Williams goes on to quote another Australian colleague, who shares the national gift for chucking a bonzer phrase, on the Ichneumonid wasps, whose designer, if there was one, 'must have been a sadistic bastard'. Darwin, although he visited Australia as a young man, expressed the same sentiment in staider, less antipodean terms: 'I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.' (From: The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins, page 370)
This criticism of the Christian faith, boils down to the question: why does God allow suffering? In this and the next two posts I will attempt a theological response. I will show evolution is a threat not to the Christian faith but to some interpretations of it.
Last year, I wrote a series of posts about John Wesley's Three Grand Spiritual Doctrines . These are Original Sin, Justification by Faith and Holiness. I will explore how each of these respond to Dawkins' criticism and build together into a robust argument. I should repeat here my point, these three doctrines are not what we might expect; Wesley was mapping faith development rather than beliefs in the supernatural. These doctrines are not such an easy target for radical atheists.
What Dawkins presents us with, in the quoted paragraph, is a valid view of nature, albeit a little one sided. Yes, he is right, nature is cruel. I have complained before that 'survival of the fittest' has been used to justify violence but it is not the only thing going on in natural ecological systems. There is a degree of collaboration between species and indeed some might argue even predators eating prey can be seen as a type of collaboration.
Struggle and cruelty are fundamental to Darwinian evolution and I don't know why it is a problem for some Christians. Christians have had a doctrine of sin for hundreds of years. The fall, we believe, effects not only humanity but the whole of creation. As such it is hard to see what the Christian objection to survival of the fittest is supposed to be. It seems to be entirely biblical.
Things eat other things. They maim and kill in countless inspired ways. Whatever excuses we make for this state of affairs, and Dawkins quotes a nineteenth century clergyman who argues that predation culls the weak and controls populations, nature is often excessively cruel. Christians and Jews have called this sin. They have understood sin as something about creation that works against the will of God. So, Christians have noticed there is cruelty in creation and called it sin a very long time ago. It seems the attribution of cruelty to God is a little premature. We must dig deeper.
Jesus on the cross is at the core of the Christian faith and has always been a witness to human cruelty. It is remembered in the sacrament of communion, where believers eat the body and drink the blood of God. There might be some Christians who have not noticed how cruel this is but I think most of us have.
Now, I must confess I have problems with the next step in my argument. It seems that the presence of sin in nature is fully in accord with Augustine of Hippo's most reactionary doctrine. He claims original sin enters each person through the sex act and indeed it is passed on through the whole of nature through reproduction. This doctrine has been interpreted (or misinterpreted) as censorious and I'll deal with this in my next post.
Many biologists these days are writing about horizontal gene transfer. This has been known about for some time as the means by which genetic material is passed between viruses and bacteria and even between multi-cellular species. Evidence is accumulating to suggest it continues to this day, even in multicellular organisms, through the agency of viruses. However, the point is before sex there was a sort of free and easy sharing of innovation between species. Sex enabled multicellular organisms and so brought natural selection into the world.
This is the point where some fundamentalists might object this is not biblical because sin started with the fall after the creation of Adam and Eve, whereas I'm suggesting it happened millions of years earlier. Genesis was never meant to be a scientific account of creation and I don't see any reason why we should not see sin entering the world through sex. It is an essential flaw because without it there would be no humanity to theorise about these things. I suspect even God would have problems doing much with bacteria.
But why couldn't God create a world without suffering? Why allow sin to be present in creation? It is necessary to attain multi-cellular organisms and theologically it is the happy fault (O felis culpa) that enables us to know God's work of salvation. This will be the theme of my next post.
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