The Soulful Eye

Here’s a blurb from Michael Lloyd, addressing some issues he sees with theodicies in which natural evil (including animal pain and suffering, predation – both inter and intra-species, etc. ) is addressed from an instrumentalist position, i.e. it’s bad but necessary.

Thirdly, the instrumental answers diminish the praise-worthiness of God.  It is one of the privileges of the church that ‘you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light’ (1Peter 2.9).  It detracts from those praises if it was God who put us in that darkness in the first place.  Could we muster wholehearted praise for a God who rescues us from a situation God had deliberately created from the outset?  The prophetic promise that the wolf will lie down with the lamb (Isa. 11:6-9) is seen as one of the grounds and causes of universal proclamation and praise (Isa. 12.1, 4-6).  But if it were God who set up the structures of predation and violence originally, how genuine would be the gratitude of creation?  Austin Farrer speaks of God as ‘our rescuer from that whirlpool, in which all things, whether good or evil, senseless or sentient, are sucked down’.  Yet if God created that whirlpool and placed us within it, how fulsome will be our praise?   T.F. Torrance can speak similarly of how ‘The purpose of the Incarnation … was to penetrate into the innermost center of our contingent existence, in its finite, fragile and disrupted condition, in order to deliver it from the evil to which it had become subjected, healing and re-ordering it from its ontological roots and entirely renewing its relation to the Creator,’ because he believes that we should not ‘regard evil and disorder in the universe as in any way intended or as given a direct function by God in the development of God’s creation’. What the instrumentalists have in common, however, is a belief that natural evil does have a direct function in the development of God’s creation.  They cannot therefore speak in the same way of God rescuing God’s creatures, and our praise of God the Redeemer must correspondingly be weaker.

I think the statement “Could we muster wholehearted praise for a God who rescues us from a situation God had deliberately created from the outset?” gets at my biggest problem with instrumentalist approaches.  That’s Stockholm Syndrome.  I can see evolution by itself leading to the psychology behind empathy and morality but evolution is a thing that you can’t put a tri-Omni God in front of as a literal first cause.  So far, it looks to me like this is the one place where you actually destroy the tri-Omni concept of God when you insert him as a causality.  When you add a conscious causality to evolution, when you say there was a choice to use evolution, that causality becomes a monster.  On that model, a conscious being, something we refer to as a person, uses not just some people but the whole of creation as mere means.   That’s selfish and I’ll give you that that’s how people can be.   In fact, we consider people who embody that fully and completely to be monsters and we call them psychopaths and sociopaths.  The people who most fully  ”manifest instrumentalism” if you will, are monsters.  We can’t say that people, much less anything about the rest of the world, are inherently valuable and deserve to be treated as ends and then at the same time say we get that from God.  By definition instrumentalist positions posit God as a being who uses everything as mere means.  If we treat other people, other creatures as ends in and of themselves, and if we value that as a good, then it seems that we don’t get that from an instrumentalist God, we get that in spite of an instrumentalist God.

Fourthly, the instrumental answers drive a wedge between creation and redemption.  Either predation and pain were, and remain, God’s eternal purpose for creation, in which case redemption is unnecessary, undesirable, and impossible; or they were part of God’s temporary purpose for creation, in which case creation and redemption seem to point in worryingly different directions.  C.W. Formby draws out the problem with this latter position: it implies, he says, that ‘God, having continued the organic process as a purely constructive method for countless ages, upon the self-centered principles of ruthless competition and instinct-control, sought in later stages to unmake what He had made, by spiritual influences, by recourse to the moral teaching of the Bible, and by the power of the Incarnation’. ‘Thus,’ he concludes, ‘the method attributed [by this position] to God amounts virtually to self-contradiction.’

Michael Lloyd, “Are Animals Fallen?,” in Animals on the Agenda: Questions About Animals for Theology and Ethics, eds. Linzey and Yamamoto (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 152-153.