IS NATURE EVER EVIL?

This collection of essays is billed as an exploration into religion, science and value. What moral meaning can be discovered when we confront the world in which we exist? Is nature good, evil or morally neutral? The question promises to provoke a meaningful discussion of the human situation at the dawn of the 21st century. Individually many of the contributions are worth reading: taken collectively the 35 essays lead only to a sense of depression. Going back to the Old Testament Christians believe that the world was created by the one omnipotent God. Theoretically therefore nature should be good. Unfortunately the world we experience is full of unmerited suffering and evil. Drees points out that the Gnostic Marcion solved the problem by positing a Demiurge which was the creator of the material world, while a different God of love sent his only Son down to redeem the souls of mankind from their suffering on the lower planes. None of the religiously inclined contributors here accepts that such a deep dualism can go down into the depths of reality. All seem to posit a happy post-Darwinian view of God in which He is actively involved in the evolution of His creation. Holmes Rolston makes a powerful case that suffering and conflict are necessary to any evolutionary process which will lead upwards to consciousness. Unfortunately this makes God into a cosmic Stalin who breaks a lot of individual eggs to make a universal omelette. How can a loving personal God be reconciled with the child that is born deformed, who lives in pain and a dies of a loathsome disease before reaching maturity? Traditionally religion has solved the problem by drawing blank cheques on the afterlife. Christianity has held that the sufferings and injustices of this life are compensated for in the life to come. The world was simply something to be renounced along with the flesh and the devil. Buddhism teaches that through enlightenment we reach a nirvana which ends the endless cycle of rebirth into suffering. The modern Vedantic mystic Aurobindo had a highly optimistic view of nature. The whole universe is the involution of Divinity into physical being, and the evolution of galaxies, life and human individuals is all a vast return of nature to its Divine source. Through rebirth, we all suffer, we all redeem, and we all triumph. None of the essayists make any mention of other religious alternatives than their own modernist Protestantism. There is no suggestion that "nature" might be something wider than the immediate 4 dimensions of space-time. The picture is rather bleak. If the religious answer is unsatisfying, can a secular vision do any better? A standard scientific answer is that nature has no meaning or purpose: it is morally neutral. The catch is where does the scientist's moral commitment to objectivity come from, when he himself is part of nature? Mary Midgley has fun in describing the philosophical confusions of those who want to impose a moral vision on a nature to which they deny has any moral meaning. Keith Ward argues that science provides only an objective description of nature, while it is the job of religion to provide the values that give purpose or meaning. Unfortunately he does not explain how theistic religion can be reconciled with a world of unmerited suffering. Perhaps biology can do better? We are part of nature; perhaps our core values are what comes naturally to us? Our nearest cousins are the apes; can we learn from them what we really are? Unfortunately chimpanzees rape, kill, and commit cannibalism and infanticide, while bonabo apes live in a peaceful, co-operative matriarchy. The lesson is whatever the sociobiologist wants to find. One wishes that someone from the school of Dawkins or Atkins had contributed to these essays. Perhaps they were invited, but declined fearing that the philosophical ground had already been cut from beneath their feet. The human race has emerged from a process of evolution that is red in tooth and claw. Secularists looking for moral values point towards reason as the arbiter which will control the destructive instincts that evolution has given us. But reason is a product of evolution as much as our toe nails. It exists in order merely that we may satisfy our desires more skilfully. As David Hume put it, "reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions". How reasonable is it always to be rational? Why should I forgo the pleasures of travel by car and jet plane today because of the trouble my great-great-grandchildren will have from the greenhouse effect in 100 years time? The unwilling conclusion of this collection of essays is that contemplation of nature gives us no moral vision at all. It is rather depressing.