Episode Details

Can we say God used evolution to produce a “good” creation if it involves so much pain, suffering, predation and death?

Our listeners asked us to do an episode on how to rationalize Christian faith with all the pain and suffering that is brought on by the process of Evolution.  We spoke to Dr. James Stump, whose recently released book — Sacred Chain: how understanding evolution leads to deeper faith — puts a spotlight on that question. Jim grew up in a very Conservative mid-west American world, but wasn’t personally committed to Young Earth Creationism, and never really encountered anything either overtly for or against the Theory of Evolution.  While getting a PhD in Philosophy of Science, and then splitting his career between teaching at a Christian college and writing for Biologos, he did a deep-dive into what Evolution was all about.  He became fully convinced by the data and made that clear in his writing.  However, this did not sit well with the College, and he was politely squeezed out (much like the story we heard from Joel Anderson a few weeks back, and from Peter Enns a couple years ago).

We spent some time talking about the first three quarters of his book, including a bit about scripture, divine inspiration, and Concordance between modern science and the ancient worldview. But we reserved most of our discussion for his fifth chapter: the problem of pain and suffering, which for many people doesn’t square up with God referring to creation as “good” let alone “very good.”  Jim first pointed out that declaring something “good” doesn’t mean that it’s “finished,” and that a baby becoming a full-grown athlete or a young prodigy becoming an Olympic athlete or a concert musician may be “good” at first but will encounter a lot of pain and suffering in striving to achieve their full potential.  God’s command to his new creatures to “be fruitful and multiply … have dominion over earth” reveals that he wanted it to grow, to develop, to change.  Humans could never be created with moral maturity: that needs to be grown into and earned through experience and choice-making.

We also looked at the full meaning of the Hebrew word (tov) that gets transla