The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails by John W. Loftus

Author:John W. Loftus [Loftus, John W.]
Language: rus
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-05-24T23:11:00+00:00

his chapter is about sentient nonhuman animals, all of them, both domesticated and those in the wild. Typically the animal kingdom in its most loosely stated definition includes every living thing in distinction from the plant kingdom.' In this world they suffer, sometimes horribly, because of the natural law of the jungle, as well as at the hands of human beings. Upon the supposition of Darwinian evolutionary biology, this suffering is natural. It's what we should expect to find. But upon the supposition of Christian theism, this is not what we should expect to find. I'll argue that the existence of animal suffering cannot be reconciled with the Christian faith and is one of the strongest reasons to reject it.

WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?

In 1859 when Charles Darwin published his work, On the Origin of Species, the world learned how all life is interconnected through the evolutionary process of natural selection, stretching back billions of years in time. From Darwin's detailed scientific investigations we learned that humans are directly related to other animals, especially to chimpanzees, who share 98.5 percent of our exact genetic makeup. We are not special to earth's ecosystem either. We depend on each other. It could no longer be said, except in the ignorant Bible-thumping pulpits of the world, that we were created instantaneously by divine fiat on one day of a divine workweek.

Rehearsing his own process from being a Christian to agnostic, Charles Darwin laid out what I'm calling the Darwinian Problem of Evil. In his autobiography he wrote:

That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Some have attempted to explain this in reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings, and these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement. A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create this universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the suffering of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent First Cause seems to be a strong one; whereas ... the presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.'

This argument is expanded upon by Christopher Hitchens, who states it with rhetorical flare. Based upon the claim that "at least 98% of all species on this tiny speck of a planet made only a few hesitant steps 'forward' before succumbing to extinction," Hitchens asks: "What kind of designer or creator is so wasteful and capricious and approximate? What kind of designer or creator is so cruel and indifferent?"3 Hitchens also argues that we not only have the problem of nonhuman animal suffering up until to the first Homo sapiens.

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