The Hump of the Camel

Whilst desperately trying to find the final quote for my last-but-one post, I came across a file of old Christian magazines from my University years, 40 years ago. Hoarder that I am, I’ve never had the heart to throw them out, and they’re probably unique now. It was interesting to see that there were a few articles about science and faith which give a flavour of the UK Christian climate of the time – more or less confirming my memories of that era.

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“Most animals are fated to an agonising death.”
“The sheer horror so frequent in the biological world has seemed to make Christianity unintelligible and even offensive.”
“[A world] which seems at best to be utterly indifferent and at worst implacably malevolent.”

These are all quotes from Christians dealing with a theodicy of natural evil. I have commented on natural evil before, largely on the question of whether the natural world is “fallen” and, specifically, on the history of that doctrine. See for example here,  here   and here. I have pointed out that fallen nature is a relatively recent doctrine, even before evolutionary theory raised the stakes. Nevertheless theodicy of some sort is surely desirable, if only because non-believers also raise it and there is an apologetic necessity.

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This is probably my last post on Cosmology – from Alpha to Omega, and is essentially a footnote.

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As I said in my last post Russell seems to follow a common view of Augustine’s “theodicy” that derives largely from John Hick, rather than from Augustine himself. As I said there, actual citations from Augustine are not present in Russell’s book, but rather “examples” in the form of the entire Confessions and City of God. In neither of these works is Augustine pursuing a theodicy at all.

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I’ve found much to agree with in reading Russell’s Cosmology – from Alpha to Omega with regard to his approach to theistic evolution. I’m rather less happy with his take on theodicy. He is quick to point out that by putting divine governance back into theistic evolution, he has increased the challenge of theodicy posed by evolution. You’ve heard it, and I’ve criticised it, before – all those parasitised grubs agonising from Darwin, egregious genetic errors and viruses from Ayala, and so on. Russell sees that a “top-down” evolution doesn’t let God off the hook at all, yet concludes that a God who is actually in charge necessitates even more explanation for “natural evil.”

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In my reading of R J Russell’s book, discussed in my last post, I’ve reached the point where he uses his concept of God’s activity within quantum uncertainty to defend theistic evolution.

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I’m slowly wading through Russell’s Cosmology – From Alpha to Omega, in which, amongst other things, he covers his “quantum indeterminacy” hypothesis for NIODA (non-interventive objective divine action), as advertised in Ted Davis’ blogs at BioLogos. If I have a criticism overall, it’s that he seems to be playing a game that accepts science’s assertions about nature’s being (at the Newtonian level) a closed system. This being assumed, he seems to say, how can we assert God’s activity in the world without his interfering with natural law, which science won’t allow. To me, the obvious first move is to question whether there is adequate evidence for science’s deterministic assertion in the first place.

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