For Charles Darwin, traditional invocations of the necessity of human free will to explain why God would allow widespread suffering were, at best, irrelevant to the suffering and death of non-human animals, which started long before the advent of human beings.
A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent first cause seems to me a strong one; whereas, as just remarked, the presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.[1]
Was Charles correct in assuming that widespread suffering is incompatible with a benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient first cause of the universe?
A modern effort to answer this question is Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering by Michael J. Murray, a philosopher at Franklin and Marshall College. Murray examined practically every known explanation for the evil allowed by a supposedly all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving God.
Murray’s is the traditional theistic starting assumption that God chose to create a species capable of exercising free will to reciprocate God’s love. For that purpose, Murray concluded, God created a universe in which the regular application of physical “laws” would drive a progressive process from chaos to order, specifically to pockets of ever-increasing order within the chaos, leading to formation of galaxies, stars, planets, and on earth to evolution of diverse species and eventually to the self-conscious Homo sapiens.
Note there are two major features of the universe that seem necessary to allow creation of a species capable of consciously entering a loving relationship with God. First, all within the universe must behave predictably, as though governed by physical “laws” with very few, if any, exceptions. Without this regularity, it would be impossible for organisms to complete their life cycles of survival and reproduction in an interdependent ecosystem.
Unfortunately for organisms living in a physically regular world, the laws of physics can hurt and kill them if they are unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gravity applies whether the squirrel judges the distance to the next branch correctly or not and whether the rabbit is in the way of the falling tree or not.
And the laws of thermodynamics require organisms to consume sources of energy and nutrients to maintain their body functions. A plant consumes sunshine and absorbs nutrients from soil. An animal can’t live on sunshine and soil, but it can consume plants that do. Some animals “discover” that they can get a lot more energy and nutrients by eating other animals rather than eating plants. So, we see the negative consequences of the laws of physics in the lives of God’s creatures—accidents, competition, predation, and more.
Biologists would agree with Murray that “pain” enables a creature to react to minor injury and thereby avoid more serious injury—necessary to survive and even thrive in a dangerously regular physical environment. But why should the “higher” animals be equipped to consciously feel pain? This question brings us to the second of Murray’s two necessary features of the universe: a progression from initial chaos toward increasing order.
Modern cosmology supports the chaos-to-order history of the universe, involving a long evolutionary process, first astronomical then, on only one planet we know of, biological. This process began in a state of chaos and progressed from simple to more complex forms. When it became biological on earth, the evolution must have started with simple organisms and progressed toward increasingly complex organisms before achieving the current diversity of life on earth, including the human species capable of higher-order consciousness of its own pain and suffering—the self-consciousness needed to enter into loving relationship with God, or not. Such a progression required intermediate species with simpler but similar-enough neurological equipment to both feel pain and be conscious enough of the feeling to suffer.
In God’s creation project, the good far outweighs the bad, and the bad is only there as collateral damage caused by necessary preconditions for creating the good. This scenario offers a plausible explanation for God’s allowing pain and suffering among non-human animals long before the human species came to be. The work done by Charles and subsequent evolutionary biologists and other scientists provides no grounds for rejecting this scenario. It is logically consistent with both the scientific evidence and with the starting assumption of God’s purpose.
Like all logical arguments, this one is persuasive only so long as the starting assumptions are accepted as valid. In the worldview of the Abrahamic religions, God exists and acts with purpose. A Christian, Jew, or Muslim need not give up his or her religious worldview because of evil stalking the world, whether it is perpetuated by humans or natural causes and whether it causes pain to innocent people or non-human animals. The existence of all that evil and suffering is not inconsistent with the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God they believe in.
For those who reject the Abrahamic worldview, Murray’s argument sinks under the weight of its starting assumption. But there is no way to objectively judge the validity or invalidity of any assumption regarding God. To accept or reject is fundamentally a faith statement.
The broader message is that the greater threat to the Abrahamic religious worldview is the skepticism of the increasingly secular world about the importance of the human species in the story of the universe and its creation. Without the special status of this one species, the rest of the Abrahamic worldview becomes difficult to understand—and even more difficult to defend.
[1] Darwin, Charles, “Recollections,” in Barlow, Autobiography, 75.