Evil happens: who's at fault?

The subject of "Science and Religion" has become something of a cottage industry in the academy. Ian Barbour pioneered the conversation, publishing several works since the 1960s that explore the meanings of various theological notions--creation, redemption, and salvation--in light of the findings of science. Barbour, John Polkinghorne, Philip Hefner, John Haught, and others have tried to synthesize science and religion in an effort to get at the truth about the world and its meaning. They propose various models of how the two should interact, all of which reassure those of us who find the rhetoric of "warfare" between science and religion both historically shallow and theologically stunted.

Despite my confidence that religion and science can serve as allies in the pursuit of truth, complications persist. In the weeks since the tsunami devastated southern Asia, I've been invited several times to speak on the challenges to religious faith posed by natural disasters. In his January 28 column ("Is God Responsible?"), John Garvey poignantly discusses the issues of theodicy that arise when, in response to massive suffering, our very understanding of God--all-loving, all-good, all-powerful--is called into question. Garvey's essay is a powerful Orthodox reading of the essential unknowability of God. At the same time, he generalizes that "all religious perception" is united by the sense that "things are not the way we know they should be."

That much is clear. Still, I wonder whether recent emphases in the science-religion discussion can be reconciled with other elements in traditional theological accounts of natural evil. For Garvey, sin is linked to the presence of both moral and natural evils. The facts of moral evil are clear enough. People do bad things all the time. Many theologians, both popular and professional, interpret God's seeming inability to intervene in events like the Holocaust with what has been called the free-will defense. The mystery of human freedom, they argue, lies at the heart of God's creation; for freedom to be real, the possibilities for either good or evil must exist. To be sure, such an observation seems to float above the fray, whatever its logical force. It also fails to address the inscrutability of a God who appears to be sometimes active, sometimes not: the divine instigator of the Exodus during the time of Moses, but the sorrowful spectator during Hitler's reign of terror.

Yet in a world after Darwin, natural evils--earthquakes, tsunamis, disease--cannot be easily linked to sin in the traditional way. In patristic writings, nature's disorder results from the Fall. The story of Adam and Eve becomes an "explanation" for humanity's rebellious nature, which, before their sin, had been harmonious. Such an account is no longer plausible. Nature was lacking in harmony long before Adam and Eve even could be part of the story--indeed, fossil evidence of carnivores precedes the arrival of humans by hundreds of millions of years. Thus, any explanation of natural disorder that rests on human choice seems an egregious case of anthropocentrism, even hubris. If, alternatively, one interprets natural evil as the effect of Satan's rebellion against God, this merely relocates the question to a different point: Why would a beneficent God allow a powerful and wily Satan a place in the garden? Of course, one can read the story in strictly mythic terms, but that modern strategy, for all its persuasive power, does not answer questions of theodicy any better than a literalist reading. However one reads Genesis, the theological assumptions of a pre-Copernican world view fare poorly in a cosmos now understood in evolutionary terms.

So what might be a plausible response to the logic of natural selection, where order proceeds from chaos, and where chance seems constitutive of nature rather than the byproduct of human choice? How might such processes be reconciled with the workings of a beneficent and powerful God?

As Garvey observes, drawing on the book of Job, suffering and evil will always defy explanation. But some theologians have recently placed the mystery in a new framework, by setting natural evil within an expressly evolutionary context. John Polkinghorne, for example, has developed what he calls a "free process" defense that parallels, in relation to natural evil, the "free will" defense used to interpret moral evil. For Polkinghorne, "the created order looks like a package deal." The very processes that "enable cells to mutate, making evolution possible," are the very ones that "enable cells to become cancerous and generate tumors." In other words, the same tectonic pressures that led to the rupture of the ocean floor bringing on the tsunami also caused the formation of the original continents and the emergence of terrestrial life--including human beings.

Of course, the "free process" defense has its own drawbacks. It, too, speaks more to the head than to the heart: I don't pretend that it will bring solace in the midst of suffering. However one seeks to reframe the discussion, suffering remains a dark and abiding mystery. Whatever answers we find, however tentative, reside in a God who sustains us in our compassion for one another, and suffers with us all the while.