, through variation and natural selection.
- Regularity
- The dependable repeating of cause and effect, which makes prediction and planning possible.
Background
Until the last two centuries, many Christian writers could treat natural evil as a consequence of human sin: the world was damaged when Adam fell. The geological and biological sciences have changed the discussion. Fossils show that animals suffered and died for hundreds of millions of years before humans appeared. Earthquakes and diseases are older than any human wrongdoing. A reply that traces all natural evil to human sin must now reckon with this evidence, and many Christians have turned to other replies.
The problem has three layers. The first is the harm done to humans by nature: disease, disaster, accident. The second is animal pain, which seems to have no human cause or human benefit. The third is the question whether a good God would design a world in which creatures live by killing one another. These layers do not have the same answers. This lesson sets out the reasoning and the next lesson turns to traditional theological accounts.
Step-by-step explanation
Step 1: Why natural evil is a separate problem
The free-will defense places evil in the choices of free beings. An earthquake chooses nothing. If God created the natural order, then it seems that he is responsible for its dangers, in a way that he is not for the freely chosen wrongs of persons. This is why the problem of natural evil is often thought harder than the problem of moral evil, and why Rowe’s example of the fawn is drawn from nature.
Some replies treat natural evil as a result of free choices after all, by angels, or humans. Others look for a different good that justifies it. Both kinds are studied in this module.
Step 2: The argument from stable laws
Richard Swinburne and others argue that a world in which human beings can act, plan and learn needs reliable laws. If fire sometimes burned and sometimes did not, no one could cook or build. If a falling stone sometimes hovered, no one could judge what to do. To make real moral choices, people need to know the likely results of what they do. So stable natural laws are a necessary condition for moral agency.
But stable laws bring dangers. The same laws that let water quench thirst let people drown. The same plate movements that make a habitable planet also cause earthquakes. If God interfered every time a law would cause harm, regularity would disappear. This argument claims that some natural evil is a side effect of a good thing, and not a goal.
Step 3: Objections to the laws reply
Critics reply that the reply proves too little. It might justify some harm, but not the amount of it, such as the death of millions of infants from disease. If God could occasionally intervene, as Christians believe he sometimes does in miracles, he could prevent more harm without making nature chaotic. Defenders answer that a few interventions would not destroy regularity, but that too many would, and the line is not humans’ to draw.
Critics add that God could have made laws that were gentler. Why should cancer exist, or parasites that blind children? The defender can only reply that humans do not know all the connections among laws, and that a world with these features may be part of the best available package. Many readers find this thin. The reply to the evidential problem in Lesson 1.3 depends on how much weight it can bear.
Step 4: Animal suffering and deep time
Animals feel pain, and they did so before humans existed. The fawn in the fire is typical. Darwin himself noted that nature appears to involve great waste and suffering. Thinkers in the Christian tradition have offered several responses. C. S. Lewis, in The Problem of Pain, suggested that animals may have little conscious self, so that their pain is less than people imagine, and that fallen powers may have corrupted nature early. Michael Murray, a philosopher, argued in Nature Red in Tooth and Claw (2008) that the capacity to suffer depends on higher kinds of awareness that most animals lack. This is disputed by scientists who find that many animals, at least vertebrates, probably feel pain.
Other writers appeal to the value of an ordered ecosystem in which species interact, and to the possibility that God redeems animals. Isaiah 11:6 imagines the wolf dwelling with the lamb. Romans 8:21 says the creation itself will be delivered from the bondage of corruption. Critics ask whether future redemption can justify the past, and many defenders agree that it cannot do so alone.
Step 5: What to conclude
Natural evil is a place where honest Christians admit the limits of their answers. The regularity argument has force. The appeal to a damaged creation has force for those who hold it. Neither makes the extent of animal and human suffering easy to bear. The Scripture passages that speak of creation groaning (Romans 8:22) acknowledge the burden, and the next lesson shows how the tradition has read them.
- How does natural evil differ from moral evil, and why is it harder for the free-will defense?
- Why might stable laws be needed for moral choice?
- Does the laws reply explain the amount of natural suffering, or only its possibility?
- How should a Christian respond to the fact that animals suffered for millions of years before humans?
- Is Murray’s claim that most animals do not suffer in a morally serious way persuasive? What evidence would you want?
- What would be lost if God intervened to stop every natural harm?
Examples
The earthquake
The movement of tectonic plates builds mountains, renews soil and recycles carbon, and also causes earthquakes that kill thousands. Scientists say the process is part of what makes a living planet. The defender says this illustrates how good and harm can come together. The critic says it does not explain why the harm falls on the innocent.
Predation
A lioness hunts a young antelope. The lioness needs to eat, and the antelope dies in terror. Darwin’s theory shows how this arose and how it supports an ecosystem. Whether this arrangement can be reconciled with a good Creator is the question a Christian must face. (A constructed scene of a common event.)
A hypothetical gentler world
Suppose a world in which no animal ever felt pain but all behaved the same. Some philosophers ask why God did not make such a world. Others respond that pain is a warning system that protects life, and that the choice of pain as a mechanism may be part of what lets creatures survive.
Different perspectives
Catholic
The Catechism teaches that creation is in a state of journeying toward perfection and that God permits physical evil as a consequence of this journey. It allows Catholics to accept evolution as a scientific account, and Catholic thinkers such as Aquinas treat natural evils as the side effects of natural goods, since corruption of one thing is the generation of another.
Orthodox
Orthodox writers see creation as damaged by the fall of humans, who were meant to lead it to God, and stress the hope of its renewal. Many Orthodox thinkers today accept evolution while insisting that death is an enemy and not a part of the original plan. David Bentley Hart has argued fiercely against explaining natural suffering as God’s design.
Protestant
Protestants range widely. Some conservative Protestants hold that natural evil began with the fall and reject evolutionary history. Others, including many evangelicals, accept evolution and appeal to the laws of nature, to the groaning of creation, and to God’s sovereignty. Reformed writers often say that God’s purposes in nature are good though hidden.
Scientific and secular views
Biologists describe suffering as a feature of how natural selection works, and see no moral meaning in it. Some atheist writers hold that the facts of animal pain are much easier to explain without a God than with one. Many scientists who are Christians argue that the same facts can be held within belief, using the replies above.
Why it matters
Natural evil is the point at which faith meets science and ordinary pain together. A student who understands both what the replies claim and where they strain is better prepared to talk with doctors, scientists and the bereaved, and to avoid saying more than can be known.
Common misunderstandings
Misunderstanding: Christianity teaches that all natural disasters are punishments for sin.
Correction: The main tradition rejects this. Jesus denies that the victims of the tower of Siloam were worse sinners (Luke 13:4-5). Some Christians have wrongly said otherwise during disasters, and the church has often rebuked them.
Misunderstanding: Science has shown that animal suffering is meaningless, so the case is closed.
Correction: Science describes how suffering arose, not whether it has a meaning. Whether it has one is a philosophical and theological question, and answers differ.
Misunderstanding: The laws of nature reply explains every natural evil.
Correction: Its supporters usually say only that it explains why some natural harm is unavoidable. It does not claim to account for each event or for the amount of suffering.
Knowledge check
What is natural evil, and why does it challenge the free-will defense?
Natural evil is suffering whose cause is in nature, such as disease, earthquake and animal pain, and not in wrongful human choice. The free-will defense explains evil by the misuse of freedom, so it does not explain these events, unless one adds the idea that nonhuman free beings caused them, which is speculative.
How does the laws of nature argument work?
It says that creatures who plan, learn and make moral choices need a world that behaves in regular ways. Such a world will include harmful events, since the same laws that sustain life can also destroy it. The critic replies that this does not account for the amount of suffering, and that God could sometimes intervene without destroying regularity.
Why is animal suffering especially hard for Christian replies?
Animals suffered for hundreds of millions of years before humans existed, so human sin cannot be the cause, and animals cannot learn moral lessons or exercise free will. Replies include arguments that animals feel less than people assume, appeals to ecosystems, and hope for renewal of creation, but each is contested.
What does Scripture say about creation and suffering?
Romans 8:19-22 says that the creation waits for deliverance and groans together in pain. Isaiah 11:6-9 pictures a peaceful creation to come. These texts treat the present state of nature as incomplete or damaged and point forward to a renewal. They do not give a scientific account of the origin of pain.
Think it through
- How does it change the problem for you if animals feel less than people imagine, or more?
- Does the thought of a renewed creation make past suffering easier to accept, or does it seem a poor answer?
- What do you say to a person who has lost a loved one in a natural disaster, and what do you avoid saying?
Independent assignment
A map of natural evils
In your own notebook, write about 400 words. List five kinds of natural evil, for example disease, disaster, famine, birth defects and animal predation. Beside each, write one reply a Christian might give and one objection a critic might raise. Mark the case you find hardest and explain why. Keep the work private.
Further study
- C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain Read the chapter on animal pain, noting where Lewis speculates.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Problem of Evil Read the sections on natural evil.
- Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God Read selectively for the argument from laws of nature and natural evil.
- Romans 8:22 The whole creation groans and travails in pain together.
- Luke 13:4 Jesus on those killed when the tower in Siloam fell.