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| THE GROANING OF CREATION: GOD , EVOLUTION AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL (Westminster John Knox Press, 2008) |
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In the summer of 2005 I had the privilege of watching orcas from an open boat in the Juan de Fuca Straits between Vancouver Island and Washington State. To see these magnificent creatures (sometimes called killer whales) at close quarters, and to hear their communications on hydrophones, was an unforgettable experience. Power, beauty, community, mystery, all were there in the ten minutes or so of the ‘pod’ passing. More, these creatures were utterly fluent and masterful in an environment, the ocean, to which human beings are only tentative and limited visitors. I could not help be reminded also of Holmes Rolston’s description of orcas hunting down a sealion, tossing it playfully in the air, prolonging its agony, before it was killed.
Reading later about the Vancouver Island orcas, I learned that they are salmon-eaters, but that ‘transients’ also come into the same waters, orcas who exhibit the predation on sealions and other mammals to which Rolston referred. Apparently underwater recording equipment is now sufficiently sophisticated to distinguish the two kinds of orca – and the prey animals also can. Dolphins will swim alongside the fish-eaters, but ‘have been known to hurl themselves up the beach in a suicidal frenzy to escape the mammal-hunting orcas.’
Out in the buffeting Pacific swell I give thanks to God for power, beauty, community and mystery in creation, and drawing a deeper breath I give thanks too for the creation that contains the murderous play, and suicidal frenzy of escape, and human beings’ steadily gathering knowledge of these things through the enterprise we call science.
And there, in a parable, is the matter of this book. I seek to show that the evolving creation is an ambiguous place with an ambiguous history, and that God may be both praised and questioned when God’s creation is contemplated honestly. I write as a Christian theologian, presupposing that the world was created out of nothing by a God we can describe and relate to as Trinity. What follows is in no way an effort to prove the existence of such a God – rather it is an exploration of models of the triune God in relation to creation, and of what that means for human beings. Above all it is an exploration in theodicy, it poses the question, how can God be understood as good, just and loving in a world full of suffering? But beyond that I also seek to ask – what is the human calling in respect of this ambiguous world, so out of the last two chapters come also proposals in environmental ethics.
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