Śmierć i Upadek: dlaczego teistyczny ewolucjonizm nie łagodzi problemu zła
Death and the Fall: Why Theistic Evolution Does Nothing to Mitigate the Problem of Evil

Summary/Abstract: Most theistic evolutionists increasingly argue that Christian theism benefits from the idea that God created indirectly by Darwinian means rather than directly (as in special creation). Theistic evolutionists worry that a God who creates directly renders the problem of evil insoluble. Such a God would be responsible for all the botched and malevolent designs we find in nature. By letting Darwinian natural selection serve as a designer substitute, theistic evolutionists can refer all those botched and malevolent designs to evolution. This, in their view, is supposed to resolve the problem of natural evil and thereby help validate Christian theism. They worry that a God who creates by direct intervention must be held accountable for all the bad designs in the world. Their proposed solution is therefore to have God set up a world in which evolution (by natural selection and random variation) brings about bad designs. But how does this address the underlying difficulty, which is that a creator God has set up the conditions under which bad designs emerge? In the one case, God acts directly; in the other, indirectly. But a Creator God, as the all-powerful source of all being, is as responsible in the one case as in the other. For the Christian it does nothing to resolve the problem of evil by passing the buck to a naturalistic evolutionary process (a process, in that case, created by God). This is filling one hole by digging another. The problem of evil is a difficult issue, but Darwinian evolution, with or without God, does little to mitigate it.

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