Thoughts on Adam and Eve

I just read and very much enjoyed Jack Collins’ recent book on Adam and Eve.  One of the things the book did for me is help me reflect more upon attempts to uphold the historicity of Adam and Eve and some form of human evolution.  I used to think about this issue basically in terms of two options: (1) Adam and Eve are de novo creations of God, without any prior ancestry; and (2) human being evolved from primates.  The first of these options is broken down into the young-earth and old-earth subdivision camps, and the second is quite diverse, embracing everyone from Richard Dawkins to Francis Collins.  So, adding in these two subdivisions, you’ve got basically four options: (1) young-earth creationism; (2) old-earth creationism; (3) theistic evolution; (4) non-theistic evolution.

I was and am in the second of these categories, the old-earth creationist camp.  However, over the past several months I’ve realized that boundaries between (2) and (3) are not necessarily non-porous.  What brought this on my radar was reading several months ago Tim Keller’s Creation, Evolution, and Christian Laypeople, which argues that belief in a literal Adam and Even and a historical fall is not necessarily at odds with some versions of human evolution. Though it is not his own preferred view, Collins also leaves room for this possibility: “even if someone is persuaded that humans had ‘ancestors,’ and that the human population has always been more than two, he does not necessarily have to ditch all traditional views of Adam and Eve” (121, italics his).  The great challenges to opting for a Adam and Eve + human evolution view, it seems to me, concern how original sin, human death, and the Imago Dei entered the world.  What would such a scenario look like?

Collins himself sees a high degree of human solidarity as necessary to any Adam and Eve + human evolution view:

“If someone should decide that there were, in fact, more human beings than just Adam and Eve at the beginning of mankind, then, in order to maintain good sense, he should envision these humans as a single tribe. Adam would then be the chieftain of this tribe (preferably produced before the others), and Eve would be his wife. This tribe ‘fell’ under the leadership of Adam and Eve. This follows from the notion of solidarity in a representative. Some may call this a form of ‘polygenesis,’ but this is quite distinct from the more conventional, and unacceptable, kind” (121).

Collins then charts various views in which God miraculously created Adam and Eve somewhere alongside the history of other hominids. In some cases Adam and Eve were the first members of the genus Homo, which may seem initially attractive because such a hypothesis is able to account for Adam and Eve’s parentage of all the human race.  Its great weakness (which Collins sees as fatal, 122) is that the earliest Homo appeared about 2 million years ago, which is too far in the past to be plausible.  Another possibility is that Adam and Eve were de novo creations alongside other hominids in the more recent past, and the descendants of these two individuals formed a small community that eventually eclipsed all other hominids.  So far as I can tell, this is the view, for example, of Fazale Rana of Reasons to Believe (a ministry at my church connected to the apologist Hugh Ross), who dates the creation of Adam and Eve to around 50,000-70,000 B.C. Gavin Basil McGrath has a similar view and dates them around 45,000 B.C., give or take 20,000 years.

At times intermingled with such views is the idea that God created Adam and Eve from already existing hominids by sort of refurbishing them and implanting the divine image and a rational soul in them.  John Stott was one of the first to suggest this view in his Romans commentary.  He dated Adam and Eve much more recently, somewhere around 10,000 B.C., but this is a good while after the dispersion of modern humans to Australia and the Americas, which makes it unlikely. Another interesting alternative is the (very tentative) view of Derek Kidner in his Genesis commentary.  Kidner draws attention to Cain’s fear of others in Genesis 4:14 and his finding a wife in 4:17 as suggestive that there were other humans even at the early stages of human history.  He suggests that perhaps God created Adam by refurbishing an already existing hominid, and then miraculously created Eve from Adam, thus establishing these two as God’s vice-regents over creation.  Then God conferred his image from Adam and Eve laterally, to their already existing contemporaries.  Thus when Adam and Eve sinned, their contemporaries were likewise disinherited, as his federal headship extended outwards to them as well as downwards to his descendants.

Denis Alexander’s view advocated recently in this book that Adam and Eve were two neolithic farmers to whom God chose to reveal himself in a special way relatively late in the process of human evolution, around 10,000 B.C.  This view labors under the difficulty of how the image of God and original sin were transmitted to the rest of the human race. C.S. Lewis’ tentative proposal in chapter 5 of his The Problem of Pain is similar to several of these, but he does not consider whether Adam and Eve were historical figures or simply represent early humanity to be important to the issue.  All of these views, it seems to me, must explain the death of the our alleged sub-human ancestors – but then, this is a larger problem in old-earth creationism.

For me, the DNA and fossil evidence in favor of human common ancestry with primates is not conclusive (as I talked about here), so at this point in my thinking I am not compelled to perceive of any of these scenarios as necessary. I nevertheless find it helpful to simply recognize that its possible (with some scenarios perhaps working much better than others) to believe in a historical Adam and Eve, and simultaneously believe in some kind of human continuity with primates. This, it seems to me, puts the entire conversation in a more helpful context. The most basic divide is not between creation and evolution, but rather between teleology and a-teleology. Evolution can either be an all-encompassing philosophy or a limited biological process. The latter is one mechanism of creation, to God be the glory for it, whether it explains little or much. The former is an anti-Christian worldview.  It is between these two worldviews, it seems to me, that the ultimate battle lies.

My final thought after reflecting on these issues over the last few weeks is, what a gift the story of Genesis 1-3 is.  It gives us the true account of our origins that science never could, even if the science about human origins were fully advanced, because it speaks at a deeper level.  God gave us a picture in these chapters that answers the deepest questions in our hearts, that explains the kind of world we live, that provides hope and meaning and context to our existence.  I don’t need to know how literally to take it – I don’t need to know exactly how it all happened. Taking the Genesis on its own terms, according to its own purposes, delighting to submit to it as the arch-explanation, itself ruling over and interpreting all other (valid) points of data, I am liberated from uncertainty and I discover, again and again, the true meaning of my existence in this world.  I’ve quoted before Kidner’s statement in his Genesis commentary:

“The accounts of the world [of science and Scripture] are as distinct (and each as legitimate) as an artist’s portrait and an anatomist’s diagram, of which no composite picture will be satisfactory, for their common ground is only in the total reality to which they both attend…. [Scripture's] bold selectiveness, like that of a great painting, is its power” (31).

To put what I am trying to say in these categories: I don’t need to figure out the anatomist diagram in all its details in order to fully bow before the artist’s portrait.  Whatever that anatomist diagram may or may not say, the artist’s portrait needs no further confirmation than the ring of my own heart and conscience, and already stands sufficient to teach me how to live in the world. Its bold selectiveness is its great power.

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Humans and Chimps: Some Tentative Thoughts

I’ve been reading through Intelligent Design 101: Leading Experts Explain the Key Issues (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2008), which has an appendix dealing with theistic evolutionist Francis Collins’ arguments for common ancestry between humans and chimps in his The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006).  It raised several questions/thoughts:

1) You often hear people say that humans and chimps have 96-98% similar genetic structure, and it can initially seem like a strong argument for common ancestry.  But all living things share a great deal of genetic similarity, and the greater the morphological similarity between two living things, the more genetic similarity we find.  We have about 40% genetic similarity with lettuce, 60% with fruit flies, 80% with cows, 90% with cats.  I’m not a scientist, but in light of these facts, and in light of the great morphological similarity between humans and chimps, isn’t a high degree of genetic similarity to be expected?

2) Supposing for the sake of argument that the genetic similarity between humans and chimps is beyond what we would naturally expect from morphological similarity, does this fact really prove common ancestry?  It seems to me that common design can explain the data just as cogently as common descent.  All designers use similar building blocks in the construction of different materials.  No builder of a house would make every brick differently.  No designer of car models would start from scratch each time.  To do so would be almost infinitely inefficient.  Genetic similarities between humans and chimps – as well as other homologous traits – are only proof of common ancestry if we assume that an ultimate Designer operates differently from all human designers.

Further, Jonathan Wells has pointed out that if genetic similarities and other homologous traits did point us towards common ancestry, it would mess with the Darwinian tree.  For example, there is striking similarity between the eye of a mouse and the eye of an octopus – two animals never seen near each other on a tree of life model.

3) Evolutionists – from Dawkins to Collins – make much of the similarity between human chromosome 2 and chimpanzee chromosomes 2a and 2b.  It is claimed that this can only be explained by a chromosomal fusion in our past, and that this chromosomal fusion is proof of a link from humans back to chimps.  Not being a scientist, I find it difficult to assess the claim that human chromosome 2 must have been formed by a fusion of two prior chromosomes – but supposing there was such a fusion, why should we preclude the possibility that this fusion happened within human history?  Luskin and Gage make this point, “the fusion evidence does not tell us whether human chromosomal fusion took place in a line that leads back to a common ancestor with chimps or in an independent line that was designed separately” (p. 223 of ID 101).

4) Evolutionists  also argue from “junk DNA,” i.e., DNA that has no purpose for a living creature, and has supposedly been discarded at some point in the evolutionary process.  Time and time again, however, scientists have found that DNA which has been thought to have been “junk” plays a crucial purpose in the life of the organism.  In light of this history, we should be wary of labeling something “junk” just because it has no known purpose.  Even evolutionists such Richard Sternberg and James Shapiro have written, “one day, we will think of what used to be called ‘junk DNA’ as a critical component of truly ‘expert’ cell control regimes” (quoted on 226 of ID 101).

Moreover, for this objection to persuasive, one would have to preclude the possibility that junk DNA was originally designed with purpose but then became “junk” in the recent past, within human ancestry.  Again, even when evolution is a possible explanation for the data, it need not be macro-evolution.

5) For all my objections to naturalistic neo-Darwinism, I’m open to creative possibilities in terms of the precise timing and mechanism(s) of how God created humanity, and what kinds of continuity there may be between Adam and an ape.  I’m not a scientist, and at the end of the day I have to admit I don’t know how it happened, and I’m even not always totally sure in my interpretation of Genesis 1-2 and the other relevant Scriptural data (though I affirm a historical Adam and Eve as my best effort).  But contemporary evolutionary theory is defined as an unguided, blind process by the current scientific establishment.  For example, the National Association of Biology Teachers defined evolution in 1996 as a “unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process.”  How can any thoughtful theist make peace with that?  No matter where we fall on the “how much can evolution explain?” spectrum, belief in the Christian God places us diametrically at odds with an unguided, blind account of biological origins – which is the reigning paradigm among the current scientific establishment.

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Ban Darwin?

Many people in our society believe that all books which affirm intelligent design should be disallowed from biology classrooms in public schools. Should we therefore ban Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species? Whatever later changes his thought underwent, in this book Darwin affirms intelligent design several times. For example, the last sentence of the book reads thus:

“There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved” (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species [Signet Classics, 2003], 507, italics mine).

There is a reason why Darwin titled his book The Origin of Species and not The Origin of Life. He thought natural selection explained the diversification of life on earth, but not how it got there in the first place. For its origins, Darwin points to “the Creator” and his “originally breathing” life onto the planet. Well, if that’s not intelligent design, what is? So, according to the logic of some secular voices in our society, shouldn’t we ban The Origin of Species from our public schools? If we allow it to be read, won’t we be pushing creationism onto our students?

My point is that if even Darwin has become too “religious” for the classroom, then maybe, just maybe, we should reconsider our criteria.

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Why the Framework View of Genesis 1?

Here is a brief synopsis of why I think the Framework interpretation of Genesis 1 is superior to other varieties of old-earth creationism which read the days as temporally sequential:

1) Seeing the days as sequential leads to numerous textual difficulties. First, you have the age-old problem of the appearance of light in day 1 prior to the creation of the luminaries in day four, which is what led Augustine to posit his famous doctrine of instantaneous creation. In my opinion, attempts to relieve this difficulty by finding significance in the usage of haya rather than bara in 1:14 pay too much attention to the lexical evidence, and too little to the contextual, where meaning is always solidified and made definite. Throughout Genesis 1, “let there be …” in divine speech refers to God’s creative activity, not some sort of refashioning process. If the light came from God himself, as others respond, did God turn this light off “at night?” Did it also contain nutrients causing plants to grow through photosynthesis? Did God also supernaturally suspend gravitational forces so that the universe would not implode without stars, and then suddenly switch these forces back on during day 4? And why are days 1-3 called “days” at all, since it is the revolution of the earth around the (not yet created) sun which marks our 24 hour days in the first place?

In addition, if the days are sequential, how is it that after the seventh day the text can say that “no small plant in the land had yet sprung up” (2:5)? Some people view dischronologization as a terrible problem, but everyone must grant some dischronologization from chapter 1 to chapter 2. And finally, if the sun was not created until day four, was the earth simply suspended without orbit in outer space prior to day four, and then suddenly catapulted into orbit at the creation of the sun? The issue in all these things is not whether God could have supernaturally smoothed over all these points of awkwardness. Of course He could have. The issue is whether the text invites us to read it as though He did. Its not a question of supernaturalism or divine omnipotence but asking, “what did the author intend his original audience to understand from this text?

2) A sequential reading of the days, even when they represent long ages of time, does not square with modern geological and fossil evidence. For example, most scientists believe that reptiles preceded birds, and fish preceded seed-bearing plants. The days in Genesis 1 have birds (day 5) before reptiles (day 6) and plants (day 3) before fish (day 5). These kinds of problems could be multiplied.

3) People who push sequentiality often (though, to be fair, people from all sides do this) seem to me to be coming to the text with certain questions already in mind rather than approaching the text on its own terms. Our starting questions should not be, “what does Genesis 1 say about the age of the universe?” but rather, “what did the author intend to communicate in this text to his original audience (first or second generation Israelites about to enter the promised land)?” “What is the text’s genre, and how does that shape interpretation?” “What is the text’s theological purpose?” “How does it fit into its larger literary context, as part of Genesis, and then the Pentateuch, and then all of Scripture?” And so on.

Though very far from being irrelevant to questions of science, I think Genesis 1:1-2:3 is far more concerned with questions about post-Exodus, pre-Canaan Israel and her covenantal relationship with the Lord. The word “covenant” must be constantly kept only a short distance away to read Genesis 1 well. The main point is: “you know the One who just led you out of Egypt and gave you His law? He is no tribal deity! He is the Creator God of the whole world.” When the text is read on its own terms, within its own matrix of thought and in light of its own purposes, the sequential reading (especiallly the 24-hour day version) becomes much less obviously the “plain reading” of the text, and, in my opinion, a much more difficult, wooden way to read the text.

For these reasons and a few others, I see the “days” as ordered not sequentially, but topically, as part of a literary device (i.e., framework) which is devised to compare God’s creative work to a human work week. This reading does not mean that Genesis 1 is not “true” or “historical” or even “literal” (depending on how define that term), any more than believing in heliocentrism means you deny the truthfulness/historicity of Psalm 104:5: “He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved.” Rather, this reading seeks to honor the text by reading it as it was meant to be read. Whether it is right or wrong, it should not be dismissed as unhistorical or heretical.

Good resources for further reading on the framework view:

Henri Blocher, In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis (IVP, 1984).
Lee Irons with Meredith Kline, “The Framework View,” in The Genesis Debate, ed. by David G. Hagopian (Crux Press, 2001).

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Lewis on the Satanic Fall and Corruption of Nature (again)

In my previous series of posts arguing that the Satanic fall may be the explanation for the fallenness of nature, I quoted C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain, chapter 9, “On Animal Pain.” While listening to his Miracles the other day I discovered that he put forward the same view in chapter 14 of this book, “The Grand Miracle.” He writes: “according to the Christians (Nature’s depravity) is all due to sin: the sin both of men and of powerful, non-human beings, super-natural but created…. Beings in a different, and higher ‘Nature’ which is partially interlocked with ours have, like men, fallen and have tampered with things inside our frontier.”

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Biblical Inerrancy and Young Earth Creationism

Something I have noticed lately is that many people in our culture, especially non-Christian or nominally Christian people, seem to have gotten the idea that biblical inerrancy and young earth creationism are the same thing. People often say, “do you believe the bible is literally true, [i.e.] that the universe was created in six 24 hour periods?” In other words, “literally true” and “six 24 hour periods” get lumped in together and define each other.

In addition to being, in my opinion, biblically unwarranted, this association is also very historically strange. From Tim Keller’s The Reason for God, p. 262:

“Despite widespread impression to the contrary, both inside and outside the church, modern Creation Science was not the traditional response of conservative and evangelical Protestants in the nineteenth century when Darwin’s theory first became known. There was widespread acceptance of the fact that Genesis 1 may be been speaking of long ages rather than literal days. R. A. Torrey, the fundamentalist editor of The Fundamentals (published from 1910-1915, which gave definition to the term ‘fundamentalist’), said that it was possible ‘to believe thoroughly in the infallibility of the Bible and still be an evolutionist of a certain type….’ The man who defined the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, B.B. Warfield of Princeton (d. 1921) believed that God may have used something like evolution to bring about life-forms.”

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Intelligent Design

I have been growing more and more convicted lately about the need in our society for people to speak out against naturalistic neo-Darwinism and not be bullied into silence by the contempt with which intelligent design is often regarded. I am going to frame my thoughts here in a series of questions:

1) Should intelligent design (hereafter ID) be taught in schools?

Whether ID is right or wrong, students should be given all the facts, hear all the arguments, be free to ask any question, and be free to follow the evidence wherever it leads. This is the essence of free academic inquiry.

2) But is there really a debate?

A large chunk of the general population and many in the scientific community with strong academic credentials (Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, to name a few) question whether neo-Darwinism can explain all the facts. There is only no debate about this if you dismiss the other side as non-existent. It may be a lop-sided debate, but to claim that there is NO debate is simply factually incorrect.

3) But isn’t ID just pseudo-science that only ignorant people take seriously?

The biggest problem in this debate is that anti-ID voices in the scientific community and more generally in culture rely more upon bullying, name calling, caricaturing, labeling, dismissing, and intimidating than they do on arguing. Appeals to authority are frequent and thundering; appeals to evidence are rare. If ID is really so stupid, shouldn’t it be easy to prove that? Why, then, the need for ideological bullying?

4) But isn’t ID not really science?

This whole controversy gets to the very heart and definition of science. ID is only not science if you define science in such a way that it can only study that which has naturalistic causes. But this is a rather restrictive definition of science which is not based on any empirical observations of the world, but on a philosophical presupposition, namely naturalism. This is not the definition of science that Newton or Kepler or Einstein worked under, nor has it been shown why intelligent causes must be out of bounds in order for something to be studied scientifically.

5) But why do so many scientists espouse evolution?

In our cultural and intellectual setting philosophical naturalism has a very strong grip on the sciences. Fighting against this pressure is very difficult, as Ben Stein’s movie shows. In any case, the issue should be settled not by an appeal to numbers, but to evidence.

6) What evidence is there for ID?

The irreducible complexity of the first cell and sudden explosions in the fossil record (e.g., the cambrian explosion) would be two examples of events or data that are best explained by an intelligent cause. Darwin himself validated both of these points. He thought the cell was relatively simple: we know today that its unimaginably vast, intricate, and complex, needing all of its various parts to be functioning to have any survival value at all. He also admitted the lack of transitional life forms in the fossil record stood against his theory. He thought later discoveries would vindicate him; they have not.

7) Why is it important for Christians and others who question neo-Darwinism to speak out on this issue?

Its important because truth is important, its important because academic freedom is important, and its important because the worldview that normally corresponds to neo-Darwinism is a brutal one which dehumanizes people.

8) But what if ID is wrong?

If it is wrong, it should be proven so by science, not bullied into silence by the powers that be. People should be allowed to challenge the consensus – just like Darwin did.

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Satan and the Problem of Animal Suffering (4)

In his book The Problem of Pain, chapter 9, “On Animal Pain”, C.S. tackled this issue and suggested that the Satanic fall may be the best explanation for animal suffering. He wrote that it is “a reasonable supposition, that some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe, or the solar system, or, at least, the planet Earth, before ever man came on the scene…. If there is such a power, as I myself believe, it may well have corrupted the animal creation before man appeared.”

More recently, Gregory Boyd has argued for this view in his book Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy. His approach is much different from Lewis’ in so far as it is informed by his open theism, but it still shares the same basic contours. He summarizes this view in this way:

“Of their own free will, Satan and other spiritual beings rebelled against God in the primordial past and now abuse their God-given authority over aspects of the creation. The one who ‘holds the power of death – that is, the devil’ (Heb. 2:14) exercises a pervasive structural, diabolical influence to the point that the entire creation is in ‘bondage to decay’ (Rom. 8:21). If this scenario is correct, then the pain-ridden, bloodthirsty, sinister hostile character of nature makes perfect sense. If not, then despite the valid contributions of a number of thinkers on ‘natural’ evil, the demonic character of nature must remain largely inexplicable” (302).

To the list of proponents of this view can be added the popular philosopher Alvin Plantinga. In his The Nature of Necessity, he writes:

“But another and more traditional line of thought is pursued by St. Augustine, who attributes much of the evil we find to Satan, or to Satan and his cohorts. Satan, so the traditional doctrine goes, is a mighty non-human spirit who, along with many other angels, was created long before God created man. Unlike most of his colleagues, Satan rebelled against God and since has been wreaking whatever havoc he can. The result is natural evil. So the natural evil we find is due to free actions of non-human spirits” (192).

I have not been able to locate what Plantinga is referring to in Augustine, so please let me know if you find it. I have, however, discovered that J.R.R. Tolkien appears to have also held this view about Satan and animal suffering – he and Lewis appear to have discussed it together when Lewis read his The Problem of Pain aloud to the Inklings (see pp. 126-132 of Richard Purtill’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality, and Religion). It should be noted, too, that sometimes this view is combined with the reconstructionist or gap theory interpretation of Genesis 1:2, “the earth became formless and void,” although this is not necessary to it (none of the above thinkers, for example, go that route).

Evaluation of this view

As I have evaluated this theory, it has seemed to me that although it fits with a lot of the data and explains much of what we do not know, at the end of the day it falls outside the range of what we can know. Here are some of the considerations that converge, however, to make this theory – for me, at least – a compelling possibility:

(1) Satan is portrayed in Scripture now as the “ruler of this world” (John 12:31, 14:30, 16:11) and the “god of this world” (II Corinthians 4:4). In Ephesians 2:2, “following the course of this world” is parallel to following Satan. And in Matthew 4:8-9, Satan is able to tempt Jesus with the offer of “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.” All of this entails a kind ownership and dominion by Satan over this world (though we would also say that God is only true and ultimate King of the world, and that Satan’s ownership has been decisively overturned by the work of Christ).

(2) Satan is portrayed in Scripture as active throughout the entire world and seeking to influence it for ill (Job 2:2, I Peter 5:8), and his presence in the world cannot be restricted to after the human fall, since he is present in the garden with Adam and Even in Genesis 3. All this arouses the question: if Satan and demons were present on earth before humans, what kind of effect did they have on it? What were they doing for all those hundreds of millions of years (or however long was the gap between their fall and the creation of Adam)?

(3) Throughout Scripture, and especially the gospels, demons exert a kind of disabling, disorganizing, and/or disturbing influence on material reality (Luke 13:11, 16, Matthew 9:32-33, 12:22-23, 17:14-20, I Samuel 16:14-15). Its rare to find instances of demon possession in the gospels, for example, without an accompanying physical illness, such that the exorcism by Jesus is part and parcel with the healing. If demons cause sickness and corruption after the human fall, why would it be impossible that they also did so before the human fall?

(4) Jesus refers to the Satanic fall as a real and apparently temporal event in Luke 10:18 (“I saw Satan fall like lightening from heaven.” Cf. II Peter 2:4, Jude 6). Ezekiel 28:11-19, a passage often interpreted as an indirect reference to Satan’s fall, refers to a mighty cherub being corrupted by pride and thrown down to earth.

(5) Christians have believed for centuries that the human fall caused catastrophic effects upon material creation: it seems reasonable, therefore, that the angelic fall may also have had a kind of spoiling or corrupting effect upon God’s good creation. Dom Trethowan writes, “it seems to be a general law that the lower orders should be governed by the higher ones, that God’s creatures should be arranged in a hierarchy, with a certain dependence of those below on those above” (quoted in Michael Murray, Red in Tooth and Claw, 98). The principle that sin corrupts is not new: all that is new here is the application of this principle to the fall of angels and their continued presence in the world.

Secular critics of this theory argue that it is fantastical because it attributes animal suffering to unseen, supernatural, “otherworldly” agents. While this may reduce the value of this argument for apologetics, but it should weaken its force for the orthodox Christian, for the existence and fall of Satan is a historic Christian doctrine well attested in Scripture. As for the unpopularity of this belief today, C.S. Lewis helpfully responds: “the doctrine of Satan’s existence and fall is not among the things we know to be untrue: it contradicts not the facts discovered by scientists but the mere, vague ‘climate of opinion’ that we happen to be living in. Now I take a very low view of ‘climates of opinion.’ In his own subject every man knows that all discoveries are made and all errors corrected by those who ignore the ‘climate of opinion.’”

If this view is correct, it has some profound implications for how we view the world and our relation to it. First, it means that the history of our planet is far vaster than we often consider: that our existence as human beings is one of later chapters in the much larger story of the battle between good and evil on our planet. Secondly, it informs our understanding of the role of human beings in the world. As C.S. Lewis suggests, “it is worth considering whether man at his first coming into the world, had not already a redemptive function to perform. It may have been one of man’s functions to restore peace to the animals’ world, and had he not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable.”

At the end of the day, however, I have to admit that all the points above are indirect, and that we are left with intriguing possibilities, not certain conclusions.

I will conclude this series of posts with a quote from James Bately that well summarizes the spirit of the conclusion I have reached: “a wise man will not be so oppressed by the unsolved riddles of nature…. Man is not in a position to call into question the justice of God. In order to judge of the merits of a case it is necessary to know the whole truth about it. It is becoming in man to wait humbly and seek to learn more of the way of his Creator” (quoted in Perspectives on an Evolving Creation, 468).

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Satan and the Problem of Animal Suffering (3)

As I type this post I have Planet Earth on in the background, which by the way is awesome and you should not sleep till you have watched every episode twice (okay thats an exaggeration – but they’re good). Having it on renews my interest in this topic and reminds me of its importance. The reason animal suffering is important is that it arouses serious apologetics concerns about the adequacy of the Christian view of origins. Also, more basically, it affects how we view God and the world he created.

So, continuing in my thoughts on this issue, I will address here the most common response that I have heard to the problem of animal suffering, namely, the view that animal suffering is not a moral evil which requires explanation: it is simply the way God made the world. Before I get into that, however, I need to say a word about whether animals are capable of suffering.

Do animals suffer?

There are some who argue that animals do not suffer, and that any association between the word “animal” and the word “suffering” is an anthropomorphic projection onto animals from human experience. Proponents of this view usually distinguish between sentience and consciousness, arguing that while more developed animals feel the sensation of pain, they lack the mental consciousness with which to organize and interpret this sensation. Therefore, while (some) animals may feel pain, they do not, strictly speaking, suffer. Some would even suggest that if we are going to talk about animal suffering, we might as well go the whole route and talk about plant suffering.

While it is helpful to be cautioned against the danger of anthropomorphism, and while this view may mitigate the problem of animal suffering in the case of lower, simpler animals, at the end of the day it is very difficult (for me, anyway) to accept the thesis that larger, more complex animals do not suffer. The similarities between the way human and animal brains receive information from the nervous system, the sophisticated behavior of highly intelligent animals such as dolphins and chimps, the ways animals respond to pain (for example, an abused dog growing distrustful of humans), and finally, sheer intuition all seem to militate against this view. Also, if the ability to suffer depends upon a centralizing consciousness and awareness of pain, then its difficult to avoid being forced into the problematic conclusion that infants and some severely retarded humans cannot suffer. However we respond to this huge issue, and whatever tensions we may be forced to embrace, I don’t think response is our best bet.

Moving forward…

It is more common to admit that complex animals do suffer, but to argue that it is not a fact of moral significance. Appeal is often made in conjunction with this argument to God’s creation of, and provision for, predatory animals in Job 38-41, Psalm 104, and Psalm 145. If God provides food for the lions (Psalm 104:21), and delights in the fierceness of the leviathan (Job 41:1-10), should we fault him for creating these creatures? As Collins puts it, “if we think that animal death would be a blot on the goodness of creation, we are out of step with Psalm 104″ (C. John Collins, Science and Faith: Friends or Foes? [Wheaton: Crossway, 2003], 154).

Sometimes to this view is added the claim that animal suffering is harmonized by the greater beauty of nature. Just as in every beautiful painting there are both bright colors and dark shades, and just as in every beautiful symphony there are both moments of tension and discord as well as moments of harmony and release, so it is in God’s creation, God’s painting, God’s symphony. The reason that animal suffering causes us problems is that we are a part of the natural world, and thus we are unable to see the whole picture, seeing instead only fragments and pieces. Augustine’s comments to this end in The City of God are worthy of extensive quotation:

But it is ridiculous to condemn the faults of beasts and of trees, and other such mortal and mutable things as are void of intelligence, sensation, or life, even though these faults should destroy their corruptible nature; for these creatures received, at their Creator’s will, an existence fitting them, by passing away and giving place to others, to secure that lowest form of beauty, the beauty of seasons, which in its own place is a requisite part of the world…. This is the appointed order of things transitory. Of this order the beauty does not strike us, because by our mortal frailty we are so involved in a part of it, that we cannot perceive the whole, in which these fragments that offend us are harmonized with the most accurate fitness and beauty. And therefore, where we are not so well able to perceive the wisdom of the Creator, we are very properly enjoined to believe it, lest in the vanity of human rashness we presume to find any fault with the work of so great an Artificer…

For me personally, I find this approach possible, but unsatisfying. As I look at the animal world, I cannot shake the the feeling that something is wrong here. There is much beauty in nature, but the amount of waste, futility, inefficiency, brutality, and pain seems unnecessary and incommensurate. (It does not help that we are dealing with hundreds of millions of years of it, either.) However, I do not have enough information to evaluate this view with certainty, so I will keep thinking it over. Here are my questions and concerns that will inform my thought process as I continue to mull it over:

1) Does God’s provision for carnivorous animals in Job 41 and Psalm 104 entail that animal predation is his creational ideal, or is it possible that God provides for carnivores despite their existence having been severely affected by sin (as he provides for all humans [Matthew 5:45] despite the devastating effects of sin on human life)?

2) What is the biblical portrait of God’s posture towards animals, and how does this affect the way we approach this issue? Does God’s compassion for the cattle of Ninevah (Jonah 4:11), his goodness and mercy toward all his creatures (Psalm 145:9), and his generous provision for all animals (Genesis 6-9, Psalm 104, Psalm 147:9, Matthew 6:26) square with the idea that he has designed animals to live according to the principle of the strong devouring the weak from the beginning?

3) Finally, what is the meaning of Romans 8:20, “the creation was subjected to futility,” and what is its relevance to this debate? Does this statement refer to the human fall and its effects upon nature, as traditionally interpreted? If so, and yet animal death and suffering predate the human fall, is it possible that although animal death already existed, its conditions and brutality were aggravated by the human fall?

In my next post we will talk about Satan and how the crafty old serpent might be relevant to this whole issue (hence the title of this series of posts).

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Satan and the Problem of Animal Suffering (2)

In this post I will address some preliminary methodological issues before getting into the various theodicies (answers) to the problem of animal suffering:

1) I do not believe the Bible directly addresses this question, and there is therefore a need for caution, restraint, and humility in our thinking about it. When approaching an ancient text (say, Genesis 1) with a specific contemporary question in mind, it is easy to make the text say more than it actually says, or to apply the text to concerns it was intended to address, or to impose later categories of thought onto the text that would be foreign to the original writer and original readers. The Genesis 1 creation narrative is not a kind of a-historical, technical, scientific account, written to satisfy modern speculative curiosities: rather, the creation narrative was written, part and parcel with the narrative that follows it, to the first and second generation Israelites about to enter the promised land in order to explain to them their identity as the covenant people of the God of the whole world. We must read the biblical creation narrative (1) accordance with its genre(s), (2) in light of its historical context, (3) in cooperation with its literary intent, and (4) in conjunction with the rest of the Pentateuch, to which it is annexed, and without with it cannot be understood. By subjecting our understanding of the creation account to what this text originally meant for its first hearers, we will likely reach conclusions from it that are much more chaste – however, they will also be sounder and more reliable.

2) In the opposite direction, it would be a mistake to think that the Genesis account has nothing to say to modern curiosities, or to set up a chasm between “science” and “faith,” or to be afraid to ask any questions about creation which the Bible does not directly address. If the Genesis account gives us trustworthy data from God Himself, as I believe, then to fail to seek to understand it in relation to the modern world of science (and the questions which arise from it) would be a colossal failure of imagination. Thoughtfulness, not presumption, is the goal. There are important apologetics issues at stake.

Henri Blocher has written, “the Bible … is not a handbook for science. Agreed. But that does mean it will have nothing to say which touches the realm of the scientist” (In The Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis [Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 1984], 24). Since both science and theology seek truth, and truth is one, there will inevitably be areas of overlap between the two. Granted, when we are asking questions not directly addressed by the Bible, our reasoning will be more indirect and our deductions more tentative. But it is not wrong to speculate – provided that we remember we are only speculating!

3) Finally, there are a number of theodicies of natural evil which I will not address in this series, such as John Hick’s “soul-making” theodicy, responses associated with process theology, N.P. Williams’ “World-Soul” hypothesis, and several others. The reasons are (1) you can’t do everything in one series of posts, and (2) the philosophical and theological bases for many of these theodicies are so different from my own that it would be difficult to interact with them in a limited way, without addressing the root issues. Instead, I will confine myself to the two most common “theodicies of natural evil” that I have heard among evangelicals: (1) the denial that animal suffering is a moral evil; (2) the attempt to understand animal suffering as a result of the Satanic fall. I will take these two in my next two posts, respectively.

To conclude this post, I will restate the question I am addressing, for clarity, force, and momentum into the next posts. The question I am addressing in this series is: how do understand the reality of animal suffering in relation to the Genesis account’s repeated emphasis on the goodness of God’s creation? By animal suffering I mean not only the physical sensation of pain felt in individual animals with developed nervous systems when they are injured or killed in nature, but also the entire system of predation, futility, waste, and disorganization by which the natural order subsists. Everywhere we look we see a nature “red in tooth and claw” in which the strong devour the weak, suffering and death are the driving forces, and decay, disease, and disorganization are rampant. If we are willing to yield to the overwhelming fossil evidence that this system pre-dated human beings (and thus the human fall), then … what do we do with this?

 

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