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God, Evolution, and Animal Suffering
After the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, theologians were faced with the dilemma of God creating through evolution. Suddenly, pain, suffering, untimely death and extinction appeared to be the very tools of creation, and not a result of the sin of humanity. Despite this paradigm shift, the question of non-human suffering has been largely overlooked within theodicy debates, overwhelmed by the extreme human suffering of the twentieth century. This book redresses this imbalance by offering a rigorous academic treatment of the questions surrounding God and the suffering of non-human animals. Combining theological, philosophical, and biblical perspectives, this book explores the relationship between God and Creation within Christian theology. First it dismantles the popular theological view that roots violence and suffering in the animal kingdom in the fall of humanity. Then, through an exploration of the nature of love, it affirms that there are multiple reasons to suggest that God and creation can both be "good", even with the presence of violence and suffering. This is an innovative exploration of an under-examined subject that encompasses issues of theology, science, morality and human-animal interactions. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars and academics of religion and science, the philosophy of religion, theodicy, and biblical studies.
216 pages, Hardcover
Published December 20, 2018
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February 24, 2020
The reason why I haven't profited much from this book, although it addresses some of my most pressing concerns, is that it goes about answering them the wrong way.
Here is how Sollereder proceeds. She starts with the premise that God is love and that his love includes non-human animals. Then, she analyses love as a "desire for the good of and for union with the beloved" (p101). Because love is not controlling, God gives creation a "freedom" to which the disvalues of evolution are attributable. Also, because love is vulnerable, God "co-suffers with the Creation", which somehow should be of comfort to us and to non-human animals (though I myself would find more comfort in a non-suffering God.)
I would have gone a totally different route.
First, we should not assume that God is love. On the contrary, we should look at the world as it is and ask ourselves what kind of God would create and/or sustain such a world. Though Sollereder does mention Wesley J. Wildman's point that God does not seem "particularly concerned about what form existence takes" nor to be "in the caring business" (p65), her counter-argument is rather weak: she says this position "cannot be a help to people who wish to maintain anything of the character or nature of traditional Christian theism" or "to hold any form of Christian faith, because God's love for creatures is intrinsic to that faith" (id.) This argument merely begs the question.
Sollereder is perfectly willing to acknowledge the immense harms non-human animals endure in the natural world. And because she rejects any fall theory (whether human or angelic), she has to make God (and the "freedom" he gives to creation) fully responsible for them. This, however, does not seem to dent her belief in God's love for the animals.
One problem is that the God of the Bible is no more tender with the animals than the God of evolution is. Sollereder never once mentions the system of animal sacrifice which is described in almost obsessive detail in one of the five holiest books of the Bible, or God's injunctions to the Hebrews to massacre animals and hamstring horses as part of herem warfare. And even though Jesus is credited with ending the system of animal sacrifice, he himself, as an observant Jew, must have killed his share of lambs for Passover (as graphically described, for instance, in Maurice Casey's Jesus of Nazareth). He also helped fishermen catch more fish, sent lepers to sacrifice birds and had no qualms telling parables about slaughtering the fatted calf.
Sollereder's definition of creation's "freedom" is also very problematic. I think she equivocates between a purely figurative meaning of the term (God lets secondary chains of cause and effect run their course, however deterministically or randomly) and a more anthropomorphic one (creation is genuinely "free" to pursue its own path.) The more literal meaning of freedom is of course very questionable. It is not even clear at what level of organisation this "freedom" is exerted. Sometimes, it seems to be the level of individual living creatures, down to (ironically) the wasps that Daniel Dennett considers the antithesis of the "varieties of free-will worth wanting" (hence his neologism for lack of freedom, "sphexishness"): "God's love created an open field of possibilities in which the Ichneumon [Darwin's dreaded parasitic wasp] would have the freedom to develop that survival technique [eating caterpillars alive from the inside] as it pursued its desires" (pp 116-7.)
Sometimes, some mystical lifeforce itself seems to be endowed with this "freedom": "Creatures would selve without micromanagement into lions and lettuce, dinosaurs and diphteria. Life was not drawn inexorably along fortuitous lines of descent, but was allowed to develop according to each creature's own need and agency, sustained by the unflinching generosity of God to all life." (p183)
Considering that the mechanism of evolution is mostly random mutation and the struggle for survival in a harsh Malthusian world, such rosy-eyed picture of the process sounds very new-agey to me.
I even wonder if Sollereder does not see the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs as somehow "selving", exploring its own freedom or resisting God's "lure towards the good" p137) to devastate one of the rare planets in the galaxy to harbour life (she does say she would "restrict the objects of divine lure to living beings" (p137), but even imagining viruses or bacteria "refusing" God's grace sounds very far-fetched to me, and not very different from the concept of fallen nature.) Moreover, since the values and disvalues of evolution are completely entangled in her system, it seems very difficult to discern what the good God lures us to actually is. Is the mother cheetah that hobbles an impala to teach her cubs how to pull a prey animal down (p136) resisting or following God's lure?
Adding to the irony, Sollereder refutes one model of special divine action by defending reductive physicalism as a theory of mind: "Problematic from a scientific perspective, Clayton and Knapp's view is founded upon the assumption that mental events are not reducible to physical brain events, a step which has come under criticism." So in her upside-down world, nature becomes "free", but genuine free-will is denied to humans.
Another thing I found objectionable in Sollereder's approach was her willingness to part with traditional attributes of God. For instance, her God is tensed, vulerable, suffering and not omniscient. But I am starting with the attributes of God one can establish from natural theological arguments, such as immateriality or timelessness, and I cannot compromise such attributes.
Apart from these departures from the God of classical theism, Sollereder's God is Trinitarian and "kenotic" and became Incarnate in Jesus Christ. So if you are starting from a natural theology or a Biblical Unitarian perspective, you might find her arguments based on these premises unsatisfactory.
What I did get from the book are good points against a theodicy I once found consoling (that of an angelic fall) and a good overview of the current debate, including authors I have already read but might find less convincing today.
The part of the book I found the least satisfying was Sollereder's imagining of what an animal-loving God would do for our fellow creatures in the eschaton. Since I am very doubtful that God does love animals, I found such imaginings to be pure wishful thinking.
Please note that though the title of the book includes the word "evolution", the index only has five entries for Darwin.
Here is how Sollereder proceeds. She starts with the premise that God is love and that his love includes non-human animals. Then, she analyses love as a "desire for the good of and for union with the beloved" (p101). Because love is not controlling, God gives creation a "freedom" to which the disvalues of evolution are attributable. Also, because love is vulnerable, God "co-suffers with the Creation", which somehow should be of comfort to us and to non-human animals (though I myself would find more comfort in a non-suffering God.)
I would have gone a totally different route.
First, we should not assume that God is love. On the contrary, we should look at the world as it is and ask ourselves what kind of God would create and/or sustain such a world. Though Sollereder does mention Wesley J. Wildman's point that God does not seem "particularly concerned about what form existence takes" nor to be "in the caring business" (p65), her counter-argument is rather weak: she says this position "cannot be a help to people who wish to maintain anything of the character or nature of traditional Christian theism" or "to hold any form of Christian faith, because God's love for creatures is intrinsic to that faith" (id.) This argument merely begs the question.
Sollereder is perfectly willing to acknowledge the immense harms non-human animals endure in the natural world. And because she rejects any fall theory (whether human or angelic), she has to make God (and the "freedom" he gives to creation) fully responsible for them. This, however, does not seem to dent her belief in God's love for the animals.
One problem is that the God of the Bible is no more tender with the animals than the God of evolution is. Sollereder never once mentions the system of animal sacrifice which is described in almost obsessive detail in one of the five holiest books of the Bible, or God's injunctions to the Hebrews to massacre animals and hamstring horses as part of herem warfare. And even though Jesus is credited with ending the system of animal sacrifice, he himself, as an observant Jew, must have killed his share of lambs for Passover (as graphically described, for instance, in Maurice Casey's Jesus of Nazareth). He also helped fishermen catch more fish, sent lepers to sacrifice birds and had no qualms telling parables about slaughtering the fatted calf.
Sollereder's definition of creation's "freedom" is also very problematic. I think she equivocates between a purely figurative meaning of the term (God lets secondary chains of cause and effect run their course, however deterministically or randomly) and a more anthropomorphic one (creation is genuinely "free" to pursue its own path.) The more literal meaning of freedom is of course very questionable. It is not even clear at what level of organisation this "freedom" is exerted. Sometimes, it seems to be the level of individual living creatures, down to (ironically) the wasps that Daniel Dennett considers the antithesis of the "varieties of free-will worth wanting" (hence his neologism for lack of freedom, "sphexishness"): "God's love created an open field of possibilities in which the Ichneumon [Darwin's dreaded parasitic wasp] would have the freedom to develop that survival technique [eating caterpillars alive from the inside] as it pursued its desires" (pp 116-7.)
Sometimes, some mystical lifeforce itself seems to be endowed with this "freedom": "Creatures would selve without micromanagement into lions and lettuce, dinosaurs and diphteria. Life was not drawn inexorably along fortuitous lines of descent, but was allowed to develop according to each creature's own need and agency, sustained by the unflinching generosity of God to all life." (p183)
Considering that the mechanism of evolution is mostly random mutation and the struggle for survival in a harsh Malthusian world, such rosy-eyed picture of the process sounds very new-agey to me.
I even wonder if Sollereder does not see the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs as somehow "selving", exploring its own freedom or resisting God's "lure towards the good" p137) to devastate one of the rare planets in the galaxy to harbour life (she does say she would "restrict the objects of divine lure to living beings" (p137), but even imagining viruses or bacteria "refusing" God's grace sounds very far-fetched to me, and not very different from the concept of fallen nature.) Moreover, since the values and disvalues of evolution are completely entangled in her system, it seems very difficult to discern what the good God lures us to actually is. Is the mother cheetah that hobbles an impala to teach her cubs how to pull a prey animal down (p136) resisting or following God's lure?
Adding to the irony, Sollereder refutes one model of special divine action by defending reductive physicalism as a theory of mind: "Problematic from a scientific perspective, Clayton and Knapp's view is founded upon the assumption that mental events are not reducible to physical brain events, a step which has come under criticism." So in her upside-down world, nature becomes "free", but genuine free-will is denied to humans.
Another thing I found objectionable in Sollereder's approach was her willingness to part with traditional attributes of God. For instance, her God is tensed, vulerable, suffering and not omniscient. But I am starting with the attributes of God one can establish from natural theological arguments, such as immateriality or timelessness, and I cannot compromise such attributes.
Apart from these departures from the God of classical theism, Sollereder's God is Trinitarian and "kenotic" and became Incarnate in Jesus Christ. So if you are starting from a natural theology or a Biblical Unitarian perspective, you might find her arguments based on these premises unsatisfactory.
What I did get from the book are good points against a theodicy I once found consoling (that of an angelic fall) and a good overview of the current debate, including authors I have already read but might find less convincing today.
The part of the book I found the least satisfying was Sollereder's imagining of what an animal-loving God would do for our fellow creatures in the eschaton. Since I am very doubtful that God does love animals, I found such imaginings to be pure wishful thinking.
Please note that though the title of the book includes the word "evolution", the index only has five entries for Darwin.
August 10, 2021
This book is held back by its dismissal (or misunderstanding) of Thomist and Calvinist understandings of divine and human agency, but it is otherwise a very helpful survey and exploration of answers to the question how evolutionary creation could be understood as very good (if not finally perfected).
Read
January 9, 2026I didn't finish this one as it wasn't the approach to this subject I was looking for. Some excerpts in case I ever decide to come back to it:
"I maintain the natural world, apart from human sin, is not fallen. By this I mean that the natural world is fit for the purposes of God's love. I do not mean that it is the best of all possible worlds, or that every instance of suffering is justified by this consideration alone, but that the disvalues in the natural world do not originate from a corruption of the world."
"Drawing on Aquinas, Eleonore Stump, and W. H. Vanstone, I argued that a creation made in love would necessarily involve allowing creatures to "selve" with significant freedom."
"Creation through evolution is not efficient. Rather, love's generosity provides a superabundance of the gift of being that "wastes" resources on all sorts of unlikely and unproductive sorts of beings."
"Love's twin desires, the desire for the good of the beloved and for union with the beloved, set the conditions for God's creative work. God's work begins with... the choice not to control.... [and] continues with presence, not to forsake the work of life, but to act within the world in empowering and meaning-making ways. God's work finishes in redemption, the healing and fulfilment of the suffering and lack of flourishing that characterises, to some extent, every creature's life."
"In light of God's love, I depicted four main avenues of special divine action: the gift of being, co-presence, divine lure, and participation." (the first in superabundance, the second in attention, the third in creatures being drawn toward the good and thus toward God, the last in embodiment and meaning-making)
"I maintain the natural world, apart from human sin, is not fallen. By this I mean that the natural world is fit for the purposes of God's love. I do not mean that it is the best of all possible worlds, or that every instance of suffering is justified by this consideration alone, but that the disvalues in the natural world do not originate from a corruption of the world."
"Drawing on Aquinas, Eleonore Stump, and W. H. Vanstone, I argued that a creation made in love would necessarily involve allowing creatures to "selve" with significant freedom."
"Creation through evolution is not efficient. Rather, love's generosity provides a superabundance of the gift of being that "wastes" resources on all sorts of unlikely and unproductive sorts of beings."
"Love's twin desires, the desire for the good of the beloved and for union with the beloved, set the conditions for God's creative work. God's work begins with... the choice not to control.... [and] continues with presence, not to forsake the work of life, but to act within the world in empowering and meaning-making ways. God's work finishes in redemption, the healing and fulfilment of the suffering and lack of flourishing that characterises, to some extent, every creature's life."
"In light of God's love, I depicted four main avenues of special divine action: the gift of being, co-presence, divine lure, and participation." (the first in superabundance, the second in attention, the third in creatures being drawn toward the good and thus toward God, the last in embodiment and meaning-making)
November 17, 2025
The book is definitely highly speculative in many places, and admittedly so. I don’t think that’s at all a bad thing when acknowledged. I particularly appreciated the insights on how the early church was more liberal in their interpretations at times (I.e. Augustine on thorns before the curse) as well as explorations of texts like increasing pain vs sorrow in childbirth. I thought this was a very interesting work to get one thinking about natural evil.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews