One of the virtually axiomatic doctrines of modern Christianity is the corruption and fall of the natural world along with mans moral nature. Natural evil is accounted to be a result of sin, not only in the sense that men suffer and die from disease or disaster, but also in the sense that these exist in the natural world at all.
In the controversy over origins, this is a stumbling block to Biblical literalists, one of whose arguments is that if mankind was born into a world already long-established in the business of death and decay, it is a denial of the original goodness of the creation from Genesis 1. It is almost as much of a problem for Christians believing in evolution, or Old Earth Creationists, since there then needs to be another explanation for natural evil in the pre-fall world. Answers range from a rather implausible spread of the falls effects backwards in time, to versions of theology in which God is not fully responsible for creation, perhaps through allowing it some kind of freedom of action of its own. Some Christian evolutionists have even considered Intelligent Design blasphemous for implicating the loving God of Jesus Christ in the examples of disease or poor design we encounter. Continue reading