Does Evolution Make the Problem of Evil Harder?

It is actually special creation that makes the problem of evil harder

As mentioned above, Old Earth Creationists typically accept the same progression of life that the fossil record shows. But instead of accepting the evolutionary claim that today’s species all have common ancestors if you go back far enough, they claim that God created all the species separately in the order that the fossil record shows. That would require an extraordinary number of miraculous interventions by God (there have been millions and millions of different species).

At BioLogos we don’t doubt that God has worked miraculously outside the system of natural causes, but the overwhelming pattern we observe in Scripture is that God uses miracles as “signs and wonders” to point people to the Kingdom of God. What would be the Kingdom rationale of specially creating dinosaurs instead of letting them evolve from earlier reptiles? No one was there to see that sign and wonder.

An even bigger difficulty with the special creation view, to my mind, is that it leads to the disturbing perception that God constantly intervenes in the natural world to create at the species level, but not to protect creatures from pain and suffering. The problem of evil is more difficult to understand if we believe that God has already intervened millions of times to disrupt what would have otherwise happened “naturally”.

Evolution is not wasteful, but a lavish way to create

Finally, many people think evolution exacerbates the problem of evil because it is such a wasteful process. Why would God use a process for creating what he ultimately wants that meanders around and appears to be remarkably inefficient? Over 99% of all species that have ever lived have gone extinct. Doesn’t that make the problem of evil harder?

First of all, extinct species are a problem whether or not you accept the science of evolution. There is no debate (even among Young Earth Creationists) that the species alive today represent only a tiny fraction of those that used to live. Next, calling this process wasteful assumes that the only purpose for all these extinct species was to get to the ones we have today. That treats them as expendable and without value in and of themselves.

Instead, we can see the evolutionary process as consistent with God’s lavishness in creation. Many, many more kinds of things have lived and flourished over the vast stretches of evolutionary time than could possibly exist at one time on Earth. The fact that most of them eventually died out (some after thriving for millions and millions of years) does not take away from their unique way of reflecting the glory of their Creator for a time.

Over the centuries we have continually discovered that God’s creation is more extensive than we had previously imagined: from Western civilization around the Mediteranean, to discovering many other civilizations around the globe; from thinking Earth was the center of the universe, to discovering that we are just one planet around our sun, which is just one star out of billions in our galaxy, and that our galaxy is just one out of billions in the universe (and now some suggest there may be just as many other universes!).

Uncovering the vast stretches of evolutionary history and the multitudes of previously unknown creatures is another step in our understanding the expansiveness of the created order. It seems that God simply delights in creating lots of things. To call these millions of extinct species a waste is to massively misunderstand this aspect of what God has done. Instead, let us praise God for the wonders of his lavish creation.

The existence and persistence of evil will never be easy for us to understand—let alone to experience. These quick reasons I’ve given here don’t settle things. But I hope they at least point toward the possibility that there are legitimate ways of understanding the science of evolution in the context of a robust Christian faith.