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Book Review: Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution and the Problem of Evil

Christopher Southgate is best known as the co-ordinating editor of the widely used textbook on science and religion, God, Humanity and the Cosmos. He offers here a monograph on the challenge to Christian theodicy that is provided by the pain, suffering, death and extinction that form such an intrinsic part of the processes of evolution. This is an important topic, but one that is routinely ignored by those theologians who profess to accept an evolutionary perspective on creation, while assuming that this central tenet of biology makes little difference to how we must now do theology. Darwin was never as sanguine as that, and Southgate redresses the balance with a vengeance. His very thorough, scholarly text reviews every significant contribution to this discussion available in the recent literature in English, supporting his analysis with nearly fifty pages of detailed notes. Rejecting both the ‘explanation’ of intelligent design and the various attempts to hold human or angelic beings ultimately responsible for the disvalue of creation, the author focuses on the nub of the problem of evolutionary evil, as represented by the unfulfilled nature of the lives of many individual creatures (‘all suffering and no richness’). His essential response is that an evolving universe that contains such disvalue is the only way – or at least the best way – for God to create. Along with many other theologians, he tempers this claim with an affirmation of God’s cosuffering with every sentient part of creation, an insight that comes to full expression in the crucifixion. But unlike most theologians, he also seeks some account of an eschatological fulfilment or transformation of all creation, symbolized and inaugurated with the resurrection that includes (in Jay McDaniel’s memorable phrase) a ‘pelican heaven’. It is only with this latter move, Southgate believes, that we can avoid thinking of some of God’s creatures as being no more than expedient means to justify a wholly human end. For this reader, at least, this seems a speculative move too far in theodicy, even if it is one that chimes in with Paul’s profound claim in Romans 8.18–25, which provides the title for this study. However, I believe that this raises too many problems for our concept of the resurrected life. Nevertheless, like the other claims in the book, the proposal is persuasively argued with a proper exploratory agnosticism. The text concludes with some intelligent comments both on the role that humans should take in the killing of animals (Southgate does not advocate vegetarianism), and on the view that we should adopt on the Book reviews