After my last article, “Gorillas’ Rights and Atheist Wrongs,” I received a good number of responses—not all in favor of my report of Dawkins’ emotion-based argument for protecting Gorillas.  Of course, none of those opposing me actually addressed the issue itself (I suppose it is hard to come to the intellectual aid of admittedly emotion-driven claims), instead, they offer what they seem to believe are effective comebacks.  One of these comes from “Boris,” who, while not addressing the point that atheism and Darwinism ultimately reduce morality to teary emotionalism at best, brings up a related point about animal cruelty among animals themselves, and the implications he thinks this has for my faith.

Boris writes, I would like to ask the writer of this article whose idea it was that most of the animals in the world should spend the better part of their lives being terrorized by and finally murdered and eaten by other animals. Is that the writer’s idea of intelligent design?

The temptation is to be flippant and say it was Adam’s and Eve’s idea, though I don’t think they thought of the full consequences when they ate the fruit and introduced sin of all kinds into the world. But the larger answer is just that simple: the basic bestial emotion is that of fear—fear of competition for food, fear of each other—and fear is the result of sin.

Boris is not the only person to have noticed this problem.  He quotes Charles Darwin:
“There seems to me to be too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficient and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with a mouse.” - Charles Darwin.

There is no doubt in my mind that since the Fall of Man, and the subsequent fall of fear upon the animal world, animals have developed and evolved into ever more effective carnivores and predators. This is one area that “natural selection”—which simply involves “struggle” in the natural world—really does explain matters.

Boris, however, believes that evolution explains everything. He continues:

A God that would create a world like this is not a very moral or even intelligent God. Given omnipotent power I certainly could have come up with a better plan than this. Isn’t nature much better explained by evolution that imagining that this is the best an omnipotent being can come up with?

I’ll deal with the “I could have done it better than God” claim another day, and for now chalk it up to the pride of fallen man (Is. 14:12–15). The greater issue here is the idea that this world is the best that God could do.

The classic episode of this argument came from the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), who is credited with creating the mathematical discipline of calculus separately, though slightly later, than Isaac Newton. Leibniz claimed that God created the world, and that God is good, and that since this is the world that this good God has chosen to create, then therefore this world must be “the best of all possible worlds.”

The phrase was later taken to task and ridiculed by Voltaire, whose classic Candide: Or, the Optimist tells the story of a young man who encounters a philosopher with Leibniz’s view (Dr. Pangloss).  The young man then endures or witnesses every form of misery, beating, war, murder, shipwreck, and the killer 1755 earthquake of Lisbon, all screaming that this world isn’t that great after all. Take that Leibniz.

Boris is simply trying to remind us—pointing to the ravenous animal world—that this is not the best of all possible worlds. While I do not have time to write an entire theodicy (justification of God), there are a couple Biblical points related to this issue which rarely get discussed.

First, God did not create the world this way.  The world He created was “very good” (Gen. 1:31). Rather, His created man and woman turned against Him in free disobedience, and He, faithful and good to His word, punished them and their domain—the entire creation. This is no longer the “best of all possible worlds”; it is a fallen world.

But the Apostle Paul adds something to this discussion. God was certainly not unconcerned or even uninvolved when His creation fell, rather, He had already accounted for it happening:

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God (Romans 8:20–21).

God did not create the world “red in tooth and claw,” but He allowed it to be subjected to that state, in order that He may redeem it, and transform it even more glorious than before. We know that this world shall be made New, and Paul is speaking here of the “whole creation” (Rom. 1:22).

This is why the prophecies of the millennium include changing the nature of the animals:

And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, And the leopard will lie down with the young goat, And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; And a little boy will lead them. Also the cow and the bear will graze, Their young will lie down together, And the lion will eat straw like the ox. The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra, And the weaned child will put his hand on the viper's den. They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain, For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord As the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:6–9).

Boris thinks that evolution explains the world.  If he is right, then there is no hope of ever changing the beastliness of nature or of man. The struggle of natural selection will rule the day. In an atheist universe, change can only come through struggle, force or Revolution—never through Reform of a person’s nature. Nature cannot fundamentally change nature; only something above and beyond nature can do that.

In God’s plan, man’s nature is changed, first, and further reformed and refined over time. In God’s future, even the planet and the animals will be redeemed.  The atheist world has no such hope.  The Christian world stands on it.