HistoricalChristian.Faith

The “only way” (evolutionary) theodicy of natural evil — is Darwinian suffering the necessary price of creaturely life?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — as an account of why a good God would create through predation, extinction, and pain, the reading is coherent, has serious proponents, and meets the antiquity of natural evil head-on: it treats death and struggle not as a corruption of creation but as intrinsic to the only kind of process known to yield free, conscious, valuing creatures. In its modest form — suffering is the necessary price of a genuinely creative, law-governed world, a price God shares rather than merely imposes — it is plausible. But the strong form that gives it its name — that evolution was the only way, that even omnipotence could not have done otherwise — carries weight the argument cannot bear: its proponent concedes it is an “unprovable” postulate, and the omnipotence objection (an omnipotent God could create the same creatures directly; a redeemed “heaven” preserves them without suffering) presses that the necessity is asserted, not shown. Strong by the lights of theistic evolution, strained by the lights of the doctrine of omnipotence, with no clear winner. Possibility ≠ proof. · advanced by Christopher Southgate (The Groaning of Creation, 2008), Holmes Rolston III, and, in “free-process” form, John Polkinghorne and Arthur Peacocke

Related arguments: natural evil — see also Natural evil and the fallen-powers (cosmic-fall) reading — is nature’s disorder the work of rebel spirits? · Natural evil as the penalty of the human Fall — did death and predation enter through Adam’s sin?

See also: the soul-making theodicy, of which this is the evolutionary cousin (both make suffering the price of a good that can only be grown); the free-will defense and privation pages, the will-and-metaphysics answers this reading judges insufficient for natural evil; and original sin and the Fall, whose historical-Fall account of natural evil the “only way” theodicy expressly rejects.

The claim

Natural evil — predation, parasitism, disease, mass extinction, the “three billion years of ancestral suffering” that precede any human will — is the case every theodicy of the will strains to reach. The fallen-powers reading answers it by extending free agency upward, to rebel spirits who corrupted the biosphere; the penal reading pins it backward, on the human Fall. The evolutionary theodicy makes neither move. It grants the Darwinian picture in full — predation and death are woven through life from its origin, no rebel power spoiled a peaceable Eden, no human sin reaches back across the fossil record — and argues that this suffering is not a corruption of creation at all, but the constitutive cost of the only process that can bring genuinely free, conscious, valuing creatures into being. Christopher Southgate, a biochemist-turned-theologian, states the “general tenor” of the argument:

…to accept that there is a problem of evolutionary suffering, but to regard it as the inevitable and necessary price of the realization of values through evolution, and the price is worth it.

— Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil (2008), p. 12.¹ On this reading a universe whose regularities include natural selection is plausibly the only way — or at least the best way — to generate creaturely selves at all: the same law-governed openness that lets predators, parasites, and extinction arise is inseparable from the openness that lets sophisticated, self-transcending life emerge. So the “evils” of the animal world are not a sabotage God must answer for, but the shadow side of a good He could not otherwise give. To this “only way” core the fuller versions add a redemptive supplement: God is not the distant designer of a cruel machine but the fellow-sufferer of every creature — the “cruciform nature” of Holmes Rolston, the divine co-suffering and the eschatological redemption of individual creatures (“pelican heaven”) that make Southgate’s a compound theodicy, not the bare cost-of-doing-business claim.

Who advances it

The reading is the mainstream of late-twentieth-century theistic evolution, and it comes in tiers. The free-process form is John Polkinghorne’s and Arthur Peacocke’s: as a good God grants persons the free will that makes moral evil possible, so He grants creation the “freedom to be itself” — to explore its own possibilities through law and chance — and the suffering that freedom entails is the analogue, at the level of nature, of the free-will defense at the level of persons.² The “only way” form proper is Southgate’s: in The Groaning of Creation (2008) he assembles a “compound” theodicy whose load-bearing plank is that the values realized in evolved creatures could be realized in no other way, and expressly labels this an “(unprovable) assumption” that it is nonetheless “eminently plausible and coherent to suppose.”³ The environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III gives it its most vivid theological form: nature is cruciform — life perpetually wrung out of suffering and death, a “via dolorosa” running through the whole evolutionary epic that the cross of Christ then gathers up and redeems.⁴ Southgate, Rolston, Polkinghorne, and Peacocke all reject a historical or “cosmic” fall as the explanation of natural suffering: on their account there was no deathless golden age for a rebel power or a human sin to spoil.

The evidence for

It fits the record every rival must explain away. This is the argument’s real strength. The fossil record shows predation, disease, and extinction reaching back hundreds of millions of years before any human — and, on the mainstream dating, before any plausible corruption event the other readings can locate. Where the penal reading must deny that antiquity (and so lean on young-earth chronology) and the fallen-powers reading must posit an unattested pre-human spoiling of the whole biosphere, the evolutionary theodicy simply takes the data as it stands. It needs no peaceable Eden that never shows up in the strata.

It answers the case the will-theodicies miss. The free-will defense, privation, and even soul-making all speak most naturally to what wills do or what evil is; none, unaided, explains a biosphere organized around predation eons before human wills existed. The “only way” reading is built for exactly that gap: it gives natural evil a rationale — the necessary structure of a creative world — without needing a rebel spirit or a retroactive human sin. And it is the evolutionary generalization of the ancient Irenaean intuition that the greatest goods must be grown, never issued ready-made.

Its redemptive form keeps God from being a mere designer of pain. The bare cost argument risks casting God as the engineer of a torture-machine; the compound version blunts that by making God the co-sufferer of creation (Rolston’s cruciform nature) and by extending redemption to the individual creatures who bore the cost — so the pelican chick starved in the nest is not written off as raw material but gathered into a final flourishing. That both preserves the goodness of God and honours the reality of the suffering, rather than explaining it away.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. As an account of natural evil that neither denies the evidence nor multiplies unattested agents, the reading is coherent and serious, and this wiki does not dismiss it. In its modest form — that the suffering intrinsic to an evolving world is the necessary price of creaturely value, a price God shares — it is genuinely plausible, and it is the strongest available reply to the antiquity of natural evil.

What is overstated in the word “only.” The name is also the weak point. The claim that carries the theodicy is not merely that evolution is a way, or a fitting way, but the only way — that even an omnipotent God could not have realized these values otherwise. That is a very heavy modal claim, and three things press against it:

• The proponent concedes it is unprovable. Southgate himself calls the premise an “(unprovable) assumption,” defended as “plausible and coherent” rather than demonstrated. A theodicy whose central plank is an admitted postulate answers the problem only for those already willing to grant it — and to say “God could not have done otherwise” without showing it is to constrain omnipotence on a guess.
• The omnipotence objection (Wahlberg). Mats Wahlberg presses the modal claim with a “Twin-Earth” thought experiment: if God is omnipotent He could create — directly, without any evolutionary history — creatures molecule-for-molecule identical to the ones evolution actually produced. Those duplicates would be exactly as free, as conscious, and as “truly other” as their evolved originals, yet no suffering-laden process would have been required to make them. If so, evolution was not the only way, and the theodicy’s load-bearing premise fails.⁵ Southgate’s reply concedes the shape of the problem: he grants that a redeemed “heaven” will preserve creaturely selves in a suffering-free state, but insists that “though heaven can eternally preserve [creaturely] selves… it could not give rise to them in the first place” — a distinction between originating a self and sustaining one that is suggestive but exactly what Wahlberg’s duplication case denies.⁶ The debate here is live and unsettled, not closed either way.
• It relocates authorship rather than dissolving it. Where the fallen-powers reading is faulted for making a rebel spirit the near-author of predation, the evolutionary theodicy has the mirror cost: it makes God the direct and knowing author of the predatory order — He chose these laws foreseeing exactly the carnage they entail. The co-suffering supplement softens this (God does not stand outside the pain He authored) but does not remove it: a God who chooses a system of universal predation, even a system He then suffers alongside, has still chosen it, and the question “was there no better world available to omnipotence?” returns with force. Calling predation the price of a good can also slide into blessing it — the very move critics find hardest to accept.

What this does not do. None of this reduces the reading to weak. The modest, “best way / necessary trade-off” version survives the objections; even the strong version is coherent and honestly held. What the objections defeat is the confident only — the claim that the necessity is demonstrable rather than postulated. Two serious readings of natural evil, this one and the fallen-powers rival, each strong in one register and strained in another, each resting finally on an unprovable postulate (that Darwinian struggle really is the only route to creatures; that fallen spirits really did corrupt the biosphere): that is a contest, not a rout.

Assessment

Contested. Keep the two forms apart. As a claim that the suffering of an evolving world is a necessary trade-off for a genuinely creative, law-governed creation — a cost God shares rather than merely imposes — the reading is coherent, meets the antiquity of natural evil where every will-theodicy strains, and is plausible. As the stronger claim its name asserts — that evolution was the only way, that omnipotence itself was so constrained — it is genuinely disputed: its own proponent concedes the premise is “unprovable,” and the omnipotence objection (that an omnipotent God could create the same creatures directly, and that a redeemed heaven already holds them suffering-free) is live and unrefuted. Strong by the lights of theistic evolution, strained by the lights of the doctrine of omnipotence, with no clear winner — contested. On any proponent’s page flag the slide from “evolution is a fitting or necessary way” (which the evidence supports) to “evolution is the only way even for omnipotence” (an admitted postulate the evidence does not establish).

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