Evolutionary Ethics: The Dilemma of Animal Suffering and Divine Goodness - Finlay Thwaite

Humans incontrovertibly suffer a great deal over the course of their lives, throughout the world, and over a lengthy historical timespan. Humans, however, are not the only species to suffer the agonising experiences the world has to offer. Nonhuman animals and thereby deaths outnumber that of humans by trillions, and their lives are defined by the experience and avoidance of suffering.

When a human endures the breaking of a bone, the opening of their flesh, or the degradation of their organs, they evidentially feel pain – or at least claim and appear to. Does this experience similarly apply to nonhuman animals? Pain is the phenomenal experience of discomfort, irritation, agony, and other associated unpleasant sensations or negative states. Nonhuman animals have behavioural and physiological responses to nociception, but it is fundamentally or at least presently impossible to determine whether there is an associated phenomenal pain accompanying the activation of these nociceptors. It is possible that nonhuman animals lack consciousness. It is possible that all humans other than you lack consciousness, and merely appear to have phenomenological responses to external stimuli, falsely communicating their subjective experience despite the ‘lights being off’ inside. Obviously, nonhuman animals are unable to use language to communicate the nature of their subjective experience of pain to us, similar to a human baby, a mute human, or other humans unable to use language; we do not assume that this inability negates the possibility of their experience of pain. With advances in genetics, neuroscience, and other related fields, it is increasingly difficult to defend the idea that nonhuman animals do not experience the phenomena of pain and that most, if not all, are not at least primitively sentient. A precautionary principle should be applied to the question of if nonhuman animals can in fact suffer, given the current body of evidence and the naive interpretation of their seemingly phenomenal responses to pain.

Considering, then, that nonhuman animals likely experience pain, negative states that they attempt and desire to avoid, and sensations that are not in their interest (e.g. suffering), the abundance of such experiences poses a deep problem for the Christian conception of a loving God.

God seemingly desired the outcome of a particular species homo sapiens to be selfconscious beings that desire a conscious, reciprocal relationship with God. On these anthropocentric teleological views, all the creatures that have come before us and have suffered unimaginably over an intense timescale are merely evolutionary expedients for the divine end of human existence and redemption.

Nonhuman animals will sometimes suffer very little, spending their long and peaceful lives basking in the sun, forming fulfilling social bonds, free from the threat of predation and untouched by disease, eventually dying a quick, painless death. The potential life just described does not negate the fact or propensity of predation, disease, parasitism, starvation, natural disasters, and high rates of infant mortality that predominantly define nonhuman animal existence. The victims of predation suffer intense distress, fear, and pain during the ordeal. A zebra caught in the jaws of a crocodile will experience excruciating pain for several minutes as its flesh is torn whilst it drowns. Parasitic wasps lay their eggs inside caterpillars; the larvae consume the caterpillars’ internal organs, slowly eating them from the inside out while they remain alive. The slow, weakening sensation of emaciation, exhaustion, dehydration, stress, and organ failure experienced as an elephant struggles to roam vast distances during a drought in search of water is, presumably, an undesirable experience. There is no agent responsible for suffering in the case of disease, starvation, or natural disasters, but nevertheless, this suffering is real. It is not an understatement to claim that almost all the suffering on Earth is experienced by nonhuman animals in nature and that this applies throughout the evolutionary genealogy of every species. Suffering is no less bad just because it is temporally separated from us. Likewise, it is no less bad just because it is experientially separated from us phenomenologically or through taxonomical diversity.

Why this suffering exists is termed ‘the problem of evil’. The problem of evil can be divided into two main categories: logical and evidential. Its evidential form, contending that the existence of evil and suffering though perhaps not logically incompatible with God's existence constitutes strong evidence against the traditional Christian conception of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, good God. Given that nonhuman animals are traditionally not seen to have free will, are not considered moral agents, and are not assumed to go to heaven, the problem of evil when applied to nonhuman suffering raises many questions.

Assuming that the Christian God is part of the moral order, then the propensity, quantity, and quality of nonhuman animal suffering in nature are not what one would naively expect from an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient God. It is, however, what one would naively expect from a naturalistic universe without intentional occurrences. Naturalism being a more adequate explanation for this reality of suffering poses a problem for the Christian theist, as there seems to be an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering in nature. By this, I mean that it serves no obvious function, globally or locally, and cannot be easily interpreted to bring about some greater good. A baby deer being crushed under a fallen tree and slowly starving to death does not obviously seem to serve some purpose. A koala dying of agonising burn injuries after a forest fire follows similarly.

Many respond with the claim that evolution was the only, or at least the best way for God to realise certain values, one being the intrinsic value of creaturely selves: all sentient life. They posit that the existence and flourishing of these creaturely selves humans included is one of the main goals of creation and that the realisation of this goal involves intrinsic evolutionary suffering. Further, many provide a compound theory combining the presuppositions of eschatological fulfilment and divine cosuffering with the victims of evolution. They presuppose that if God is good and loving, then he would have created the best of all possible worlds in terms of the balance between its potential for realising creaturely values and the concomitant pain. These involve three main aspects of the evolutionary theodicy: ontology, teleology, and soteriology.

Posed as questions, these can be asked as ‘Why did God make this world of suffering?’ for the ontological aspect; ‘For what purpose was this suffering necessary?’ for the teleological aspect; ‘Are the victims of suffering nonhuman animals to be eternally saved?’ for the soteriological aspect. Respectively and succinctly, the Christian theist can answer these questions ‘To bring about the conditions to give rise to creaturely selves’, ‘To fulfil the values inherent within creaturely selves’, and ‘Yes, in the sense that God suffers with, and will not abandon, the victims of evolution, and that humans have a calling, analogous to Christ, to participate in the healing of the world’. Without the final soteriological postulates, the evolutionary theodicy is guilty of requiring God to use nonhuman animals as means to an end, allowing their inherent value to be neglected and forgotten by the processes He created.

The final part of the Christian theist’s potential response to the soteriological problem includes a postulate that humanity can and will seed nature’s transformation and redemption. However, an ongoing process of redemption does not have any casually backwards effects on the past victims of Earth’s evolutionary history. Many organisms cannot reach their full potential in experiencing the goodness inherent to being of a given species, particularly those that came before us. Therefore, these left-behind beings require reparation of fulfilment in terms of their species’ potential that was denied to them in their tellurian existence. This reparation should be in relation to other species as a form of recreated, fulfilling life in divine company and free from competition or frustration for both predator and prey. One can raise a seemingly obvious objection to this proposal; why did God not only create this heaven, rather than heaven in addition to a world of gratuitous suffering?

Even if this evolutionary scheme was fundamentally required for creaturely selves to flourish, it is surely imaginable that the quantity and quality of the suffering could be toned down. Increased resources, reduced prevalence of disease, parasites, natural disasters, and exclusively herbivorous animals could still give rise to valuable capacities through evolutionary pressures, albeit maybe more slowly. Any scheme that postulates heaven an eschatological creation free of suffering cannot consistently claim that any environment suitable for flourishing must be characterised by evolution by natural selection. The very claim of eschatological fulfilment entails that it is possible for God to create a benign world without the suffering of evolutionary evils.

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