A Christian explanation for Natural Evil from the Dirckx vs Woodford debates

Natural evil is a topic that gives some Christians heartburn. Moral evil can be explained by inappropriate human choices and the gift of free will, but natural evil is far more difficult to understand because nature, while having means and opportunity, lacks motive. It’s a difficult problem for Christians to explain, but do atheists do any better? Premier Unbelievable explored this difficult question by hosting two discussions in May and August between Christian writer Sharon Dirckx, author of Broken Planet: If There is a God, Then Why Are There Natural Disasters and Diseases? [IVP] and influential atheist Stephen Woodford, the voice behind the Rationality Rules YouTube channel.

Here I lay out the basic argument that Dirckx has outlined in her book and in the debates. 

An amnesty for natural evil?

Labelling nature as “evil” seems cruel, since nature has no choice in the matter and holds no particular grudge against humans. Yet we can’t help but describe its actions in moral terms because the devastation it wreaks seems so gratuitously excessive. We want to give nature amnesty, but feel that at a minimum it is complicit in crimes against humanity. Scientists tell us that that some of the ecological events are necessary for maintaining planetary health, yet we feel like we have been the victim of cosmic malpractice. Why do we think Mother Nature should have better manners, if we are just guests in her house? 

We have a dilemma; we find a hurricane scientifically fascinating, yet our intellectual curiosity gives way to emotional trauma when it wipes out an entire city. Dirckx, in her book, gives us some insight into this conflict:

“To call an event a ‘disaster’ is to make a moral judgment, to imply that something is wrong, that things could or should be better than they are. Yet, scientific accounts alone can’t take us to this destination. The sciences merely tell us how things are, not how they should be. They describe events in the natural world with elegance and insight but are under no obligation to infer that nature ought to be a certain way. Why then do we insist that they should?”

Why do we care?

Storms, quakes, and meteor collisions occur throughout the universe yet the earth, as far as we know, is the only planet that is occupied by creatures who put their complaints in writing. Nature often conducts its business in a way that senselessly destroys innocent plants, animals and humans, yet only humans care. Isn’t that strange?   

Dirckx gave science its due for its intellectual explanations of natural phenomena but noted that those analyses don’t explain why everybody gets angry when nature red-in-tooth-and-claw doesn’t treat us with kid gloves. Explaining the scientific mechanism behind a natural disaster may make one an intellectually fulfilled atheist, but does nothing to explain why we become an emotional wreck when it goes on a killing spree. 

Dirckx pointed out that all humans have this strange idea that the world should be better than it is, which is a problem for the atheist because they are forced to believe the world is exactly the way it should be. ‘S*** happens’ is an unsatisfactory explanation if you also believe natural disasters stink to the high heavens.

A good God creating a world filled with evil is a Christian predicament, but feeling bad about blind pitiless indifference is an atheist dilemma. Atheism may be satisfied with the maximum wind speeds of a hurricane, the Richter scale reading of an earthquake, or the rate of planetary warming, but the rest of us just want to know why these phenomena make our blood boil. Nobody escapes the suffering problem. Dirckx, however, maintains that the Christian worldview offers the most comprehensive explanation. 

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Beauty and the beast

One of the most fascinating aspects of our response to natural disasters is that while we recoil at the devastation we are simultaneously enamoured by its elegance. We chase tornadoes, fly planes into the eyes of hurricanes, film volcanic eruptions, and surf tsunami waves despite the profound loss of life associated with each. Strangely enough, we find beauty in the beast. French philosopher Simone Weil expresses this situation well:

“The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it. On the contrary, this adds to its beauty. If it altered the movement of its waves to spare a boat, it would be a creature gifted with discernment and choice and not this fluid, perfectly obedient to every external pressure. It is this perfect obedience that constitutes the sea’s beauty.”

One of the activities that provides me with the most peace is standing on a beach and gazing out at the ocean, an activity that seems quite odd given that this very same ocean also wrecks ships, destroys homes and ends lives. How can we explain this uneasy relationship between nature’s destructive tendencies and its beauty, its evil and its elegance; its badness and its goodness? Does the Bible give us any insight into this incongruity?

Moralizing talk

Genesis helps us understand this conundrum by explaining how God set the stage for an ethical universe. God’s Spirit began by hovering over a formless, empty, dark and ethically neutral void. This initial substrate had no moral compass until God gave it direction by speaking form into formlessness, order into disorder, and then sequentially calling each innovation “good” until it reached a cumulative “very good.” God’s “good” is therefore measured by the form he imposed on a morally neutral chaos, and his “very good” by the degree of order he integrated into its function. 

Augustine believed that evil had no existence of its own but was the privation of a pre-existent good. Evil therefore appears when that which God called “good” and “very good” becomes formless or disordered. Privation is often defined in sociological terms as a lack or absence of the basic necessities of life, a definition which makes the Genesis narrative even more profound because it means that whatever is taken away from God’s “very good” is ultimately unlivable. God baked goodness into the created order from the very beginning, thereby establishing an objective morality which is recognised by all creatures who bear his image and explains why East of Eden the world feels like the wild, wild West.

Privation is similar to the postmodern concept of deconstruction where larger metaphysical truths are torn into smaller incoherent pieces. Privation prevents us from seeing the forest for the trees and instead of becoming park rangers guarding a metaphysical Truth, we become lumberjacks logging trees to build our own “truths.” Sadly, when we cut down God’s “very good” we end up paving paradise with a postmodern parking lot, in the words of Joni Mitchell’s classic song. 

One can only subtract from God’s “very good” if one has moral agency, which gets nature gets off the hook but then turns all eyes on either God or his image bearers. Nature didn’t choose to be bad but became so when we started privating her prior goodness.

Vacuuming up morality

Morality cannot be conducted in a vacuum because morality requires relationships. While God gave a “good” stamp of approval to every created thing, it wasn’t until they were in relationship with one another that the world became morally “very good.” God sequentially introduced three key relationships; the first was between God and nature, followed by God and man, and then humans with other humans, each of which required defined relationship parameters. God established physical boundaries of form and order for nature which it should not transgress. God set a divine boundary beyond which mortal men should not venture. God distinguished humans from nature by creating them in his image and giving them caretaking responsibilities. And finally, God made all humans equal by giving each one transcendent image bearing worth. In other words, God from the very beginning established an objective morality governing these relationships which can be known by all who possess moral agency.

Temple officiating

Temples are holy places where God and man meet through priestly intercession. Priests are the middlemen commissioned by humans and sanctified by God to create harmony in God’s world. Interestingly, theologian John Walton in his book, The Lost World of Genesis One suggests that the Genesis creation story is an example of “cosmic temple inauguration.” If he is correct then humans, composed of earthly dust and heavenly breath, are priests in this cosmic temple serving as intermediaries between a spirit God and a physical world. As it turns out, God not only declared that his creation was “very good” because of its functional integrity, but also because he had just created image bearers capable of officiating in his cosmic temple. 

Critics of Christianity suggest that dominion, subduing, and tending rather than priestly vows were loopholes designed to give the human clergy permission to fleece the environmental congregation. However, God’s command for humans to have dominion wasn’t permission to be overlords but rather to assume their role as priestly intermediaries. God’s command to subdue nature wasn’t permission to use it for our own selfish purposes but to treat it as sacred instruments of temple worship. Finally, God’s command to tend the Garden wasn’t license to engage in poor farming practices but to diligently maintain the ecological health of the cosmic temple. While it could be argued that nature is perfectly capable of functioning without humans, I would argue that without humans it is incapable offering praise to its Creator and without consecrated priests to intercede on its behalf, natures hymns become dirges and her songs of praise are reduced to groans. 

Defrocked priests

Sadly, humans disrupted the moral universe by reorganizing the temple hierarchy and instead of graciously accepting their priestly appointment traded in their vestments for royal crowns; rather than serve nature they forced it to take a knee. Humans, tasked with bringing God and nature together, only succeeded in offending them both. Dirckx’ Broken Planet argues that there are spiritual realities behind the apparently mechanical natural world: 

“Whatever the particular position taken, be it the ‘natural law’, ‘human fall’ or ‘pre-human fall’ view, the foundations are the same. Nature’s brokenness cannot be explained merely in natural terms. There are also spiritual reasons for disasters and diseases.” 

‘In the beginning God’ took the chaos of possibility and balanced it with the actuality of order and then placed humans on the borderline to guard it. However, Adam and Eve, seeking higher ground from which to monitor the situation, climbed the highest tree in the Garden, only to find the air too thin for mere mortals clouding their vision and allowing chaos to snake across the border. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil can also be understood as the Tree of the Knowledge of Order and Disorder and once humans took a bite, they became full of themselves and concluded that manning a guard post was beneath their station, and instead took artistic license with God’s warnings and started dancing on the edge. Nature saw humans rise to their level of incompetence and groaned because they had very little confidence in the ability of defrocked priests to officiate in the cosmic temple.

Dirckx eloquently summarised the problem by quoting Rousseau: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” 

Nature, unable to be properly pruned of its thorns and thistles by qualified gardeners, began to blow a bit harder than was needed, overwater the ground and shake more than was tectonically necessary. Unable to confess its transgressions to a consecrated priest, it continued to violate its boundaries all the while groaning along with St. Paul, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate”. (Romans 7:15)

Evolution portrays humans as the pièce de résistance of natural selection so it would seem unusual for our evolutionary progress to be punctuated by pangs of guilt for messing up the planet. The atheist may dislike my talk of trees with special knowledge bringing down mankind but at least it explains why we feel the world falls short of our expectations, why humans are ultimately responsible and why nature is depending on us.  

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Temple restoration 

We all recognise that the underlying good of the natural world has gone bad. We can intellectually justify the appearance of hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes by pointing out how important they are for the planets ecological health but have a difficult time explaining our contempt when they use excessive force. I find the atheist argument lacking because it would seem odd that after millions of years of an evolutionary process characterised by ecological tumult we would get bent out of shape over pain and suffering. Sadly, even when they do find pain and suffering horrendous their only solution is to expect more of the same.  

The Biblical narrative, whether you consider it archetypal, figurative or actual, has a better story to tell addressing both the intellectual and emotional challenges of a world where nature occasionally misbehaves. It explains why we groan when nature groans but also offers both short term and long term solutions. In the short term it tells us suffering doesn’t get the last word because it can always be redeemed, and in the long run it promises cosmic temple restoration once we stop living as wilderness orphans, reclaim our birthright as God’s children and perform our temple chores without complaining.  

“For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved.” (Romans 8:20-24)

Empty promises

Christians may have issues with theodicy or the ‘problem of evil’, but atheists must deal with atheodicy and ask why their omnipotent evolutionary creator wreaks such havoc to get what it wants? I fear for the atheists who successfully rid the planet of God because when they do, they will lose the imaginary whipping boy they routinely take their anger out on when a tornado tears through a town, a hurricane devastates a city, or a tsunami kills thousands. 

The problem with the atheist critique is that it attacks what Woodford calls the “omni-max” God and conveniently leaves out God’s other superpower, “omni-emptying”. Theism may generally have a problem with the God of the ‘Omnis’ allowing evil in the world, but Christianity worships a God who put sandals on the ground, walked a mile in our shoes, and experienced the very evil they find so disturbing. The New Testament is full of warnings about the suffering we will encounter. Therefore, if you lose your faith because God allows suffering, then you haven’t read the Bible. The early Christians weren’t sold a bill of goods but knew exactly what they were signing up for and they embraced it.  

Christians shouldn’t get sucked into defending a God who is so full of himself that he cannot be emptied. Atheists will try convincing us that God is nothing but an empty promise, but Christians believe that the real promise was the emptiness of Christ on the Cross. In the end, the question isn’t why God allows suffering but why in the world he would take it on.

“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:5-8)

Erik Strandness is a physician and Christian apologist who practised neonatal medicine for more than 20 years and has written three apologetic books, The Director’s Cut: Finding God’s Screenplay on the Cutting Room Floor, Cry of the Elephant Man: Listening for Man’s Voice Above the Herd and God Spoke: Bridging the Sacred Secular Divide with Divine Discourse. Information about his books can be found at godsscreenplay.com.