Readings for The Problem of Evil Session 3: Darwin's Wasp and the Problem of Animal Suffering

Steph
Apr 23, 2024
3 min read

Updated: Apr 24, 2024

Colleagues,

Once again, thank you for your engagement with the logical problem of evil.

We are leaving Mackie and Plantinga behind! Since we have (somewhat!) tied up loose ends on the logical problem of evil, we will turn to another expression called the evidential problem of evil. Whereas the logical problem of evil submits that there is a logical impossibility given the existence of both God and evil, the evidential problem of evil asks: Given certain types of evil in the world, what is the probability of the existence of a God with certain properties? What might those properties be? We will begin our adventure with a doozy of a consideration: The existence of animal suffering and evolution. Draper and Rowe trace the parasitic wasp that so troubled Charles Darwin and outline the problem of animal suffering via evolution. Coakley provides a response.

Required:

Draper, Paul. “Darwin’s Argument from Evil” from Scientific Approaches to the Philosophy of Religion, edited by Yujin Nagasawa (2012), 49-69.

Coakely, Sarah. “Evolution, Cooperation and Divine Providence” from Evolution, Games and God: The Principle of Cooperation (2013), 376-383.

Optional:

Rowe, William. “The Evidential Argument from Evil” from “Evil and Theodicy,” from Philosophical Topics 16, no 2 (1988).

In “Darwin’s Argument From Evil,” Paul Draper adopts the evidential form and moves to assert that Darwinian theories of natural selection function as a more effective account of the vast amounts of animal suffering when paired with a no-design hypothesis than when paired with orthodox theism. Draper begins by distilling Darwin’s notion of evolution into two assertions: 1. That it is true that complex life arose from simpler life and 2. That this complexity arose through natural selection. Natural selection, more specifically, is the notion that evolutionary changes result from “competition for survival, random variation, and heredity.” Draper observes Darwin's troubled relationship with religion in light of his discovery of natural selection. Notably, one of Draper’s primary objectives in his paper is to reclaim Darwin’s evidential argument from hard atheism and demonstrate that Darwin had identified specific tensions between an omnipotent personal designer and natural selection, rather than rejecting theism/deism wholesale. Draper reframes Darwin’s argument from evil and posits that, although Darwin rejects the notion that a belief in natural selection directly necessitates atheism, natural selection and orthodox theism are nevertheless in tension.
In "Evolution, Cooperation, and Divine Providence," Coakley refutes the notion that natural selection promotes competition, and argues that natural selection actually produces animals that exhibit cooperation, costly self-sacrifice and even forgiveness. She goes on to say that the development of cooperation is something she takes to be “deeply inculcated in the propulsion of evolution,” and can be observed through things like the emergence of in-group altruism or the care of the young and weak animals at great personal cost to healthy, able bodied animals. If this were to be the case, we would have good reason to reconsider Draper and Darwin's perspective on animal suffering.
*optional* William Rowe is a well-known exponent of the evidential argument from evil. Although it is logically possible that God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting the evils in our world, Rowe develops the case that it is not likely to be a morally sufficient reason for some, perhaps many, evils of which we are aware, For a deity who is perfect in power and goodness, a morally sufficient reason for a given evil would be that its occurrence is necessary in order to obtain a greater good or to prevent an evil that is comparably bad or worse. Rowe cites specific cases of evils for which we can think of no morally sufficient reason, that is, evils that an all powerful and all good God could have prevented without losing a greater good or allowing an equivalent or worse evil. In the following piece, he uses the example of a natural evil: a fawn trapped in a forest fire and suffering for days before finally dying a horrible death. His basic point is that it seems quite unlikely that all such horrible evils are necessary for bringing about a greater good or for preventing an even more monstrous evil. In Rowe’s argument, the facts of evil are marshaled as evidence against the claim that God exists: if an all powerful, all good God exists, then pointless evils (i.e. evils for which there is no morally sufficient reason) would not exist.