Whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory and the data of natural selection may be like, he is not the Protestant God of waste not, want not. He is also not the loving God who cares about his productions . . . The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is cer-tainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.
David Hull (1991), p. 486 If a tenth part of the pains which have been expended in finding benevolent adaptations in all nature, had been employed in col-lecting evidence to blacken the character of the Creator, what scope for comment would not have been found in the entire existence of the lower animals, divided, with scarcely an excep-tion, into devourers and devoured, and a prey to a thousand ills from which they are denied the faculties necessary for protecting themselves!
John Stuart Mill (1874), p. 58 In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.
Bertrand Russell (1957), p. 13 103
What’s the problem?
Our main conclusion so far is that evolutionary theory dissolves some of the most potent reasons for believing in God. Before going any further, it’s worth noting that, even if that’s all it did, this would not be a trivial implication. After all, without a reason to believe something, belief is unreasonable. But in any case, evolutionary theory does a lot more than remove reasons for belief; it contributes positive reasons for disbelief. We’ve already touched on one of these: incompetent design in nature is evidence against certain conceptions of God, in particular the hands-on creator of the Creationists and some Theistic Evolutionists. However, there’s another difficulty for the individual who accepts evolution but wishes to reconcile this with a belief in God, a difficulty that applies whether God directly intervened in the evolutionary process or simply set the ball rolling and then sat back and watched. This is a new variant of the age-old‘problem of evil’ as an argument against the existence of God.1The problem can be summed up in a single, simple question: if God exists, and if God is good, why is there so much evil (i.e., suffering) in the world?
Evolutionary theory profoundly exacerbates the traditional prob-lem of evil. The history of life on earth is a history of carnage and waste, a vast and bloody struggle for existence. And the evolu-tionary drama has been playing out not for thousands of years but for billions. In short, the problem of evil is much larger than anyone ever dreamed. Furthermore, an evolutionary perspective combats our native tendency to focus exclusively on members of our own species, and brings to our attention the suffering of non-human animals throughout the vast expanses of evolutionary time.
If evil was a problem before Darwin, it is a thousand times the problem now.
1 On the problem of evil, see Adams and Adams (1990); Howard-Snyder (1996).
Atheism’s killer argument
The problem of evil has been haunting theists for thousands of years. The challenge is to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with the fact that the supposed creator is supposedly knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. If God knows everything there is to know, he knows about all the pain and suffering taking place on the surface of this planet (and probably others). If God is completely good, he presumably wishes to eliminate this pain and suffering. And if God is omnipotent, it is within his power to do so. Nonetheless, pain and suffering continue to exist. Why? Why doesn’t God intervene?
Remember, this is a God who allegedly concerns himself with the fall of every sparrow. The problem is not just that God doesn’t step in and help. If God could have created any possible universe, why did he create one in which there was evil in thefirst place? For that matter, why did he create any universe at all? He presumably didn’t have to.
But he did it nonetheless, and therefore he’s responsible for what goes on in the world. Perhaps we can agree with Albert Einstein that only God’s non-existence would excuse him.
The apparent clash between the nature of God and the existence of evil leaves the thoughtful theist with a number of options, none of which is particularly appealing. One is to concede that God is power-less to prevent evil. Another is to concede that God is not all-good.
Maybe God is evil! Or maybe God is indifferent rather than evil. The suffering of evolved sentient life is important to us, but perhaps in the grand scheme of things it is utterly inconsequential. Perhaps we are merely God’s playthings, and he’s experimenting with us in the same nonchalant way that we might experiment with a computer simula-tion. Afinal option is that we were wrong about God all along – that we’ve been making a terrible mistake for the last few thousand years and that there is no God.
It’s worth noting that not all atheists accept the merits of the argument from evil. Richard Dawkins is one who dissents, noting that the problem
of evil‘is an argument only against the existence of a good God . . . for a more sophisticated believer in some kind of supernatural intelligence, it is childishly easy to overcome the problem of evil’.2 Admittedly, the problem of evil works only for one conception of God– God as all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good– and at first glance, it might seem an attractive option to jettison one or a few of these attributes. Most theists probably didn’t have a clear idea that God was omnipotent or omniscient or omnibenevolent before thinking about the matter, so it might seem that they would have little to lose by accepting a diminished conception of the deity. Unfortunately, though, it’s not so simple, because on closer inspection the implications of such a conception undermine many common religious practices and attitudes. If God is not omnipotent, how could you trust him to look after you or your nearest and dearest? If God is not omniscient, why should anyone accept his pronouncements without subjecting them to critical scrutiny and, wherever appropriate, empirical examination? In other words, why should we take anything on faith? Finally, if God is not good, why should we worship or obey him? Indeed, if God were evil, wouldn’t we have a moral obligation not to obey him?3The problem of evil is not nearly as trivial as Dawkins suggests. It strikes at the very heart of theistic belief.
Darwin and evil
The problem of evil didn’t play a big role in my own transition to atheism. But for many people it was the deciding factor, the straw that
2 Dawkins (2006), p. 135.
3 One reason we might continue to worship and obey God, even if God were evil, would be to avoid his wrath and obtain the good things that such a powerful being could proffer. But this is the same reason that someone might suck up to a despotic king or leader. If God existed, it might be prudent for us to obey his commands, just as it would be prudent to obey the commands of any powerful individual, especially one with the reputation of a despot. However, it would hardly be admirable. We would not be morally obliged to obey God unless we had some reason to think that God were good.
broke the camel’s back. Not only that, but the specific contribution made by a Darwinian perspective has persuaded a lot of people to drop their faith. The following quotation provides a lucid description of the problem faced by the person who accepts that evolution took place, but wishes to retain a belief in God:
Could an Almighty God of love have designed, foreseen, planned, and created a system whose law is a ruthless struggle for existence in an overcrowded world? Could an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibe-nevolent God have devised such a cold-blooded competition of beast with beast, man with man, species with species, in which the clever, the cunning, and the cruel survive?4
You might be surprised to learn that the author of these words was a clergyman. You might be less surprised if I tell you that, by the time he put pen to paper and wrote this, he was actually a former clergyman, who had come to the conclusion that atheism was the only intellec-tually honest position available for anyone who truly understood evolutionary theory. Darwin himself was always deeply disturbed by the suffering that natural selection entailed. As I mentioned in Chapter 4, he occasionally entertained the possibility that some kind of God had designed the laws of nature. But he had great trouble imagining that the universe was guided or controlled by any kind of benevolent force. Shortly after the publication of the Origin, Darwin wrote to his friend, Asa Gray:
I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omni-potent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their [larvae] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.5
4 Cited in Haught (2000), p. 21.
5 Cited in F. Darwin (1887b), pp. 311–12.
Darwin is not the only evolutionist to have expressed such senti-ments. Many have looked at natural selection and judged it to be morally unacceptable. George C. Williams, a prominent evolutionary biologist, went so far as to call it ‘evil’.6 Natural selection is a massively inefficient process. For every beneficial mutation, there are countless others that inflict gross and pointless suffering on their bearers; for every successful variant, thousands of organisms perish miserably. Not only that, but even the successful ones– i.e., organ-isms that have more offspring than their neighbours– often end their days in suffering. Dawkins put the point well:
Nature is not interested one way or the other in suffering, unless it affects the survival of DNA. It is easy to imagine a gene that, say, tranquilizes gazelles when they are about to suffer a killing bite. Would such a gene be favored by natural selection? Not unless the act of tranquilizing a gazelle improved that gene’s chances of being propa-gated into future generations. It is hard to see why this would be so, and we may therefore guess that gazelles suffer horrible pain and fear when they are pursued to death– as most of them eventually are. The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sen-tence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.7
As this passage suggests, not only is the process of natural selection ruthless, but so too are many of its products. Numerous unpleasant facts about the natural world can be pinned directly on natural selection. Among parental species, mothers usually abandon their weak or disabled offspring– they just let them die. Likewise, when a lion takes over a pride, it typically kills the existing cubs– those sired by rival males.8 Infanticide, siblicide, and rape are common in the
6 Williams (1993).
7 Dawkins (1995), pp. 131–2.
8 Schaller (1972).
animal kingdom. All these unpleasant phenomena make good sense in terms of selection for genes that get themselves copied into future generations at a faster rate than competing versions of the same genes (competing alleles). The question is: why would a kind and benev-olent God choose such a reprehensible process as his means of creat-ing life?
One might respond that the picture of nature that has emerged since Darwin’s day is not one of relentless cruelty, and that the extent of the competition and selfishness in nature has been vastly over-estimated.9Evolution doesn’t only produce unpleasant traits; as we’ll see inChapter 11, parental care, altruism, and other morally desirable behaviours also have their origin in natural selection. But although nature might not be unrelentingly red in tooth and claw, there’s still more than enough redness to give the theist pause. Furthermore, as George Williams noted:
Attempts to demonstrate the benevolence of Nature often take the form of name changing. The killing of deer by mountain lions meant
‘nature red in tooth and claw’ to a generation of ‘social Darwinists.’ To a more recent generation it has become Nature’s kindness in prevent-ing deer from becomprevent-ing so numerous that they die of starvation or disease . . . The simple facts are that both predation and starvation are painful prospects for deer, and that the lion’s lot is no more enviable.10 There’s no avoiding this unpleasant fact: there has been pain and suffering on this planet for as long as there have been multicellular organisms with nervous systems capable of mocking up the experi-ence of pain and suffering. Thus the planet has been host to at least half a billion years’ worth of suffering. InChapter 4, we saw that many theists claim that God chose natural selection as his means of creating life. But when you really think about what this implies, you recoil from the idea in horror. Why the bloodbath?
9 See, e.g., de Waal (1996).
10 Williams (1966), p. 255.
The question of consciousness in non-human animals This entire line of argument rests on the assumption that at least some non-human animals are sentient beings, capable of experiencing pain and other unpleasant psychological states. It is open to the theist to deny this. The celebrated seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes argued that non-human animals are unfeeling machines, no more capable of suffering than wind-up toys. Few have been able to accept such a counterintuitive position, but if it were true it might provide a way of escaping the Darwin-enhanced problem of evil. If non-human animals were unconscious automata, such things as pre-dation and infanticide would only be aesthetically unpleasant. On the other hand, to the degree that non-humans are sentient, the cruel products of natural selection represent precisely the kind of evil that conflicts with the existence of a loving God.
The idea that animals don’t have consciousness suggests an uncom-fortable parallel. When the early Spanish explorers first arrived in South America, they seriously debated whether the indigenous peo-ples of these lands had souls. Similarly, Christians in the past asserted that non-white people were soulless, in exactly the same sense that Descartes claimed this of non-human animals. Fortunately, most people are now free of this kind of bias. It is perfectly possible, though, that the denial of a‘soul’ or consciousness in animals is an equivalent bias, a bias which future generations will look at with the same incredulity and contempt that we have for those who denied souls to non-whites. At the very least, this possibility should give pause to those of us who deny that any non-human animals are conscious.
We’re certainly capable of making mistakes along these lines.
It might be objected that when we attribute consciousness to other animals, we are simply anthropomorphizing– that is, we are attribut-ing uniquely human traits to animals that don’t possess them. And we should certainly be aware of this potential pitfall. We shouldn’t forget, though, that there is also the danger of making the opposite mistake: viewing shared traits as uniquely human. Often this
possibility is overlooked, perhaps in part because there is no simple word or phrase for it.11However, there is reason to suspect that the second mistake might be more common than anthropomorphism itself. People kill non-human animals for food, for their skins, and sometimes just for fun. We enslave animals and force them to work for us. We experiment on them and justify their suffering in terms of our advantage. Because most of us want to be able to view ourselves as good people (and, perhaps more importantly, because we want others to view us as good people), we may be motivated to view non-humans in such a way that these activities are rendered morally unproble-matic. One way to do this is to view other animals as utterly different from us. Darwin wondered about this; he speculated that the reason we admonish each other to avoid anthropomorphizing, but not to avoid making the opposite mistake, is that we have an emotional need to rationalize our treatment of nonhumans.12
There are various reasons to think that other animals are conscious and can experience pain and suffering.13First, as we’ve already seen, an evolutionary perspective tells us that the mind is the activity of the brain. If human brains are conscious, why would this not be the case for non-human brains, especially those that most closely resemble our own? Second, we have largely the same evidence that other animals experience pain as we do that other humans experience pain: we infer it from their behaviour. If the evidence is good enough in the human case, why isn’t it in the case of non-humans? I’m not going to deny that it’s possible in principle that every animal bar Homo sapiens lacks consciousness– but it is also possible in principle that every human being bar oneself lacks consciousness. What reason do we have to take either possibility seriously?
11 My suggestion: denying shared traits to animals that in fact possess them is deanimalizing them.
12 Barrett and Gruber (1980).
13 On the question of consciousness in other animals, see Marion Stamp Dawkins (1993).
There’s one more thing to consider. Some argue that we should not assume that other animals have consciousness until we have indis-putable evidence that this is the case. I hold the opposite view: we should not assume that other animals do not have consciousness until we have indisputable evidence of that. If we assume that they’re conscious and we’re wrong, the price for our error is trivial: we’ll treat them more humanely than we need to. But if we assume they are not conscious and we’re wrong about this, the price will be that we
There’s one more thing to consider. Some argue that we should not assume that other animals have consciousness until we have indis-putable evidence that this is the case. I hold the opposite view: we should not assume that other animals do not have consciousness until we have indisputable evidence of that. If we assume that they’re conscious and we’re wrong, the price for our error is trivial: we’ll treat them more humanely than we need to. But if we assume they are not conscious and we’re wrong about this, the price will be that we