Evolution, the problem of evil, and a challenge to the idea of the good.

Evolution, the problem of evil, and a challenge to the idea of good.

The argument from evil stands out as the strongest case against belief in God. If an all good and all powerful Creator produced a world, the argument goes, that world would reflect the Creator’s own goodness. But a close look at reality presents something quite different from what we would expect. Life on earth is violent, terrifying and excruciatingly painful for its inhabitants. Except for those at the top of the food chain, animals must seek food for themselves and their young under the constant threat of being eaten by a predator. Their lives are likely to end with a few minutes of terror as they try to escape and then the horror and physical pain of having the claws and teeth of death tear into their flesh.

            Psychologist Ernest Becker writing about how our fear of death, which we try to suppress, describes an absurd nature in which the horror of human death constitutes a small but typical part:

What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to tear others apart with teeth of all types---biting, grinding flesh…bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating the essence into one’s own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue?

Becker argues that if we can remove all of the illusions that constitute our culture and look at life as it is, we realize that nature mocks the poet. In the context of these posts, we might conclude that nature mocks the idea of the good.

Why did the Creator not make us all vegetarians like the animals in the “Peaceable Kingdom?” Since plants lack the awareness and the nervous system to feel pain, eating them would not involve inflicting cruelty. Or better, yet, why not endow all creatures with the power of photosynthesis and skip eating all together?  But since eating constitutes such a pleasure, why did the Creator not grow lobster tails on trees so that we could enjoy them without throwing a live lobster into boiling water? And why can we not enjoy all sorts of steaks and roasts without the pain and horror of the slaughterhouse? Scientists today are working on growing meat from stem cells. Why didn’t an omniscient Creator think of that? The contrast between reality and our fantasy of what a benign all-mighty being would have created constitutes for many an airtight argument against belief in God.  Atheists like Dawkins do not posit an evil god, but simply an absence of any creator or source of good and evil. The universe including the process of evolution is, in their view, unconscious and pitiless. Atheists have a strong case to show that the world including living things does not flow from an intelligent designer. What happens to the idea of the good?