THIS sparkling collection is available free of charge on Open Access for those with links to subscribing colleges — a very welcome innovation. Nevertheless, even if you have to pay, it is well worth buying.
It gathers together a distinguished group of applied theologians (some with scientific training) and Christian philosophers debating whether it is “possible for Christian theology to provide a story about animal suffering, or perhaps in certain respects a story about why we cannot tell such a story, that is persuasive enough to meet whatever intellectual threshold needs to be met in this domain for Christian claims about divine creation and providence to remain a live intellectual option” —— to use the nuanced summary by Mark Wynn, Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, at Oxford.
Professor Christopher Southgate, at Exeter, who originally trained as a physicist, provides an able and accessible introduction and conclusion, noting points of agreement and disagreement about whether different forms of animal suffering are compatible with a loving Creator. All contributors conclude that it is, but they take different paths: some minimise animal suffering, while others believe (as Southgate himself does) that God could have created sentient, moral life only in the way in which it has evolved (the so-called only-way argument). Oxford’s veteran Emeritus Professor Paul Fiddes also provides thoughtful summaries and critical comparisons.
Professor Neil Messer at Winchester, an expert in medical ethics who trained initially in bioscience, provides a Barthian perspective, whereas Dr Bethany Sollereder at Edinburgh, now moving back to Oxford, is more liberal, rejecting the belief that animal suffering results from a fallen world: “The largest difference between myself and my colleagues and me is around the question of whether or not the world is ‘fallen’ in any sense. I hold that it is only in the human realm that resistance to God or fallenness occurs. . . I can understand the unwillingness to accept disproportionate pain, but my imagination fails when I try to think of how evolution could happen pain.”
The Revd Dr Michael Lloyd, Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, is unconvinced by this rejection, arguing, instead, for an angelic fall that affected the whole of creation long before Homo sapiens evolved — a speculation also adopted by my saintly Anglo-Catholic Ph.D. supervisor, the late Eric Mascall. Ironically, it is the Baptist Fiddes who points out that an angelic fall simply defers the problem of animal suffering, since monotheists typically deem angels (including the devil) to be part of God’s creation.
Messer detects one surprising area of agreement among his fellow animal-lovers: “Among the authors of this volume there is a remarkable level of agreement. For example, Southgate, Sollereder and I all affirm that individual members of other-than-human species will have a place in the life of the world to come. We agree that (at least) all individual creatures who are ‘individual centers of experience’ will be included in this new life, not merely representatives of their species. We also agree that it must offer the ultimate fulfilment of those creatures’ lives, including those of ‘evolution’s victims’ whose flourishing has been denied or constrained by the contingencies of life on earth.”
When younger. I did love my springer spaniels, but I am not sure that I share this confidence. I also consider it more prudent to follow Job 38-41, challenging theodicy sceptics to demonstrate how creation might plausibly have been otherwise. given the impossibly complex variables involved, rather than dogmatically deploying the only-way argument.
As you can see, this fascinating collection has got me arguing, too. It has done its job well.
Canon Robin Gill is Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology at the University of Kent.
God, Struggle, and Suffering in the Evolution of Life
Christopher Southgate, Paul S. Fiddes, Michael Lloyd, Neil Messer, Bethany Sollereder, and Mark R. Wynn
T&T Clark £16.99
(978-0-5677-1648-4)
Church Times Bookshop £15.29
