The Evils of Evolution

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The challenge that the theory of evolution poses to traditional religious belief is not hard to understand. Natural selection makes it possible to explain the remarkable complexity of the living world without any reference to divinity, and it shows that the complexity once attributed to the designs of God is entirely without purpose. As the French biologist and Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod wrote in Chance and Necessity, “Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity.”

Believers who accept evolution can agree that the steady work of natural selection might look devoid of purpose. But they can also pose a question of their own: why is there life and adaptation at all, and why is the natural world not just adequately fruitful but extravagantly so? For believers, the glorious excesses of the natural world fit pretty well with faith in a God who takes an interest in our earthly well-being.

These familiar arguments are a distraction, however, from an even bigger evolutionary challenge to religious belief: the ravaging of life that is inherent in natural selection. Evolution is indeed magnificently fruitful, but it squanders, at a truly fearful rate, the life that is so supposedly valuable to God.

It is possible that swallows may sing for joy as they flit across the evening sky and flying fish may leap from the waves just because they can. But the ordinary workings of evolution show nature to be both a careless butcher and a vile torturer. Think of the random meteorite that seems to have obliterated the entire diverse group of magnificent reptiles that we call dinosaurs. Or consider the wasps that lay their eggs in live hosts, or the degenerative brain diseases that inflict their merciless destruction on human beings, the creatures most capable of dreading such ravages. Nature, as Tennyson observed, is “red in tooth and claw.”

There is, too, the sheer length of time that life took to evolve — something like 3.5 billion years. For much of that period, life took only the most primitive forms, doing nothing much at all. Only very recently, and quite suddenly, has anything of possible moral interest been produced. If God does lie somewhere in or behind evolution, these divinely instigated mechanisms seem to be laughably inefficient and ineffective.

Finally, there is the issue of extinction, which Stephen Jay Gould referred to as evolution’s “grim reaper.” Almost all of the plant and animal species that have ever lived, live no more. That would seem to be doubly problematic for believers, as it suggests that one day human beings also will go the way of the dinosaurs. We are but material for the Lucy-fossils of tomorrow. What does that say about a deity who supposedly created Homo sapiens in his own image?

Suffering, waste and extinction — the three add up to evolution’s problem of evil, and though that problem per se is not new to believers, evolution arguably intensifies the issue, simply by virtue of scale. So how do scientists who are believers respond to it?

The molecular biologist Francisco Ayala, who won the 2010 Templeton Prize, has a strikingly subversive solution. He argues that evolution does not deepen the problem of evil at all. Rather, it dissolves it. Evil, he points out, requires intent, which is why we do not regard earthquakes as immoral. They kill, to be sure, but they are natural events not acts for which anyone can be held culpable. Evolution demonstrates that our biological existence falls into the same category, because life is the result of natural processes. This means that God cannot be blamed for evolution’s painful shadow. Ayala has gone so far as to call natural selection “Darwin’s gift” to believers.

But Ayala's defense does not add up. Think of the parallel to just war theory. Here the negative consequences of otherwise well-intended actions are what the great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas called "double effects." He argued that negative consequences are excusable in war only if soldiers avoid deliberately performing evil acts, like unnecessarily killing innocent civilians. Patch that thought onto evolution’s "war,” and it is clear that natural selection fails to pass the test. If God has anything to do with evolution at all, which he must if “creation” is to have meaning, then natural selection appears to be incompatible with a good God.

The physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne adopts a different approach in his new book, Encountering Scripture. Polkinghorne points out that, in his letter to the Romans, Paul described creation as being “subjected to futility.” That futility could be identified with the heavy costs of natural selection, the necessity of one generation dying in order that another might live, or as the “double effect” of genetic mutation, which produces both new life and malignancy. But if Paul is right, that futility is not for nothing. As he wrote to the Romans, there is hope that “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay” and come to enjoy the freedom and glory of God.

Polkinghorne argues that this freedom is possible only because order and disorder in the world — evolutionary fruitfulness and waste — are so intimately intertwined. Too much order, which might prevent waste, would prevent anything genuinely new from emerging. Too little order, which might promote invention, would prevent fruitfulness, because nothing would last. The result is that nature is “groaning in labor pains,” as Paul also writes. And, as Polkinghorne adds, that is “the inescapable cost of the good of a world in which creatures are allowed to make themselves.”

Does Polkinghorne’s answer also fall foul of the double-effect critique, that is, the production of good by evil means? Not really. In Polkinghorne's account, God suffers too — as shown most clearly, for Christians, by the cross. Unlike Ayala, he does not seek to absolve God from the agonies of evolution. His is not a Panglossian best-of-all-possible worlds but rather a world that needs redemption through God’s own suffering and — because Jesus died — even “extinction.” Polkinghorne offers not so much a solution to the problem of evil as a conviction of hope despite it all.

Whether you find his argument convincing will depend on your own faith or lack thereof. But the problem of evil is like that. It does not, and perhaps should not, be solvable by cool, rational calculation. This is surely one of the messages of Job in the Hebrew Bible: the easy answers, like those offered by Job’s tormentors, are no answers at all. Suffering is tragic and real, in our own lives as in the slow processes of natural selection.

Mark Vernon is a journalist, writer, and former Anglican priest. His books include The Meaning of Friendship, Plato's Podcasts: The Ancients' Guide to Modern Living, and After Atheism: Science, Religion, and the Meaning of Life. He blogs at www.markvernon.com.