Isn't evolution cruel and evil? Natural selection weeds out the weak, and is driven by limited resources making nature red in tooth and claw which means that there has been an unspeakable amount of animal suffering and death in the history of life on Earth.
I think that the answer to this objection can be found in the following article by Michael Murray:
I think that the answer to this objection can be found in the following article by Michael Murray:
| animal.pdf |
Here is William Lane Craig's helpful summary of that article:
| summary.docx |
Isn't evolution inefficient and wasteful?
First of all, efficiency is only a concern for someone with limited time and limited resources, and in the case of God, He has neither limited time nor limited resources. Moreover, from the above two documents on the nature of the awareness of pain experienced by animals, we have seen that God has not been cruel to the history of life on this planet even though 99 percent of all life has gone extinct. But do we have any positive reason to think that an intelligent and efficient God would use evolution instead of creating life miraculously on Earth? In fact, there is a false dilemma here which says: if it is intelligently and efficiently designed then it must be the result of a direct causal act of God or else if it is natural, then it is inefficient, unintelligent, wasteful, and the like. However, there is a third alternative, namely, God could use evolutionary processes in an intelligent and efficient manner. Moreover, I think we have a positive philosophical argument to expect God to providentially use natural causes and events to bring about the features, properties, objects, things, etc. on Earth and in the universe at large (see my section on the argument from scale for more on that) and the following article (also by Michael Murray) does an awesome job of explaining why:
First of all, efficiency is only a concern for someone with limited time and limited resources, and in the case of God, He has neither limited time nor limited resources. Moreover, from the above two documents on the nature of the awareness of pain experienced by animals, we have seen that God has not been cruel to the history of life on this planet even though 99 percent of all life has gone extinct. But do we have any positive reason to think that an intelligent and efficient God would use evolution instead of creating life miraculously on Earth? In fact, there is a false dilemma here which says: if it is intelligently and efficiently designed then it must be the result of a direct causal act of God or else if it is natural, then it is inefficient, unintelligent, wasteful, and the like. However, there is a third alternative, namely, God could use evolutionary processes in an intelligent and efficient manner. Moreover, I think we have a positive philosophical argument to expect God to providentially use natural causes and events to bring about the features, properties, objects, things, etc. on Earth and in the universe at large (see my section on the argument from scale for more on that) and the following article (also by Michael Murray) does an awesome job of explaining why:
| murray-natural-providence-reply-to-dembski.pdf |
Most shocking and awe-inspiring is that we can literally reconstruct the billions of years and sequence of events that transpired on Earth in the manner in which they actually occured in order to 'look and see' whether or not it is probable to think that an intelligent designer would endorse, or go about bringing Earth, and the life on Earth into existence in the manner in which the various sciences inform us on what really happened. (Everything contained here also belongs in my response to the argument from scale).
| was_earth_and_its_inhabitants_inefficiently_brought_about1.docx |
Lastly, I think evolution may plausibly be metaphysically necessary as a means of 'creation' since there aren't any laws of nature in biology, and this also means that biological organisms do not have essences, and if on one construal of what a law of nature amounts to derives from things having an essence, then it seems that God may have had no choice so to speak but to create biological life in 'real time' as opposed to creating life on Earth ex nihilo.
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