The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil

by Christopher Southgate

Pain, suffering, and extinction are intrinsic to the evolutionary process. In this book Christopher Southgate shows how the world that is "very good" is also "groaning in travail" and subjected by God to that travail. Southgate then evaluates several attempts at evolutionary theodicy and argues for his own approach--an approach that takes full account of God's self-emptying and human beings' special responsibilities as created co-creators.

Genres: Theology, Science, Religion

208 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2008

Reviews

[Paul Bruggink · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this helpful book, Christopher Southgate tries to see how God can be both worthy of worship and the creator of a world that includes so much suffering, with a focus on animal suffering.

In addressing the question, “Why did God choose to create this universe with these laws and constants, knowing they would then make neo-Darwinian evolution unavoidable,” Southgate opts for the “only way” or the “best way” argument. He accepts the unprovable assumption that an evolving creation was “the only way that God could give rise to the sort of beauty, diversity, sentience, and sophistication of creatures that the biosphere now contains” (p. 16). He develops this argument by discussing God’s co-suffering with creation and the expectation that God will compensate the victims of evolution in the coming new creation.

Throughout the book, Southgate helpfully interacts with the views of other authors. His book ends with the pros and cons of, and proposals for, human intervention into the environment in order to save species from extinction.

Southgate’s book is accessible to the any reader. Scholarly pieces of discussion have been left to the end notes, resulting in fifty pages of end notes for 133 pages of text. Unfortunately, the text is identified at the top of each odd-numbered page by chapter names, and the endnotes are identified only by chapter numbers, deliberately making the endnotes even more difficult to find. The book also has a twelve-page index.

This is obviously not a book for Young Earth Creationists, since an old earth and evolution are presumed. It is accessible even for those without expertise in biological sciences or systematic theology. I recommend this book for Christians who are struggling with how to integrate biological evolution into their Biblical faith

[Peter Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not very convincing but at least intellectually honest, which is actually a pathetic complement but unfortunately definately not somehting common to see Christians writes on evolution.

Southgate believes in evolution and doesn't try to excuse away the cruelty in nature. He doesn't think that nature is intelligently designed, nor is the suffering and cruelty easily handed away. Southgate's response to natural evil was because it had to be like that. Death is a law of nature, the second law of thermodynamics, more specifically. And pain was a necessary ingredient for evolution. In other words, God didn't have a choice but to create the logic of evolution so that it contains so much meaningless suffering, death and cruel instincts of parasites, because of the laws of thermodynamics.

You could ask, but why would God create the laws of nature so that it was necessary? Southgate admits there are some things that apparently aren't in God's control. Kind of like God can't make an object that is simultaneously a square and a circle. There are certain restraints to logic itself.

I find it unconvincing for several reasons. If evolution was the only means of creating life, then angels make no sense. If the heavenly residence of angels was bound by the same thermodynamics so as to necessitate death and suffering, then the sense of Christianity you are talking about is so remote to me, that I wouldn't even know what the meaningful difference is between earth and heaven. Surely in the view of a perfect heaven, it is logically possible to have a place in which there is no death.

In addition to heaven and angels, I think a core tenet of Christianity relies on the resurrection and a new heaven and a new earth, where, I must presume, there is no death. Southgate's reply here is that heaven can *preserve* creaturely selves in a pain-free state but couldn't *originate* them — only the evolutionary world can do that. Fine, but he just asserts this. It seems to me that he is capping the creative powers of God, without any explanation as to why it might be impossible to do that. Again, in light that He created angels without evolution, this seems entirely inplausable.

There's also a deeper internal problem with the "God's hands are clean because evolution did it" framing. Southgate explicitly rejects the view that evolution is genuinely random, he follows Conway Morris's convergence argument (something human-like was inevitable), Peacocke's "propensities" toward complexity and consciousness, and even Russell's idea that God may have nudged mutations at the quantum level.

I see three possibilites here, one, if evolution is truly random, then the incarnation as a human is a fluke — Jesus could just as well have been a dolphin or a dinosaur, and the whole salvation history is arbitrary. To me, this problem is so central that I am amazed that Southgate, despite his careful investigation of other issues, simply took it for granted that Jesus would be a homo sapiens.

But if evolution is steered enough to guarantee humans, then the thermodynamic-necessity defense collapses, because God was steering through the parasites and predators too. The propensities argument tries to thread the needle — loaded enough for consciousness, free enough to absolve God of the cruelty. It's ambigiuous as it is conventinent. It's kind of like saying, God had the evolutionary process on a rather long leash, letting it run around and do its thing, but it was walking slowly and steady to a predetermined place.

And it gets worse when you actually try to picture what "God nudging mutations at the quantum level" would look like. Where does the nudging start? If only at the great apes, then the great apes themselves weren't inevitable, and then you're back at God playing dice, and you're back to the dolphin Jesus problem. If at the Cambrian or earlier, then God was actively steering through hundreds of millions of years of mutation events .... including every parasite and predator innovation along the way. Clean hands gone.

The middle option ... God nudges only the lineage that becomes human and leaves everything else to randomness — is probably what Southgate has to mean, but it's the worst morally. It means God micromanages his own ancestry while deliberately turning away from the suffering of every other lineage.

The cruelty isn't a side effect of the human-producing apparatus. Nor is it just a forgotten branch of the Tree of life that God was indifferent to. The problem is that you don't get the immune system or the cognitive arms race without predation and parasitism. So "I cared about the human line, I left the cruelty to randomness" doesn't separate cleanly. The cruelty *is* the apparatus. It appears clear to me that you can't just nudge one quantum here and there toward a rig the arm's race toward intelligence so that the Homo genus would win. Instead, the genus developed through a unimaginably complex and intertwined ecosystem that formed Nature and its selection process.

Yellowstone wolves are the best small-scale illustration of cascade effects. When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, elk populations dropped and changed grazing behavior. Willows and aspens regrew along rivers. Beavers came back because they had willows. Beaver dams stabilized riverbanks and changed water flow. The rivers literally changed course because of the wolves. One predator species reshaped the geomorphology of the landscape. If pulling on one thread does that in a decade, imagine the entanglement across 540 million years. Or imagine predicting the effects of an astoriod hitting Mexico to kill off the dinosaurs.

I think it also paints a very pathethic picture of God. He's this behind-the-scenes manipulator that can only create human beings, not ex nihilo, for he isn't strong enough, but through tiny subtle quantum mutations, as if he's hiding from someone, as if he's shy and doesn't want to be found out. It also poses an acute moral issue of children who are born with genetic mutations that dooms them to a short life. If God tinkered with the billions of mutations from the Cambrian age to the path of humanity, surely he has mastered the art of gene manipulation to the degree he has the power to not produce children with rare genetic diseases.

The same tension shows up around the crucifixion and resurrection. Southgate isn't denying Christ's victory over death — he'd say the resurrection just marks the transition from the originating phase to the preservation phase. Fine. But if death is so essential to creaturehood that even God couldn't avoid building it into creation, why does the New Testament treat death as the "last enemy" to be defeated? You can't have death be both metaphysically required for creaturely life and the great enemy that Christ overcame.

If you are conquering death, you are essentially saying, no more creation. Thus you are simply preserving that which is already made. Heaven, and the new earth, is basically putting everything in a freezer and preserving it. No new creation. No new beings. If that would be the case, then heaven seems like a conservative art gallery rather than a living breathing place to actually live and create.

Southgate rejects that Adam corrupted nature. Or even introduced death. He doesn't mention Paul saying "through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned" but it seems implicit in his arguements that he rejects that the Homo-genus was immortal before Adam ate the fruit. The U-shaped trajectory of the whole Christian story, Paradise, Paradise Lost, Paradise restored, seems to be entirely compromised, and if you don't have that story, and if you allow for a Reptillian Jesus, with a refridgerator heaven, a shy, restricted God, and no angels, then the term "to be Christian" becomes vaguer then ever.

I actually think Southgate's attempt to reconcile evolution and Christianity is pretty good, at least honest. But the way he did it stretched the theology so wide that it's not really the Christianity that is typically recognized as Christianity. But even then, I think Southgate fails to reconcile this theology with evolution, for the reasons above.

[Leigh Haynes · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are two seriously important moves of Southgate that I appreciate. He is an example of one of the theologians of what Gottlieb termed theologys current, 'Green phase', in which theologians are re-evaluating their perceptions of the earth. He begins the book with the incredibly important observation that theodicy HAS failed enormously to speak about the suffering of nonhuman animals, and he does not speak about human beings as the centre of the universe, so you'll be spared that headache. Secondly, Southgate notices the success of much evolutionary theodicy to argue for bigger pictures and higher harmonies and so forth, but fail to adequately address why such harmony is so incredibly expensive, as was the question of Ivans dilemma in the Brothers Karamazov, that the price of harmony has been set too high, or even The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas. We can build an incredible case that suffering is fruitful, but at such cost? Southgates book reminds us of the span of the millions of years of nonhuman suffering, in which our human phase is only a tiny part. A central plank in Southgates response is the only way argument, that this world that God wants cannot but be paid at such a cost. I am honestly not sure whether I found his case for that convincing, but it has given me a fresh insight.

[Rodeweeks · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult academic theological/philosophical book, despite the author's promise to make it easier to read by moving much of what he wanted to say to the notes section. Despite this, an interesting book and, for me, refreshing in that it's theology is evolutionary instead of creationist. Although personally I did come to the conviction that evolution makes more sense than creationism, despite schooled in the latter since childhood, this book gave me a lot of food for thought. The author, in the end advocate some form of vegetarianism which does not eliminate meat eating all together. At first I was a bit disappointed by this, but the other suggestions he made in terms of reducing animal slaughter would make full vegetarianism for most people a compulsion as it would push out meat prices above what most of us can afford.

[Alicia Sillers · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intriguing and satisfying discussion on evolutionary theodicy

[Zach Waldis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Southgate argues here that evolution and the resultant animal suffering it entails are necessary; one could say that his argument largely revolves around natural law, though he does not use the concept or mention it. Southgate is also quite leery of using "the fall" in these types of discussions. This is a worthwhile read but I don't think that it really does the job fully; unfortunately I can't recommend a perfect replacement, though I am a big fan of Francis Collins.

[Michelle Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent, honest exploration of evolutionary theodicy - the problem of evil and suffering in creation as it specifically relates to the theory of evolution and a loving God. Southgate proposes a deeply Trinitarian and kenotic (self-emptying) foundation for the creative "selving" of creatures, prompted by the Holy Spirit to self-transcend through evolutionary mechanisms. Drawing on process theology's "divine lure," Southgate suggests that all of creation responds with yes/no through "selving," but also by moving beyond the self towards the other. He investigates the notion that this is the "only way" the universe could exist, evolving through suffering and death, and considers multiple eschatological proposals. Although he states in the beginning that this book is meant for any reader, at a basic level of science and theology, you'll have to feel pretty well acquainted with theological terminology/jargon and have the desire to do some academic reading in order to make it through the entire book.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although no theistic origins story is free of concerns about the existence of evil and the co-existence of a good God with great suffering, the acceptance of evolutionary theory – at least on the surface – seems especially vulnerable to criticism that it cannot be reconciled with Christian belief about an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God.

Christopher Southgate, however, is here to tackle the hard questions that come when scientific findings force us to abandon the Western assumptions of fallen humanity and original sin, which aren't biblical so much as they are Augustinian. Southgate's multipart theodicy doesn't provide all the answers – no theodicy can, as he correctly notes – but he provides compelling arguments not just for how a good God can use the ambiguous-at-best process of evolution via natural selection to create, but also for how humans should work eschatologically to help bring creation away from groaning to restoration.

Unlike most theodicies, Southgate approaches this topic from a thoroughly naturalistic perspective, focusing on the suffering, predation and extinction of animals, which occurred for millennia before humanity arrived – and therefore is the core of the problem for evolutionary creationists. And although Southgate certainly recognizes that humans have a special purpose in the world as being created in God's image, he does not use this to detract from the value of non-human animal life around us. All creatures are created to flourish, he argues, and when any individual creature is prevented from doing so – through predation, parasitism, disease, accident or injury – this raises questions about what God has done and what, if anything, He is doing.

I highly recommend this book for anyone struggling with the existence of pain in this world, as well as those seeking an intellectually honest way of reconciling scripture with the overwhelming evidence about animal and human origins provided by scientific research. It will challenge your assumptions, work your mind, and strengthen your faith.

[Connie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil, is a helpful contribution to the discussion of the relationship of science and faith. Author Christopher Southgate, a research fellow at the University of Exeter, England, explores the ambiguity of evolutionary creation that is at the same time "very good" (Genesis 1:31) and predatory and extinguishing of species -- a place and state of pain, suffering, and death. Careful in building his case, Southgate proposes steps for human beings to take to make this a better world.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is not an easy read, but it is fascinating and thought-provoking. Since this is a topic on which I've given only small amounts of thought, and virtually no reading, a second reading would likely yield additional fruit.