Abstract
Nicola Hoggard Creegan, Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil, Oxford University Press: Oxford and USA, 2013; 224 pp.: 9780199931842, £35.99/$55.00 (hbk)
Nicola Hoggard Creegan’s Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil is a welcome addition to the literature on the problem of evil. Animal suffering is often overlooked in discussions of evil and it is excellent to see Hoggard Creegan grappling with the subject.
The strength of the work is that she sees that the suffering and pain of animals is an awkward problem for Christian theology. She suggests that what we see in nature is ‘the wheat and the tares’ (p. 13), the good and the corrupted. Interacting with the theological and philosophical responses to evolutionary evil, she draws upon an array of sources from John Calvin to Process Theology to Michael Murray and a range of evolutionary theorists. Addressing the ambiguity of the created world and the theological sources for a theology of evolution she argues that some evil predates humanity. She then considers the implications of the ambiguous creation for evolutionary theory and suggests that faith requires seeing God in nature, even if, rather paradoxically, God is hidden. Much of the treatment is discursive and unsystematic, suggestive rather than cogent.
Hoggard Creegan concludes with a chapter on the ethical implications of her argument or lack of it. It is here that the weakness of her position becomes apparent. After concluding that dominion entails a human responsibility for the animal kingdom, she becomes rather sketchy on the details of what this responsibility entails. She suggests that living in an ambiguous world means that ‘we are never ultimately going to bring about the restoration of the kingdom of God’ (p. 161). Therefore, good will always be linked with evil.
But it is one thing to grasp the ambiguity of the world, quite another to see how we should move beyond it. While she argues that becoming vegetarian is an ‘ideal’ and a pointer towards the kingdom of God, she fails to grasp the logic of her position. If, as she maintains, non-violence is God’s will it is difficult to know why she does not advocate the most elementary way in which one can secure this, namely, by refusing to eat flesh foods. Moreover since we know that meat-eating causes a great deal of suffering to individual sentients, it is difficult to know why vegetarianism isn’t required as an essential token of moral seriousness. Hoggard Creegan’s argument that hospitality requires eating unethical food is to say the least a little strained. If hospitality is the norm, why stop at animal food?
All in all a fresh and intelligent discussion, but one that is flawed by her unpreparedness to grasp the very logic of her own position.