Van Huyssteen J.W. (editor) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

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ETERNITY

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profess that God is eternal and many of them be-

lieve that eternal life is the prospect of human life

in the wider context of the divine life. However,

believers, theologians, and philosophers disagree

about the meaning of these professions. With the

declaration “God is eternal” religious believers ex-

press their faith that God encompasses all time for

them as creatures because divine life has all the

time it needs without beginning or end. God is

present at any time in the course of history; divine

existence is everlasting, so it endures without any

possible limitation. This notion of eternity is found

in biblical literature.

The word eternal, meaning “everlasting,” can

be used in a strong and weak sense. In the strong

sense it refers only to God with the entire divine

reality, which always has existed and will exist

without end. In the weak sense eternal might be

used to describe creatures that enjoy eternal life

that has a temporal beginning but will have no

end. Human beings have their creaturely con-

straints (birth and death), and it is God’s grace

when they (or their soul) receive eternal life be-

yond death, which is life in relation to the eternal

God. Apart from these meanings, eternity is some-

times used in a nontemporal way: To live sub

specie aeternitatis means to lead one’s life accord-

ing to eternal ultimate normativity.

Theologians and philosophers often disagree

about how to interpret eternal. Many of them un-

derstand “God is eternal” as affirming “God is

wholly timeless.” So they imagine the divine being

as outside time, without a temporal location (a mo-

ment of existence), and without duration (a period

of subsistence). There is an anthropological argu-

ment pro timelessnes, presupposing a realistic the-

ory of time (time flows and exits independent from

events) that runs as follows: Human life is limited

both by the borderline cases of birth and death

(moments) and by the periods of its past, which

are no longer available, and of its future to which

it has no access. As temporally living beings, hu-

mans are imprisoned in time, continually losing

parts of their lives (present events). Such an “im-

prisonment” in any temporal series is considered to

be a denial of the perfectness of the divine being.

Therefore, the Roman philosopher Boethius (c.

480–524) equated God’s perfect eternal life with

timelessness: “eternity is the instantaneously whole

and perfect possession of illimitable life.”

So far, the argument entails that God knows

everything simultaneously because the past, pres-

ent, and future of God’s life are instantaneously

grasped in all its relations to creation. Therefore,

the past, present, and future are all present to God

in one divine point of view. Boethius illustrates

God’s point of view outside of time with the image

of a person standing on a mountaintop who sees

what happens along the road in the valley. That

person sees, as it were, simultaneously the past,

the present, and the future of people walking

along the road. The mountain metaphor, however,

makes unequivocally clear that this all-encompass-

ing simultaneity spatializes the concept of time:

God observes all temporal relations between

events as if they were spatial relations between

objects in a landscape. If the omniscient God

knows all the events of past, present, and future si-

multaneously, God is simultaneous both with these

individual events in order to observe them, and

with the sum total of these events because God

must be outside of time to observe the temporal

series as a unity. Because divine knowledge is true

by definition, God’s observation of the temporal

order is how it “really” is; all events are simultane-

ous, synchronized. In other words, the notion of a

causal chain as a temporal structure is useless be-

cause causes and effects are simultaneous, which

makes the temporal order arbitrary and causal cir-

cularity a serious option. This appears to be equiv-

alent to the assertion that time has no temporal

metric and merely a spatial topology. Given this re-

construction, time is merely illusion or appearance

(in line with an idealistic theory of time). And

therefore, the temporal “imprisonment” human be-

ings might experience is illusory as well. Without

coping with such issues, a timeless view of God’s

eternity is incoherent.

For classical theists, however, eternity con-

ceived as sempiternality (of never-ending duration)

raises several theological problems. Divine essence

cannot be identical with existence because a tem-

poral God continually loses part of being as past

and is not fully actual because of the divine future.

Moreover, a temporal God cannot be simple be-

cause the divine existence is composed of past,

present, and future, each with its own logic. Lastly,

to reach the present for a sempiternal God takes an

infinite amount of time, subdividable in a finite and

an infinite part ad infinitum. These interpretations

of essence and simplicity, however, are disputed,

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whereas the third issue misses the existential point

that there is no moment in history in which God is

absent. The use of temporal language has the ad-

vantage that it can make sense of the notion of di-

vine action and involvement in history.

Contemporary theologians like Wolfhart Pan-

nenberg (1928– ) and Jürgen Moltmann (1926– )

argue that God’s future already exists (in a tense-

less sense) from which God acts in the present, a

movement opposite to the arrow of time. So God’s

eternity is an entering in time in which everything

is shaped by and from God’s future, which is de-

clared to have ontological priority over past and

present. However, God’s action from God’s future

implies that all past, present, and creaturily future

are simultaneous with God’s future. Thus, in God’s

view, the complete history of created reality ap-

pears to be a timeless block universe, whereas

from the perspective of creatures history is experi-

enced as temporally ordered. Pannenberg inter-

prets the divine eternity as simultaneity, the perfect

possession of the fullness of life, which is claimed

to be the opposite of timelessness. Both the whole

of creaturely history and this divine life is present

to God in such a way that God’s eternity embraces

the totality of time.

See also LIFE AFTER DEATH; TIME: RELIGIOUS AND

PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS

Bibliography

Craig, William Lane. “Omniscience, Tensed Facts, and Di-

vine Eternity.” Faith and Philosophy 17 (2000):

225–241.

Helm, Paul. Eternal God: A Study of God Without Time.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Leftow, Brian. Time and Eternity. Ithaca N.Y.: Cornell Uni-

versity Press, 1991.

Moltman, Jürgen. The Coming of God: Christian Eschatol-

ogy. London: SCM Press, 1996.

Padgett, Alan. God, Eternity, and the Nature of Time. New

York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Pannenburg, Wolfgang. Systematic Theology, Vol. 3. Grand

Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman’s, 1998.

Pike, Nelson. God and Timelessness. London: Routledge

and Kegan Paul, 1970.

Stump, Eleonora, and Kretzmann, Norman. “Eternity.” The

Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): 429–458.

Stump, Eleonora, and Kretzmann, Norman. “Eternity,

Awareness, and Action.” Faith and Philosophy 9

(1992): 463–482.

Swinburne, Richard. “God and Time.” In Reasoned Faith:

Essays in Philosophical Theology in Honor of Norman

Kretzmann, ed. Eleonora Stump. Ithaca N.Y.: Cornell

University Press, 1993.

LUCO J. VAN DEN BROM

ETHICS

See ALTRUISIM; MEDICAL ETHICS; MORALITY;

ECHNOLOGY AND ETHICS; VALUE

ETHNICITY

This entry probes the intersections of religion and

science from a cultural perspective. Culture and

ethnicity are crucial to the ongoing dialogue about

meaning, nature, and the role of humankind in the

cosmos, Historically, it was assumed that dominant

cultures provided the only reliable scientific

methodologies and theological interpretations.

This preoccupation with rationality, objectivity,

and neutrality relegated the wisdom of indigenous

people to myth and mystery. Yet scientific findings

are more congruent with ancient wisdom than

modernist deductions. Ancient intuitions hint at a

universe that is expansive rather than exclusive,

connected rather than isolated.

Both religion and science offer intriguing in-

sights about the universe, culture, and human na-

ture. Both disciplines, however, have been com-

plicit in the oppression of racial/ethnic people.

Historically, religion was used as a catalyst for

domination, wars, atrocities, and abuses of hu-

mankind are still perpetrated in the name of God.

In North America, Christian slave masters hoped

that Christian conversion would encourage slave to

accept their fate. The promise of freedom in

heaven relieved owners of the need to redress im-

mediate and grievous breaches of human rights.

During the civil rights movement, it was the unified

efforts of local clergymen who urged Martin Luther

King Jr. to slow his initiatives for justice.

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Theological discourses also rely upon prob-

lematic dyads of light and dark to signify good and

evil. This is done even though biblical texts refer to

a God who is identified with light but who also

dwells in darkness. People live in a world that is

seduced by light, intrigued by its properties, and

theologically persuaded that evil is synonymous

with darkness. This paradigm allows people with

dark skin to be deemed pariahs and strangers

within the world community.

Despite cultural assumptions to the contrary,

most scholars agree that race is not a biological or

physical category, yet racial perceptions persist.

Race always develops within a matrix of superiority

and inferiority. Distinctions based on color, physical

traits, or ethnicity mask issues of power, fear of dif-

ference, and social control. Those who envision an

egalitarian society in the twenty-first century will

be challenged to use all of the resources at hand to

deconstruct mythologies about race.

Seekers of justice usually rely on the dis-

courses of religion to describe their visions of free-

dom and reconciliation, but reject the metaphors of

science when they try to delineate the contours of

the beloved community. Even though both science

and religion incorporate issues of power, hierar-

chy, and the assignment of inferiority, ethnic com-

munities have a historical mistrust of scientific con-

tributions to issues of race.

In scientific circles, eugenics attempted to tie

social constructions of inferiority to physical attrib-

utes. In the eighteenth century, Swedish botanist

Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1708) created “scientific”

racial classifications and descriptive characteristics.

In the nineteenth century, Louis Agassiz

(1807–1873), a Swiss-born Harvard professor, ar-

gued that human beings do not share a common

ancestry (monogenism); instead, he argued that

God created the races as separate and distinct

human categories (polygenism). On the medical

front, the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments con-

ducted at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama from

1932 to 1972 allowed syphilis to advance untreated

in African-American male subjects despite the

eventual availability of penicillin. Nazi experiments

on Jewish prisoners are also ignominious moments

in history.

The sciences also influence social institutions,

laws, and theological perspectives. As physicist

Nick Herbert notes, Isaac Newton’s description of

the world “as a giant clock” was translated in cul-

tural contexts into “atomicity, objectivity, and de-

terminism” (p. xi). A rigid and mechanistic view of

the universe influenced political and social initia-

tives that oppressed those deemed to be at the bot-

tom of the hierarchy. The case can be made that

both science and religion can reflect the best and

the worst in human culture.

Despite these problems, the quest for justice is

not just a social and spiritual construct; it also re-

flects the view of the universe and the human task

within the cosmos. Accordingly, liberation initia-

tives require the resources of both science and re-

ligion. The questions change when science and re-

ligion inform discussions of race and ethnicity.

What does race mean in a scientific context, when

darkness is no longer an indicator of inferiority,

but instead becomes a cosmological metaphor for

the power and predominance attributed to dark

matter? Biology teaches that social separations

based on difference are false. People are con-

nected through a common human ancestry and

genome. Cosmology teaches that separation is not

the way of the universe. Instead connections that

defy rational processes abound. By means of the

Uncertainty and Complementarity Principles,

physics demonstrates that observations and at-

tempts to know other humans connect people at

the most fundamental levels.

Conflicts based on race, ethnicity, gender,

class, or sexuality are power struggles that attempt

to define social acceptability through force or ap-

propriation of the public narrative. The addition of

religious and scientific concepts and discourses

offer a rhetorical corrective to social and legal the-

ories about life in diverse and multicultural spaces.

See also ANTHROPOLOGY; EUGENICS; LIBERATION

THEOLOGY; WOMANIST THEOLOGY

Bibliography

Herbert, Nick. Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics.

New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1985.

Montagu, Ashley. Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fal-

lacy of Race, 6th edition. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Al-

taMira Press, 1997.

Rothman, Barbara Katz. The Book of Life: A Personal and

Ethical Guide to Race, Normality and the Implica-

tions of the Human Genome Project. Boston: Beacon

Press, 2001.

BARBARA A. HOLMES

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EUGENICS

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EUGENICS

Eugenics is a science that aims to purify the gene

pool, especially of humans, by controlling repro-

duction to assure the birth of offspring with de-

sired traits. The roots of eugenics go back to an-

cient Greece, where Plato’s Republic lauds

procreation by the best parents. The term eugen-

ics, derived from the Greek word eugenes (good in

birth), was first used in 1883 by the British scientist

Francis Galton. Advocates of eugenics sought to

counter Charles Darwin’s theory of natural evolu-

tion with human-controlled outcomes. American

biologist Charles Benedict Davenport (1866–1944),

founded the Eugenics Records Office at Cold

Spring Harbor, New York, in 1910. Davenport’s

work there led some of the first research in human

eugenics during the early 1900s.

Environmental eugenicists emphasized prena-

tal care and a clean environment to ensure “posi-

tive” eugenics. Negative eugenics reached its apex

during the Nazi regime (1933–1945) in Germany,

which sterilized and murdered the “racially unfit.”

By the late twentieth century, eugenics and the

Holocaust were linked. Yet earlier, some states and

the U.S. government mandated sterilization for per-

sons with severe genetic disabilities, and immigra-

tion laws in 1924 sought to reduce the number of

immigrants from areas considered less desirable,

such as eastern and southern Europe. In the 1950s,

and most dramatically since the 1980s, human ge-

netics replaced eugenics as the accepted approach

to planned reproduction. Genetic counseling and

sophisticated screening for genetic or chromoso-

mal diseases or disorders inform parents about re-

productive options. Will labeling fetuses “defec-

tive” or “less desirable” reintroduce selection by

abortion, voluntary sterilization, or birth control?

Some feminists and liberal religious groups em-

brace freedom of reproductive choices, while per-

sons with disabilities, Roman Catholics, and con-

servative Protestants fear that it will lead to a

disregard of human life from conception forward.

With the completion in the year 2000 of the se-

quencing of the human genome, determining ge-

netic anomalies or, some say, even the genetic

roots of destructive social behavior will trigger the

wide dissemination of genetic information. Confi-

dentiality becomes crucial. Some fear that human

hubris, like that exhibited by the mythic figures

Prometheus or Pandora, will engineer the engineer

as well as the engine along an unknown track. Eu-

genics merged with genetic engineering produces

scientific triumphs, moral challenges, and fears

about things like human germline alteration and

dissemination of pathogenic bacteria. There are

dangers in policies of noninterference (as plagues

and epidemics testify) as well as in genetic en-

hancement in which the definition and social poli-

cies establishing the “fit” are externally, rather than

individually, determined. The slippery slope argu-

ment suggests that once certain traits are screened

(e.g., color blindness or skin color) they will be

eliminated or altered. The challenge is to deter-

mine the difference between therapeutic and eu-

genic measures.

At heart, one’s definition of moral dilemmas

surrounding eugenics is affected by one’s view of

knowledge as neutral or value-laden. If “improv-

ing” the human condition is a laudable end that

genetic engineering can achieve, then this knowl-

edge is good. Some believe that obligations to fu-

ture generations and exorbitant health care costs

provide a moral mandate to screen and treat cur-

able diseases. Is consideration of supremely com-

promised fetuses, profoundly disabled persons, or

comatose elderly from the perspective of financial

and social burdens a sign of a highly moral soci-

ety or an irresponsible one? Hermann Muller, for

one, argues that the gene pool is at risk without

positive eugenics, while Gregory Pence argues in

Classic Works in Medical Ethics that even with

sperm and eggs from genetically “superior” fathers

and mothers, predicting “perfect” children is un-

certain at best.

See also ABORTION; BIOTECHNOLOGY; DARWIN,

HARLES; ETHNICITY; GENE PATENTING; GENETIC

ENGINEERING; GENETICS; GENETIC TESTING;

UMAN GENOME PROJECT; PLATO; PLAYING GOD;

EPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY; SOCIOBIOLOGY

Bibliography

“Genetics and Faith.” The Park Ridge Center Bulletin 13

Jan/Feb (2000).

Kass, Leon R. “The New Biology: What Price Relieving

Man’s Estate?” Science 174 (1971): 779–787.

Muller, Hermann J. “Genetic Progress by Voluntarily Con-

ducted Germinal Choice.” In Man and His Future, ed.

Gordon Wolstenholme. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963.

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National Institutes of Health. Draft National Institutes of

Health Guidelines for Research Involving Human

Pluripotent Stem Cells. Bethesda, Md.: NIH, 1999.

Pence, Gregory E., ed. Classic Works in Medical Ethics:

Core Philosophical Readings. Boston: McGraw Hill,

1998.

Reich, Warren Thomas, ed. Encyclopedia of Bioethics, rev.

edition. New York: Macmillan, 1995.

ABIGAIL RIAN EVANS

EVANGELICAL THEOLOGY

See CHRISTIANITY, EVANGELICAL, ISSUES IN SCIENCE

AND

RELIGION

EVIL

See EVIL AND SUFFERING; THEODICY

EVIL AND SUFFERING

Evil is whatever frustrates or opposes goodness,

and goodness is what is, or ought to be, desired by

conscious rational agents. Suffering is thus one sort

of evil, since no conscious rational agent would

desire to suffer, just for its own sake. Other sorts of

evil lie in the frustration of the aims and goals of

rational agents (one might also include the aims of

God, and some would include the aims and goals

of any beings whatsoever, insofar as they could

reasonably be said to have aims or goals), or in

factors that restrict the normal activities and dispo-

sitions of rational or sentient agents.

Buddhism

The faith that most obviously takes the fact of evil

as one of its basic starting points is Buddhism,

whose first noble truth is that “all is suffering”

(dukkha). This is not merely the view that there is

much frustration and suffering in life. It is the view

that material existence essentially involves suffer-

ing, so that no enduring happiness can be found in

such existence. Not only is there the obvious suf-

fering to be experienced in birth, disease, and

death. There is the fact that pleasure is short-lived,

misfortune is always possible, and the transitory

nature of time itself means that the past is lost for-

ever, the present cannot be held fast, and the fu-

ture is always tinged with anxiety. The one who

sees deeply into the nature of things will therefore

see that only in the acceptance of total transience

can any stability be found. All things are empty of

enduring substantial existence, and there is not

even an enduring substantial soul or self that re-

mains the same throughout all change. All things

are in perpetual flow, interdependent and perpet-

ually perishing. Dukkha is the first noble truth of

the Buddhist way, which sees suffering and evil as

the basic human problem, which may, with some

difficulty, be overcome.

Buddhists are not usually concerned with an-

swering the question of how suffering arises. It is

just there, a fact of existence. However, the cause

of suffering is said to be the sort of desire that con-

sists in attachment to finite things—wishing to pos-

sess them, or bemoaning the lack of them. So it

might be said that suffering is intrinsic to a world

in which attachment and desire are possible. In

addition, specific sufferings are caused by karma,

by the accumulated attachments of many past ex-

istences. So it might be held that souls “fall” into

this world of the senses, of transience and time,

because of desire, and they have to work out the

consequences of their desires over many lives until

they achieve liberation from the wheel of rebirth—

samsara—and, all desire exhausted, never again

experience rebirth.

Karma and moral causality

Insofar as rebirth is essential to Buddhist belief,

there needs to be a spiritual or mental part of

human nature that is capable of rebirth. There

needs to be a form of moral causality in nature,

which ensures that actions have appropriate con-

sequences in future lives. And there needs to be

some form of correlation between practices of

morality and meditation and the achievement of

those higher mental states of mindfulness, com-

passion, and bliss, in which the practitioner ap-

proaches liberation, or nirvana.

To devise precise and measurable tests of

these claims is, however, extremely difficult, if not

impossible. Neurophysiology may lead to the es-

tablishment of links between brain and mental

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functions, but it is highly disputable whether it can

establish either that mental functions are nothing

but brain functions, or that they can have separate

existence. At present, evidence suggests a high de-

gree of correlation, in a rather general sense, be-

tween brain states and mental states. But attempts

to show, for example, that there can be “out of the

body” experiences, are viewed skeptically by most

scientists. While claims that complete physical ac-

counts of mental activity are possible are viewed

equally sceptically by most philosophers.

Similarly, attempts to establish or disprove re-

birth are unsatisfactorily vague or uncontrolled.

The alleged evidence for memories of past lives is

highly contested, and the theoretical difficulty of

aligning souls that have highly developed propen-

sities and desires with appropriate genetic materi-

als may suggest that a completely new individual is

created with each random combination of genetic

material at fertilization, but it is hardly conclusive.

Most physicists would probably think of laws

of nature as operating in an impersonal, universal,

and morally neutral way, thus throwing doubt on

the existence of any general principles of a morally

ordered causality, which could ensure that all per-

sons get the just deserts that their past lives have

accumulated. Scientific views have developed in

contexts in which rebirth has not been a major

issue, and the belief is at present beyond the com-

petence of the physical sciences to determine. It

may even be held that the study of discarnate men-

tal states is beyond the competence of science al-

together. Buddhist appeals to laws of karmic con-

sequences, and to the causal connectedness of

desire and suffering, to explain the existence of

evil and suffering, must be regarded as coherent

and possible, even though they are in some ten-

sion with the world-view, if not with the particular

established findings, of the natural sciences.

There are far less metaphysically committed

forms of Buddhism that might regard belief in re-

birth itself as an irrelevant question. They may not

seek theoretical explanation at all, but remain con-

cerned only with the practical question of how to

overcome suffering and attain mindfulness and

equanimity. In that case, Buddhism would be al-

most entirely a matter of moral commitment and

mental discipline aiming at enlightenment. Evil and

suffering would be purely practical problems, and

would not be subject to scientific evaluation, ex-

cept possibly for psychological tests to determine

whether Buddhist techniques of meditation pro-

duce the desired results.

Hindu traditions

Belief in karma and rebirth is common to most In-

dian religions, and so in general an explanation of

the occurrence of suffering is given in terms of the

consequences of wrong acts or attachments in past

lives. However, most Indian traditions are theistic,

with devotion to one or more gods as central to

their practice. Sometimes the gods are regarded as

caught up in the cycle of samsara just like human

beings. They have finite existences, which are

much happier and longer-lasting than those of hu-

mans. But they will come to an end, and even the

gods may fall down through the chain of beings

into greater suffering, if they do not attain final

liberation.

Those Indian traditions that are fully monothe-

istic (such as the two major traditions of Saivism,

worship of Siva, and Vaisnavism, worship of

Vishnu) usually identify the highest god with Brah-

man, the absolute reality, and assert that in some

sense all things are one with, parts of, or expres-

sions of Brahman. Since Brahman, appearing as

the Supreme Lord, Isvara, is perfect in wisdom, in-

telligence, and bliss, and is the cause of the uni-

verse, there is a “problem of evil” in those tradi-

tions. The problem is how a perfect being can

originate, or even be identical with, a universe so

full of evil and suffering.

This is not usually felt to be a severe problem,

however, since Brahman, though perfect in intelli-

gence and bliss, contains the potentialities of all fi-

nite things in its own infinite reality, and those po-

tentialities necessarily manifest themselves in the

origination of an infinite number of worlds. The

combination of a necessary manifestation of all

possible realities, and a karmic law by which all fi-

nite souls receive the consequences of their own

choices through a huge succession of embodied

lives, effectively draws the sting out of the problem

of evil. The imperfect manifests by necessity from

the perfect, which remains changeless and unaf-

fected by all imperfection. And in the realm of the

imperfect, it is the acts and desires of finite souls

themselves that cause both their suffering and

happiness. The Supreme Lord is not responsible,

and can in no way be blamed, as though he had

chosen to inflict suffering on helpless and innocent

creatures.

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Very traditional or literalist readings of the

Hindu scriptures may lead to tensions with evolu-

tionary biology, since they depict a degeneration

from an earlier golden age, when the gods were

more intimately known, to the present. There may

also be difficulties with belief in rebirth, since the

number of human souls now in existence exceeds

that of past history, and according to most scientific

accounts there were millions of years when no

souls existed at all. However, Hindus say that re-

birth can take place in many different worlds or

planes of existence. This cosmos is only one of an

infinite number of worlds in which souls might be

reborn in various forms. Moreover, Hinduism is not

committed to literalism any more than Christianity

is. In general the Hindu view is that evil and suf-

fering arise from ignorance (avidya) of the truly

spiritual nature of reality, and the mistaken belief

that souls are essentially material. This view entails

no particular account of the past history of this cos-

mos, since souls may have existed in other planes

of being. To the extent that the natural sciences

allow for such a belief in the ultimate primacy of

spirit, and for belief in rebirth, and to the extent that

Hindus interpret the classical myths as legendary,

the Hindu account of evil and suffering as due to

karmic fruits of action raises no particular problems

for the relation of religious and scientific beliefs.

Semitic religions

The Semitic religious faiths ( Judaism, Christianity,

Islam, and their offshoots) have a different account

of the human soul. They do not think, as most In-

dian religious traditions do, that souls exist without

beginning or end, and are reborn in countless

forms. They believe that human persons are

formed of dust—they are material, and begin to

exist with, or some short time after, the conception

of a genetically unique individual. This means that

the theory of karma is not available to the Semitic

faiths to explain evil and suffering. Furthermore,

since Semitic religions interpret creation as the

freely chosen act of an omnipotent God, there is a

serious problem about why there is evil and suf-

fering in the world at all.

It could be held, and often Jews and Muslims

do hold, that the creator is beyond assessment in

moral terms. The divine nature is inaccessible to

human understanding, and it is impious to ques-

tion God or to judge whatever reasons for creating

God might have. That, however, clearly raises the

question of whether God can be called good. Ac-

cording to such a view, there are three main senses

in which an omnipotent and incomprehensible

creator could be called good. First, God can be

good because God is the supremely desirable ob-

ject of rational choice. God is desirable above all

things. The divine being is unsurpassed in beauty,

wisdom, knowledge, and power, and is supremely

good in the sense that a beautiful picture might be

called good.

Second, God is merciful and compassionate,

showing mercy to thousands of those who love

him, and God can forgive sins and help and support

whomsoever he wills. God is also rigorously just,

and will visit the sins of the fathers on the third and

fourth generation of their descendents. The divine

will is simply unquestionable. But God will be mer-

ciful to those who sincerely seek to obey his will.

Third, God offers incomparable rewards to the

just. At the day of resurrection, he will condemn

the unjust (perhaps not for ever), but grant to the

just unending life in paradise, a share in the world

to come, which will make all the suffering of this

life as nothing by comparison.

Theodicy and science

Such a view does not seek to offer any reason why

evil and suffering exist, rooting them in the un-

fathomable will of God. For many people it is dif-

ficult, however, to think of God as truly just when

so many innocent beings suffer so much. And to

some, appeal to rewards after death cannot com-

pensate for immense suffering in life, when an

omnipotent God could presumably have abolished

such suffering. So attempts have often been made

to justify the ways of God to men, with varying de-

grees of success.

At this point the natural sciences, perhaps sur-

prisingly, offer a certain amount of help. It would

be almost impossible to understand the universe if

events in it did not occur in accordance with gen-

eral and predictable laws. So a condition of scien-

tific understanding, and of the growth of the abil-

ity to adapt and control our environment, is the

existence of general laws of nature, which will be

both mathematically precise and virtually universal

in scope.

Such laws are “nested” in an extremely com-

plex way, so that the elementary and highly unsta-

ble forces of the subatomic world form stable

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atoms and molecules at a higher level. These in

turn form the solid bodies and organic unities that

are found at the level of human perception. And

they make possible the formation of central nerv-

ous systems and brains, which are the conditions

of consciousness and eventually of rational agency.

Thus the natural world seems to be a developing

system of levels of emergence, whereby on the

basis of a few elementary laws and particles com-

plex communities of rational agents can come into

being. These agents are not alien intrusions into

the material world. They are its highest emergent

forms, and manifest the amazing capacity of matter

to come to understand and shape itself.

The development of quantum mechanics

strongly suggests that there is a deep interconnect-

edness in nature, whereby each part is connected

with every other, and it is not possible simply to re-

move even a few electrons, and leave the rest of

the universe unchanged. In other words, one can-

not just change a few parts of the universe for the

better, and otherwise leave everything as it is. Ei-

ther you have the system as an interconnected

whole, or you have something completely differ-

ent. To put it bluntly, as a rational agent, a human

soul, who is an integral part of this material uni-

verse, either you exist in this universe, with all its

faults, or you, as the precise and unique individual

you are, do not exist at all.

At the level of biological existence, as it is

presently understood, humans have come to exist

largely by the operation of the principles of ran-

dom mutation and natural selection. It is as if living

things shuffle through the possibilities of existence,

creatively seeking new forms of adaptive life. Con-

sciousness and creativity are perhaps, as bio-

chemist and theologian Arthur Peacocke (b. 1924)

suggested, inherent potentialities or propensities of

matter, which will be realized in time through the

shuffling and adaptive processes of natural selec-

tion. Human nature is essentially the product of

these processes, and the lust and aggression of

humans, as well as their interdependence and al-

truism, has been built up through the adaptive

process over many generations of evolution. Being

parts and products of this natural process, humans

cannot be basically different from what they are,

creatures that are partly competitive and violent,

and partly cooperative and loving.

If the universe disclosed by the sciences is

roughly like this, its basic nature will include the

operation of general laws of nature, the emergence

according to such laws of consciousness and

agency, the existence of humans as an integral part

of a general system that cannot be different from

what it is, and the gradual evolution of humans

through processes of mutation and competition.

Evil and suffering will be ineliminable from such

an evolutionary world-system. Destruction and vi-

olence are built into the system from the decay of

nuclear particles to the explosion of supernovae

and the elimination of life-threatening organic

competitors.

The moral of the story is that God cannot cre-

ate human beings without creating a universe like

this, with all its evil and suffering, of which such

beings are an integral part. In this sense the natu-

ral sciences offer a sort of theodicy, the giving of

reasons why a good Creator might create a uni-

verse with suffering in it. It might be wrong to

think that God can create absolutely anything we

can imagine—human beings in a universe without

suffering, for example. There could be beings in a

universe without suffering, but they would not be

human. They would not be us. So if human exis-

tence is worthwhile, maybe the suffering in this

universe has to exist.

For some contemporary scientists, like Steven

Weinberg, human existence is not worth-while

enough to justify so much suffering. Or maybe evo-

lution is seen as too random or accidental to be

purposive. To these scientists, chance and necessity

are enough and rule out any idea of a good God

who chooses to create the universe. But this may

not be a strictly scientific judgment. A good God

could create this universe, if the suffering in it is a

necessary condition or consequence of an over-

whelmingly great good—and such a good might be

the creation of rational agents who could enjoy

eternal fellowship with one another and with God.

This conclusion would be strengthened if the

creation of a universe like this was somehow nec-

essary to God, as flowing from the changeless di-

vine nature. At this point most theists insist that the

act of creation must be free, not compelled, and

must be intended, not accepted reluctantly by

God. But when speaking of the divine nature, the

distinction between freedom and necessity may

not apply—some theologians suggest that God is

necessarily what God freely chooses to be. As long

as God is not compelled by some external or un-

desired force, the act of creation may be both free

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and necessary—as the being of God itself may be.

As Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–1275) put it in his

Summa Theologiae, God’s willing is identical with

God’s essence, which is necessarily what it is. Yes,

as Aquinas notes, this is compatible with God’s

freely creating the universe.

Thus evil and suffering may be in some way

necessary to the creation of humans. In traditional

terms, evil and suffering are privations of good-

ness, not positively intended states. This is a view-

point to which scientific investigation of nature

makes a positive contribution.

Other explanations in theistic traditions

In the Abrahamic traditions, and especially in the

Christian tradition, there has always existed an-

other explanation for suffering—it may be the re-

sult of the maleficent or egoistic actions of rational

beings. Satan is an angelic being whose evil is per-

haps the cause of natural evils like earthquakes,

and he successfully tempted Adam and Eve to dis-

obey God. From a primal Paradisal state, Adam

and Eve were ejected into the harsh world of an al-

ready fallen nature. In the Western Christian view,

all their descendents were born in original sin,

guilty before God even at birth because of the sin

of their ancestors. Suffering and death entered the

world mainly as a result of Adam’s sin, and are

now punishments for moral evil.

This literalist interpretation of Genesis (not ac-

cepted in this form either by Jews or by Eastern

Orthodox Christians) is obviously at odds with any

evolutionary account, for which suffering and

death were intrinsic parts of the biological world

long before humans even existed, and for which

there is no paradisal world at the beginning of

human history. Most Christian theologians now re-

gard the Genesis accounts as legendary, and rein-

terpret the fall in terms of a general human condi-

tion of moral weakness and ignorance of God,

which was caused or intensified by the moral and

spiritual failures of the first humans.

Some theologians, like Paul Tillich, regard the

fall as a necessary part of human evolution, which

requires an epistemic distance between humans

and God to enable moral autonomy to exist. Oth-

ers think of the primal human estrangement from

God as originally due to voluntary moral failure,

though now all humans are born into an estranged

society, and so not onto an equal moral playing-

field. In contrast to Jews and Muslims, most Chris-

tians insist that reconciliation with God cannot be

achieved by good works, but requires divine

grace, or some act of divine self-sacrificial love,

which was manifest supremely in the life and

death of Jesus.

It is generally held in all Abrahamic traditions

that much evil and suffering is caused by the free

immoral acts of past and present human beings.

Such an account can easily be held together with a

commitment to the necessary possibility of such

evil, and its actual existence to some degree.

Human moral evil would be seen as intensifying

the amount and degree of actual evil and suffering.

Evolutionary biology requires some revision of

traditional views, especially of original sin. How-

ever, it offers a helpful account of how moral fail-

ure follows naturally, if not inevitably, from the

dispositions to lust and aggression that are part of

the human biological inheritance and have been

necessary conditions of human dominance in the

processes of natural selection. On a literalist bibli-

cal account, it is hard to see why the first humans

should have sinned against God at all, except by a

sheer irrational act. But in an evolutionary context,

sin becomes the natural expression of biologically

inbred tendencies. Such expression becomes “sin”

only when expressed in opposition to divine com-

mands to love and reconciliation. One still cannot

explain why humans sin—that is a free and there-

fore inexplicable choice. But one can give good

reasons why they might sin—it is an inherent pos-

sibility of their nature, and offers temptations of

sensual desire that might well, though they should

not, counteract the impulse to love God, which

also, according to this hypothesis, lies present,

though perhaps only implicitly, in their biologically

evolved nature.

A third explanation for evil and suffering in

theistic traditions is that they are not the natural

consequences of egoistic acts, but punishments in-

flicted by God for moral evil. This explanation has

played a part in much religious thought, and bibli-

cal narratives often connect natural and human dis-

asters with lack of obedience to God’s law, while

happiness and long life are seen as rewards for

obedience. The scientific perception of laws of na-

ture that are not morally ordered, of the chance el-

ements involved in natural selection, and of the bi-

ological basis and the possibility of medical

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treatment for most diseases has largely led to the

collapse of such views. In the Bible it was also per-

ceived that God causes rain to fall on the just and

on the unjust, and that the innocent suffer. Any

easy equation of immorality and suffering is un-

dermined by the Book of Job. While it is not ab-

surd to posit a general tendency toward altruistic

acts to produce happiness, and toward egoistic acts

to produce suffering, the attribution of diseases to

demonic influence, and of natural disasters to di-

rect decisions of God to punish sin, has largely dis-

appeared from informed theological debate.

Conclusion

Perhaps the greatest influence of modern science

on these matters has been the supercession of be-

lief in the direct causal acts of good and bad spir-

its by belief in the general operation of impersonal

laws of nature. God’s action in the world is largely

seen in the setting up of a general system in which

good is effectively selected and evil becomes fi-

nally self-destructive, rather than in continual di-

vine interventions in nature. Particular divine ac-

tions (miracles) need not be denied, but they will

be, almost by definition, very occasional transcen-

dences of the usual processes of nature for a spir-

itual purpose, not the normal causes of happen-

ings in the universe.

All these traditions accept that evil and suffer-

ing are either necessary or the result of freely cho-

sen acts, and that in either case one should seek ei-

ther to abolish evil and suffering or to overcome

them by altruistic action, non-attachment to selfish

desires, and perhaps by devotion to God. Science

does require a reconstruction of traditional ways of

formulating these positions, but it is reasonable to

see the scientific view of nature as helpful in de-

veloping a deeper religious understanding of the

place of suffering in the world, and offering more

effective practical ways of overcoming it.