The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

132 The Sufferings of Beasts
to ensure the outcome of a free angelic choice than the outcome of a
free human choice.) I do not take Lewis’s suggestion seriously enough
to be able to make a reliable guess about how plausible it would seem
to an audience of neutral agnostics. I must concede, however, that my
reaction to this suggestion is at least in part a product of theological
convictions that the audience of agnostics will not share. I am convinced
that the teaching of the Bible is that the natural world is and always
has been, apart from the effects that fallen human beings have had on
it, just as God made it. (See, for example, Psalm 104, quoted earlier in
this lecture, and the remarks that follow the quotation.) And I don’t
see how to apply anything like the expanded free-will defense to the
case of angels in a way that is consistent with the rather standard
Christian theology that I accept; for, according to this theology, fallen
angels are forever fallen, and God has no plan of atonement for them.
Perhaps my dislike of the ‘‘angelic corruption of nature’’ defense is
rooted in a moral tendency analogous to that of the defense attorney
who is reluctant to explain away the prosecution’s evidence by telling a
story (not as the truth, but as representing a real possibility) he himself
regards as certainly false. There is, however, one point that might
be made against the angelic corruption defense that does not rest on
theology. The anti-irregularity defense included this proposition: The
immediate evolutionary precursors of human beings could not have
evolved naturally without many millions of years of ancestral suffering.
And this proposition, I contended, is true for all anyone knows. I in
fact think that it is more than true for all anyone knows: I think that it
is extremely plausible. I therefore find it correspondingly implausible to
suppose that the sufferings of pre-human animals are due to the actions
of malevolent angels (even supposing—as I do—that such beings exist).
I am inclined to think that an audience of neutral agnostics would share
this reaction.
Secondly, there is an argument due to Professor Geach, who finds the
problem of the suffering of beasts to be no problem at all. We human
beings must be concerned with the sufferings of beasts (in a narrowly
circumscribed set of cases: we have no obligation to dedicate our lives to
saving rabbits from foxes or to end our ‘‘genocidal war with the rat’’),
Geach says, because we and they share the same animal nature, and we
can thus feel sympathy toward them and therefore have (certain very
limited) moral obligations to them. God, however, is not an animal
and cannot feel pain, and can therefore feel no sympathy with suffering