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Natural evil is the hardest case any theodicy must face. Moral evil - suffering caused by the free choices or negligence of moral agents - can at least be addressed by appeal to the value of free will: a world in which we can choose to love must be one in which we can choose to harm. But natural evil - suffering produced by earthquakes, tsunamis, disease, parasitism and predation, with no human choice behind it - has no obvious link to freedom at all. And once we widen our gaze beyond humanity to the suffering of animals, the difficulty sharpens to its keenest point. Sentient creatures were being torn apart by predators, consumed alive by parasites and killed slowly by disease for hundreds of millions of years before any human existed; they are not moral agents who could be developing their souls through the ordeal, and most of their agony is witnessed by no one and inspires no compassion. This lesson sets out the problem of natural evil and animal suffering and tests every major response against it, because the topic is where the most popular theodicies - the free will defence and Hick's soul-making theodicy - are at their most vulnerable.
Natural evil covers all suffering and destruction arising from natural processes rather than human agency:
The scale is staggering. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed around 230,000 people, very many of them children, in a matter of minutes. The 1918 influenza pandemic killed an estimated 50-100 million. The Black Death is thought to have killed something approaching a third of Europe's population in the fourteenth century. None of this is the product of any moral agent's choice; it is the working-out of impersonal natural forces. The theist's task is not merely to explain that such things can happen, but to reconcile their scale and distribution with the superintendence of a perfectly good and powerful God.
Key term: Natural evil is suffering caused by natural processes operating independently of human free choice (disease, disaster, predation). It is distinguished from moral evil, which is suffering caused by the free choices or negligence of moral agents. The free will defence addresses the second far more readily than the first.
One classic strategy for natural evil, worth setting out because it frames the dosage objection that recurs below, is the claim that this world, natural evils and all, is the best world an omnipotent and benevolent God could have made. Gottfried Leibniz, in his Theodicy (1710) - the work that gave the discipline its name - argued that God, surveying all possible worlds before creation, necessarily chose the best of all possible worlds: the one in which the balance of good over evil, and the richness and order of the whole, could not be improved without overall loss. On this view the natural evils we lament are the unavoidable accompaniments of features whose total value is maximal; remove them and you would not get a better world but a worse one, or no coherent world at all. Leibniz also introduced the category of metaphysical evil - the finitude and imperfection inherent in being a creature rather than God - as the deep root from which natural and moral evil spring, since only God is without limitation.
The optimist's reply has an obvious attraction: it squarely denies that any natural evil is gratuitous, which is exactly what the evidential problem needs the theist to maintain. But it drew one of the most famous ripostes in the history of thought. Voltaire, in Candide (1759), set his hapless hero and the Leibnizian Dr Pangloss through a relentless catalogue of disasters - including a thinly fictionalised version of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which killed tens of thousands on a holy day and shook Enlightenment confidence in providence - all serenely pronounced part of "the best of all possible worlds". The satire's force is that the scale and savagery of natural evil make the claim that it could not be bettered look not pious but absurd: it strains all credulity to insist that omnipotence could not have drowned fewer children in the tsunami, or spared the fawn its days of agony, without wrecking some greater good. This is precisely the dosage objection that will recur against Hick and Swinburne below - the suspicion that, whatever good some natural evil might serve, the sheer quantity we observe vastly exceeds any plausible need.
The free will defence (Lesson 5) is the strongest reply to the logical problem of evil, but it is built to explain moral evil. Its claim is that God could not create genuinely free agents without accepting the risk that they would sometimes choose wrongly; moral evil is the unavoidable shadow of a freedom worth having. Natural evil, however, is not chosen by any human, so this explanation has no purchase on it. A fawn burned in a forest fire, a child crushed in an earthquake, a population scythed down by plague - none of these is the misuse of human freedom. The free will defence, taken alone, is simply silent here.
Plantinga was aware of this gap and offered a famous, and famously controversial, extension. He suggested that it is logically possible that natural evil is the work of non-human free agents - fallen angels or other malevolent spirits - whose corrupt free choices disorder the natural world. Plantinga is careful about the status of this claim: because he is mounting a defence against the logical problem, not a theodicy, he needs only that the hypothesis is not self-contradictory, not that it is plausible or true. As a move against the strict logical problem it succeeds, since the fallen-angel story, however improbable, is internally consistent. But as an explanation that might actually satisfy a reflective believer it strikes almost everyone as ad hoc: it is introduced solely to plug the gap, has no independent evidential support, and few modern theists are willing to attribute earthquakes and cancers to demonic agency. The lesson is that the free will defence, decisive against Mackie on moral evil, has to reach for a speculative supplement the moment natural evil is on the table - and that the supplement, while logically adequate, is evidentially hollow.
The Irenaean, soul-making theodicy of John Hick (Lesson 4) is far better placed to address natural evil, because it gives suffering a purpose that does not depend on its being chosen. On Hick's account the world is a "vale of soul-making": a challenging environment of real dangers and real hardships is the necessary condition for human beings to grow, freely, from immature creatures into mature children of God. Natural evil supplies exactly the resistance that makes moral and spiritual development possible. Earthquakes and diseases create the occasions for courage, compassion, perseverance, self-sacrifice and the long human labour of medicine and engineering against a hostile world. A reality without genuine hazards - a padded "toy world" in which no choice had serious consequences - could not produce these goods, because virtues forged in real adversity cannot be conjured in a world without it. Hick reinforces this with his concept of epistemic distance: God maintains a "distance" of knowledge so that the world appears etsi deus non daretur (as if God were not given), religiously ambiguous rather than overwhelmingly obvious, because only at such a distance can humans come to God in genuine freedom rather than compelled awe. A world riddled with natural evil is precisely a world in which God's existence is not coercively plain.
This is a serious response, but natural evil presses three objections against it.
The animal objection is brought to a fine point by William Rowe's example of the fawn, met already in Lesson 2 on the evidential problem. In some distant forest, lightning strikes a dead tree and starts a fire; a fawn is trapped, badly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death finally relieves it. No human observes it; no warning is given; no compassion is aroused; no character is built; no soul is made. The example is engineered to strip away every theistic consolation at once. The suffering is natural, so it cannot be blamed on human free will. It is unobserved, so it cannot serve to warn others or cultivate human virtue. It befalls an animal, so it cannot be soul-making for the sufferer in Hick's sense. Rowe's contention is that, however hard we search, we can find no greater good for which this particular agony seems necessary. It looks, as far as anyone can tell, simply gratuitous - and a single genuinely gratuitous evil is enough to refute the omnipotent, wholly good God, since such a God would have prevented any suffering that served no greater good.
The fawn is one creature; the problem is the whole animal creation across deep time. Several features of the evidence make this the gravest version of the problem of evil.
Key term: Dysteleological suffering is suffering that serves no discernible purpose or end - that does not build, refine or redeem, but only destroys. Animal suffering across deep time is the paradigm case, since it cannot contribute to any soul-making and predates any human Fall.
It was Charles Darwin himself who felt the religious weight of animal suffering most acutely, and it contributed materially to his gradual movement away from Christian belief. In a celebrated letter of 1860 to the botanist Asa Gray, Darwin wrote: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars." In his Autobiography he gave the difficulty its general form, asking "what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time?" The point is not merely that nature contains suffering but that the suffering looks purposeless and ubiquitous - the cat toying with the mouse, the parasite consuming its host alive, the routine extinction of whole species - and so tells, on the evidence, against a benevolent designer and towards the blind, indifferent operation of natural selection. Darwin's worry is the evidential problem (Lesson 2) sharpened to its animal edge: confronted with the actual character of the living world, the inference to a good and powerful author is, at best, strained.
Everything in this topic ultimately turns on a single contested word: is animal suffering gratuitous? Rowe's argument needs only one genuinely gratuitous evil - one instance an omnipotent, wholly good being could have prevented without losing a greater good or permitting an equal or worse evil - and the fawn is offered as exactly that. The theist's options are correspondingly narrow. Either deny that any animal suffering is truly gratuitous (insisting some greater good justifies even the fawn), or block our ability to judge gratuitousness at all (sceptical theism), or reconceive God so that gratuitous suffering no longer counts against the divine (process theodicy).
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