The Best of All Possible Worlds?

Enlightment era philosopher Gottfried Leibnitz (1646 - 1716) believed that this is the best of all possible worlds. He was rightly ridiculed by Voltaire, for this is certainly not the best of all possible worlds, but a world of unfulfilled potential, a world of suffering.

We suffer because we are finite creatures in a world where certain interactions cause decay, injury, and death. While finitude is a necessity of being a created being—since only God is without limitations-- and suffering arises out of our finitude, this does not mean that suffering is a necessity. There could, theoretically, exist a reality where beings are both finite and without suffering. This reality, we hope, is heaven. But what about here and now? Why would God create a world full of death? Some attempt to say that God did not create the world this way, but that the world was corrupted as a result of the fall. However, acceptance of evolutionary theory precludes a literal reading of the creation story, nor was the story ever intended by its author(s) to be read as such. So if God did not create a perfect world that then became corrupted by human sin, how did the world become what it is?

Though I am neither a creationist, nor a follower of intelligent design theory, it seems to me that evolution could not happen without the (loosely) guiding hand of God. If adaptation of a species occurred in order to aid that species' survival, it seems that a greater intelligence, or perhaps at least an empowering force, would be necessary to cause that change. Stated differently, perhaps God's Spirit, which guides all life forms and encourages their lives, gives creatures the ability to evolve. However, perhaps this adaptation is still in some way a matter of freedom for the creature itself, whatever that may mean. Rather than God unilaterally imposing God's own design scheme onto the created order, God allows the created order to co-create with God. Thus the creation account depicts God as saying “Let the earth bring forth . . .” God's covenantal nature is such that God empowers creation to participate in the creative process, even allowing it to make mistakes, accounting for the “waste” that scientists generally say accompanies evolution. This would make the evolutionary process both guided and random at the same time, and would account for both the waste and the complexity, the violence and the beauty.

But why change at all? Why not just a creation of single celled organisms? God was not lonely and in need of humans to fill a need in God. Rather, Christian theology asserts that creation exists to participate in the love that God is. It is good that other beings take part in and enjoy God. Perhaps, then God was guiding creation to this point, to the point when it could actively acknowledge and participate in God's love. Perhaps there will be some form beyond us that can manage the task more adequately than we have. Perhaps, as Teilhard de Chardin believed, the resurrection itself is that next form of evolution, though it is most assuredly a different form.

To conclude, creation by nature is finite, and suffering and death arise out of the order that our particular created order has come to be. It seems, however, that there could exist an energy source (like the sun) that feeds, but does not destroy and an interaction of various living creatures that does not require death, but exists in a life giving reciprocity. I cannot speculate what that world would look like practically, just that the suffering of the present age does not nullify the possibility of an age to come where we remain finite, but where suffering is absent. It is possible that the world could be without death. This is good news. Death is not inevitable. However, death still plagues us. We are subject to its inescapable grasp, but it can be minimized and avoided. We can make “earth as it is in heaven” to a degree. Just as the universe's imbalance (a term I am using to describe to the evolution of death) came to be through freedom, even at the simplest level, so we can now choose to do things differently. We can share food with the hungry, clothes with the naked, and water with the thirsty. We can use technology that is sustainable. We can have less children in order to accommodate the “dominion” of humanity to the earth's finite capabilities. All of this we do, not just to preserve life, which is good in itself, but as a way of looking forward toward the promises of God. As we hope for these promises, so we live empowered to alter humanity's course for the benefit of all creatures with whom we share the earth.