In chapter one of God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution, John F Haught asks “But what if God is not just an originator of order but also the disturbing wellspring of novelty? And, moreover, what if the cosmos is not just an ‘order’ ... but a still unfinished process?” He is asking, “What kind of God would create a Universe like this one?”
This is the same question Job asked when he cried out demanding a reason for his intense suffering. Haught asks why did God create a universe where evolution proceeds in such slow and cruel fashion? It is the same question a grieving parent asks when a child dies from cancer or a congenital defect or for no apparent reason at all. God's answer to Job is not the answer Job was hoping for. God begins by challenging Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” And yet Job ultimately accepts God's non-answer when he says “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” And he repents in dust and ashes.
Why is evolution slow and cruel? What kind of God would choose to create a universe like that? Is he a God we can believe in, love, and pray to? We could begin to answer this challenging question by asking whether evolution really is slow? What is a few billion years to an eternal God but a brief pinpoint flash of light? It seems slow to us only because we are poor creatures locked into time. We cannot see how things look to God.
But why does evolution have to be cruel, filled with tragedy? Why did a child's mother suffer a long, drawn-out, agonizing death? Why did a hurricane destroy so many innocent lives? Why does suffering and death seem so integral to the very fabric of creation? Couldn't God have made the Universe in some other way?
When we ask these questions, we are implying that there can be no divine purpose that could justify creating such a miserably cruel Universe. But how could we possibly know that? God's mind is infinite, beyond our minds even more than ours are beyond the insects building their nests in our backyards. Even if God did tell us his purpose in creating such a Universe, how could we possibly understand it?
Haught will propose that God had to create such a Universe as ours in order to make beings like us possible – beings who could freely choose to love him. He may be right, but that is cold comfort to the grieving father weeping over the grave of his dead son. I prefer the answer of faith – that God has a purpose but one we cannot grasp just as we could not grasp the reason for a beautiful Persian carpet if all we ever saw was its underside with its meaningless collection of knots.
