Theodicy and divine love

The often, and justly, quoted phrase from the first letter of John in the New Testament, ‘God is love’ (1 John 4.16) can be misleading, if it leads one to think that there is a loving being who will do everything to prevent creatures from harm. The facts of animal predation, viral pandemics, suffering of all sorts that predates human existence by millions of years – all these things seem to suggest a Creator who is morally indifferent, not wholly loving.

The problem of theodicy is, of course, an old one, but attention to the facts of cosmic and biological evolution that have been uncovered by modern science helps to provide an approach to it that is not so old. Such an approach will by no means resolve all the agonizing human problems about suffering, but I think it does at least show that there is no contradiction between the facts of suffering and the existence of a Creator God.

This is nevertheless a controversial claim, since evolution, nature ‘red in tooth and claw’, as Tennyson described it, is often said to render the existence of a loving deity unnecessary or impossible. This, however, is partly because the facts of conscious human experience are sometimes discounted in recent philosophy, being regarded as little more than an accidental by-product of electro-chemical events in the brain. Yet it is with human perception of the world that all scientific knowledge begins. It is with concern for the values of truth and mathematical elegance that scientific knowledge progresses. And it is through the exercise of creative theorizing and experimentation that scientific knowledge is used for the improvement of human life.

Knowledge, valuation and purposive action are distinctive human capacities, and necessary conditions of scientific thought, and of all human experience. Modern science itself depends on giving these values a prominent place in any account of what the universe is like. Yet they are not properties of purely physical phenomena. Electrons, even huge combinations of electrons, do not understand, evaluate and act in order to achieve a goal.

These mental capacities are not reducible to purely physical description, yet they seem to emerge from simpler physical phenomena. Modern cosmology explains this in terms of cosmic evolution. From a primordial ‘Big Bang’ of unconscious and undifferentiated simplicity, the universe progressively unfolds its potentialities for understanding, appreciating and directing its own nature.

That this has happened is uncontroversial. That it has happened by unforeseen accident is a hypothesis that defies common sense. Although it is fashionable to deny purpose in the universe, it is clear that understanding, beauty and consciously experienced well-being are properties of great intrinsic value, properties worth existing just for their own sake. They were always potential, in this cosmos. For humans, they stand as ideals that in their fulness are yet to be attained. They are hard to attain, and perhaps, as Aristotle said, they are rarely attained by many or for long.

It is a reasonable and defensible view that these are not subjective preferences arbitrarily concocted by human beings. They are objective ideals, possibilities of intrinsic value, rooted in the primal possibilities of being.

In this sense, I would say that axiology is an important part of ontology – among the things that exist, objective values rank highly.

These ideals can helpfully be seen as forms of love – the love of knowledge, understanding and wisdom (philosophia), the love of beauty, creativity and sensibility (philokalia), and the love of empathy and creative fellowship with others (philanthropia). It is in this way that, at its beginning, this cosmos contained the potentiality for love, a potentiality of intrinsic value that it has unfolded progressively over a period of billions of years.

This picture of cosmic evolution makes possible an understanding of the place of love in the cosmos. Yet it also poses problems. For evolution seems to progress by the elimination of the unfit, and by mutations that are often harmful.

This does not look like a process guided step by step by an all-powerful God. Nor does it look like pure chance, which is highly unlikely to produce successively more complex and integrated forms of life. It looks like a process that is destined to produce intelligent life, but which involves competition and destruction, as well as cooperation and creativity. The cosmos progresses towards a goal obtainable only by endurance and struggle.

Such a cosmos must have a generally predictable structure and future – be lawlike – but also have many alternative paths – be partly ‘open’. For that reason, the present cannot be perfect and complete. The present has to be partly potential, unfinished, and at least to a degree uncertain. In modern biology, it is often said that mutations are copying errors in DNA that are purely random. This is, however, a misleading use of the terms ‘random’ and ‘error’. A truly random event would be totally unpredictable, like an elephant instantly changing into a banana, or just disappearing into thin air. That would be truly random. Mutations of DNA are not like that. They are strictly governed by more basic quantum laws. Those laws allow for probability – which can in principle be precisely quantified, for example by the Schrödinger equation – not for randomness.

Since mutations are probabilistic, they often lead to dead ends or are harmful to organisms. Nevertheless, some mutations are beneficial, and so positively contribute to the development of more complex integrated forms of life. These mutations need not be seen as ‘copying errors’; they can more positively be seen as the explorations of possible life paths. Many will fail, but the system is such that remarkable new patterns of life will emerge. Without such explorations, creative development will not occur.

The biological processes of mutation and natural selection, vitally important though they are, are also complemented by other factors, one of which seems to be a vector, a probabilistic inclination, towards greater complexity and integration, a vector towards value.

Biological evolution proceeds by an interplay of two main forces, both of which are necessary to creative development. One is the drive to survival and self-preservation. The other is the drive to cooperation and self-sacrifice. These forces can be mutually reinforcing. For instance, organic bodies are best preserved when antibodies cooperate to destroy attacking viruses (which are themselves, of course, seeking to survive and replicate). But the forces often conflict, and this conflict is seen in the battle between viruses and antibodies for dominance.

When intelligent life forms exist, these forces engender a tension between conscious self-love and social altruism. It is at that point that the existence of moral conflicts in human life becomes apparent. The possibility of such conflicts is a condition of creativity, and of the precarious yet ideally harmonious coexistence of self-realization and social good. The cost of such creativity is the real possibility of suffering and harm.

Given this general context, one can think of God as the ground of all possibilities, and of those ultimate values or ideals that would provide good reason for actualizing an entangled universe. Yet there may be much suffering and conflict, resulting from the alternative paths taken in the world because of the causal and purposive choices of finite intelligent agents. The world is an entangled relational society of many diverse individuals who project various, often conflicting, exploratory futures for themselves. In doing so, they are influenced both by their past histories and by their present relationships to others. The influence of ideal values (the will of God) is present, not as an all-determining cause, but as one influence among others. Taking into account all these influences, persons make creative decisions about their future themselves.

In these ways, our modern understanding of the cosmos is compatible with and, for many scientifically competent persons, strongly suggestive of an emergent, creative and self-realizing value-oriented process productive of many diverse intrinsic values. I can think of five main principles that underlie this understanding.

First, there is the principle of creativity. There is a great and unique value in the attainment of value by personal creative effort, and thus in the existence of a largely self-shaping cosmos, in which finite agents play a major part in forming the future.

Second, there is the principle of relationship. There is a great value in cooperating personal relationships. One ideal that can be envisaged is the existence of a social community of consciously cooperative and compassionate persons. That could involve a long process in which conflicts and difficulties occur, but the final attainment of the goal may still be assured.

Third, there is the principle of (a somewhat restricted) plenitude. It is a good thing for many varieties of goodness to exist, even if some varieties entail the possibility of disvalues, as long as the good is otherwise unobtainable, and overwhelmingly outweighs the bad.

Fourth, there is the principle of entanglement. The universe has to be envisaged as a whole, not as a mere collection of separable parts. Within such wholes, it is plausible to think that possible states are so entangled that positively good and possibly harmful states are inseparable. One example is the creation of heavy atoms such as carbon in the fusion that takes place within stars. This is an intrinsically creative process, without which life as we know it would not be possible, but it will be harmful to any being that happens to be too near a star. The same goes for earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, in which processes that help to maintain the earth’s stability are also very destructive to life forms near them. Only a complete understanding of the interwoven structures of a given cosmos would show just why this is the case. But it seems likely, and many cosmologists think it is true, that the sort of carbon-based life forms we are could not exist within any other cosmic structure than this.

Fifth, there is the principle of emergence. It is good that potentialities should be successively actualized through a novel and yet intelligible process. Think of all possible good states ranged evaluatively, from simple and unconscious physical states to the existence of complex conscious and loving communities. We could then construct an ordered series of states of increasing value, complexity and integration. This would be an intelligible but genuinely creative series. It could be seen as a series originating in bare existence (formless matter), which, however, has potentialities that are progressively drawn out by an ideal of perfection. This is a basically Aristotelian image, given new force by an evolutionary perspective, of which he could have had no knowledge. This series would have great value even when there was no consciousness within the universe, for a supra-cosmic mind (the mind of God) would always appreciate its beauty, intelligibility and order. As consciousness arises within the universe, a true communion of being, of relational consciousnesses united in the pursuit of understanding, beauty and love, would begin to exist and, hopefully, grow. This principle would allow many diverse and positively related states to exist, and would encourage creativity and relatedness to develop in an intelligible way.

Given these principles, we could say that God creates a world of emergent self-realizing individuals whose purpose is to achieve final union with the divine, thereby realizing the nature of God as love. The conclusion would be that God is love, not as a person who protects all his children from harm, but as the demand, the power and the promise of love, in an entangled and emergent world that has been disfigured by hatred, greed and ignorance, but is destined finally to share in the divine nature.

There is clearly much to be done in working out these principles in detail, and they are by no means certain or absolutely compelling. Yet they do suggest that belief in a God of love, understood in some sense like this, and probably accepted for quite different reasons (mainly because of personal experience), is consonant with the best results of modern evolutionary science. Cosmic evolution is not the enemy of faith. It can be of great help in understanding the ways of God in a tragic yet ultimately hope-filled world, a world the nature of which the death and resurrection of Christ express sublimely. ¹