Outside the Box has a post on the problem of death, disease, starvation, animals eating one another, and other such facets of the natural world that drive evolution. Can such a process be viewed as the work of a benevolent God?
Here’s what I wrote in response to his post (I also left it as a comment on that blog):
It is not simply evolution that poses this problem. The fact that countless organisms starved to death, were eaten by other animals, and so on may be a key part of the mechanism of evolutionary development, but the mechanism is clearly there all around us, visible and undeniable, regardless of whether one accepts evolution or not. So denying that something good came of all this through evolution doesn’t really mitigate the problem, and may make it worse.
Of course, young-earth creationists would claim that God gave T-Rex teeth and made harmful viruses and bacteria at the fall as a punishment. But once again (ignoring for a moment the other reasons why such a viewpoint is problematic), I have to ask whether that claim, rather than these being natural products of a world that is capable of giving rise to intelligent life, really helps lessen the problematic character of what we find in nature.
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