Sollereder 1: Leaving the Courtroom

A few posts ago, I said that epicenter for questions about theodicy has moved from human to animal suffering. In future posts, I will be working through the theodicy of Bethany A. Sollereder, who is a lecturer in science and religion at the University of Edinburgh. I am going to blog through her fascinating book God, Evolution, and Animal Suffering: Theodicy Without a Fall (Routledge 2019). I heard an interview with Dr. Sollereder on the excellent theology podcast "OnScript" in 2021, and her arguments caught my imagination. She made some profound Christological statements that excited me. I wanted to know more!

The big idea here is: "I want to argue that evolution is the process by which God has created the world, and that the violence and suffering inherent in the process can be both contextualised and redeemed in light of the creative suffering of God" (2). There is a lot to unpack. But, first, she must do some intellectual floor clearing.

Chapter 1: Leaving the courtroom

Sollereder is an experimental theologian. Though she does a lot of careful exegesis, she is not trying to do Biblical theology or construct a systematic. She operates at the line of dialogue between theology and science. Nevertheless, her instincts are evangelical. Her motivation is the fundamental fact that since life began living things suffer violence. God made the world with natural selection in it and called it good. So how can this be true? And waving it away with the fall, as theology has been wont to do, simply will not do.

Traditional theology once drew a familiar map. It stated that God created a perfect and peaceable world. Then humans . . . ruined the whole scene . . . and now we live in a profoundly broken world characterised by the previously unknown elements of violence, death, and suffering. But using the fall as an explanation is . . . no longer a plausible way forward. Evolutionary evidence suggests that the world was only free from death and competition when it was also free from life. The complexity, interrelatedness, and beauty of life are directly related to the ever-present violence, death, and extinction of numberless creatures. . . . A new theological map is needed. (4)

As Dr. Gordon Heugenberger, my Old Testament professor in seminary, used to say, Animal death had to exist in the garden or Adam wouldn't have understood what God meant when he said, "On the day you eat of it, you will surely die." Heugenberger's point, ignoring the genre problem, is analogous to Sollereder's. The Bible assumes this evolutionary world and all that goes with it. How, then, can God call it good?

So, step one: the doctrine of the fall is problematic. Sollereder argues that the Bible does not require it: "The biblical witness does not require the assumption that disvalues such as suffering and death entered the world due to human or Satanic sin," (8). A fall also requires some kind of point of original perfection. And, where the natural world is concerned, no amount of geology or physics can discover one. And finally, the term itself is not always clear. She will go on in later chapters to differentiate and examine the arguments for a cosmological (or mysterious) fall, a Satanic fall, and a human fall.

Now step two: natural evil needs to go. Theology has taught that fallenness unleashed sin upon the world, producing moral and natural evil. But, setting moral evil aside, natural evil is a highly anthropocentric concept lacking evidentiary sophistication. Sollereder easily overturns it and, in its absence, suggests new vocabulary: harm and disvalue. Harm is suffering caused by natural things: tornadoes, flash flooding, ice storms, etc. That's the sort of thing Calvin said was produced by sin: but tornadoes are produced by weather. Calvin was thinking like a medieval man. Disvalue is the suffering produced by the violence of living things living. It has its origin not in some kind of supernatural evil but in the way that natural selection and the results of human fallenness (Sollereder believes in a human fall) combine to damage the cosmos, even though, she says, the natural world remains unfallen.

On the positive side, disvalue is antinomous to two other terms: flourishing and selving. Flourishing, she says, means the overall well-being of an individual creature, which would include a 360-degree relational goodness analogous to the Hebrew shalom.

A flourishing creature is in proper relationship to other members of its own species, to environmental conditions, to God, and to the stage of life it is in. This relational component might lead to some counterintuitive results, such as after a full life and in light of the new creation, a creature's best flourishing at a particular moment may be to die. (8)

Selving is subjective; it is concerned with the individual. Selving is a creature acting as itself in fulfillment of its God-given course. Here she follows the work of Christopher Southgate who said, "When a living creature 'selves' . . . it is conforming to the pattern offered by the divine Logos."[1] Sollereder is careful to avoid eugenic undertones here saying individual creatures have a common characteristic but also may innovate. "It would be better to speak of the gift of community and genetic inheritance that creatures are born into which confer regular ways of being rather than a sense of Platonic 'pattern' to which creatures are meant to conform" (Ibid.) I suspect these two terms, flourishing and selving, will play an important role as her argument moves forward.

These states--disvalue, harm, flourishing and selving--each operate at every level at which living things exist. And there is a kind of order to them. The basic id-like desires that go along with natural selection, aggression and self-interest are like raw materials. And the disvalue and harm which are their result exhibit behaviors which result from a kind of moral immaturity. Above that is a higher rung of altruistic level of self-giving which can itself be transcended via divine action into love itself. Love is, she says, "a particular divine act in the person that transmutes the basic evolutionary desires into the desires of divine love." "Love is a transformation of the spectrum of desires entirely" (6).

But how, then, does she understand love? Love is "non-controlling, particular, vulnerable to suffering, and responsive to the needs of the beloved." And, as in so much theology, freedom plays its part, for love requires radical freedom and divine interaction.

Traditional accounts of freewill have been heavily anthropocentric . . . I attempt to work out what freedom for the non-human world entails in light of the two desires of love: the desire for the good of the beloved and the desire for union with the beloved. God's love leaves room for creatures to develop towards their own good, the good of the ecosystem they participate in, and in the ultimate history of the world.

A final aside. Sollereder has positioned these two systems of transcending love and natural selection together in a way. First, there is the mechanism of natural selection, where fitness creates an ability to step above or transcend. Natural selection produces disvalue, but it also produces selving, as individuals can improve on their genetic and socially conditioned model of behavior. Second, there is a definition of love built from desire and freedom. Love is a result of developmental leaps from lower to higher, from self-interest to selflessness. Love seems to set the board on which natural selection plays. Or, is love more fundamental? I am not sure.

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[1] Christopher Southgate. The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Animal Suffering (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 16. Note also: Arthur Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming -- Natural, Divine, and Human (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993) and Daryl Domning and Monika Hellwig. Original Selfishness: Original Sin and Evil in Light of Evolution. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006).

Note this interesting footnote about Southgate's understanding of selving: "[Selving] allows a unique view of fallenness: a creature is fallen when it does not embrace the divine invitation to transcendence and therefore remains what it is. In this notion of fallenness, it is potential that is lost rather than acquired characteristics" (12n29).