147 147 8 Cosmic Evolution and Evil Christopher Southgate Introduction to Cosmic Theodicy This chapter will concern itself with what the sciences tell us about the structure and unfolding of the cosmos and the implications of those accounts of natural processes for the problem of evil. I shall be writing as a Christian theologian about the problems evil poses for a Christian understanding of the loving character of God, confessed as the creator and redeemer of the world. I shall take the term ‘evil’ in its technical sense in this debate, as connoting the suffering of sentient beings (both human and non- human), and the infiction of such suffering by conscious, freely choos- ing agents. So wicked actions constitute only a proportion of what may be regarded as evil in this broader sense. Indeed, the most difficult areas of the problem of evil for the Christian theologian concern that suffer- ing which cannot be attributed to the action of freely choosing agents and must therefore be attributed in some sense to the activity of God as creator. Theodicy is the general term for efforts to reconcile the loving char- acter of God with evils in the world. For the purposes of this chapter I shall refer to theodicy in respect of suffering caused by the natural pro- cesses of the universe as ‘cosmic theodicy’. This will include suffering caused to human beings by natural disasters and by disease, be it inher- ited or caused by parasites or other pathogens, and also suffering caused to other sentient beings by predation, competition, and disease, leading at times to actual species extinction. In focusing on evil caused by nat- ural processes, I recognize that this is often exacerbated by human cru- elty or neglect. For example, the effects of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 were made worse by the lack of an early-warning system, such as already existed in the Pacifc, by the destruction of mangrove swamps on the coasts, and by the civil war in Banda-Ace. Yet there remains a very use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107295278.009 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Exeter, on 29 Oct 2019 at 10:11:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of