The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Sufferings of Beasts 131
could have been anything other than a miracle. (Anyone who does think
that a ‘‘sudden’’ genesis of rationality could have happened in the natural
course of evolution can, if he likes, introduce a disjunction into the story:
at a certain point in time, a population of our ancestors suddenly became
rational beings, either miraculously or as the result of the workings of
purely natural causes. I don’t think that this disjunction does much for
the plausibility of the story, but some may.) It is necessary to point
out, too, that even if a sharp genesis of rationality need not involve a
miracle, the taking of our first human ancestors into union with God
must certainly have been miraculous. That miracle might bother some
people less than a miraculous genetic and physiological transformation
of the human organism, but this, I think, is an unphilosophical reaction.
The taking of an individual, call him Adam, into union with God must
involve some sort of rearrangement of the matter of which Adam is
composed. If Adam is, in his own nature, in a suitable state for union
with God, after all, so will a perfect physical duplicate of Adam be in
that state. And a miraculous rearrangement of matter is a miraculous
rearrangement of matter, whether it effects rationality or the capability
of entering into union with God.
This, then, is why the story I have had Theist tell contains a
miracle—or two miracles (or two miracles times n,wheren is the number
of human beings who were raised first to rationality and then to the
Beatific Vision). These miracles are in the story because (in my judgment)
the story would be less plausible without them. But, as I have contended,
even the totality of these miracles is not comparable to the huge set
of miracles that (according to the anti-irregularity defense) would be
needed to maintain a hedonic utopia for hundreds of millions of years.
Having answered these objections to the anti-irregularity defense, I
will now raise the question of what alternatives there might be to it.
If we leave aside a thesis endorsed by various Eastern religions and
by Absolute Idealists, that the world of space and time and individual
objects and causal relations is an illusion (and that the suffering of beasts
is therefore an illusion, as indeed are the beasts themselves), and if we
leave aside the absurd Cartesian idea that non-human animals do not
feel pain, I know of two.
First, there is C. S. Lewis’s suggestion that there may have been pain
in the pre-human natural world only because fallen angels had corrupted
nature. 21 (On this suggestion, the free-will defense can account for the
sufferings of beasts, for the suggestion is, of course, that angelic free
will is a great good, and that an omnipotent being is no more able