EVIL & EVOLUTION

Chapter 7

The Price of Freedom

If all must suffer to pay for the general harmony, what do children have to do with it...? It's beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why should they pay for the harmony?... I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution too; but there can be no such solidarity with children.
(Feodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)

Do all explanations of suffering fail when it comes to the case of innocent children? All the proffered explanations down through the ages, even the "ultimate" theological justifications, seem to make no real sense. Even if innocent children who suffer are somehow turned into equally innocent children of God and "citizens of heaven", that in no way explains why they should suffer to accomplish this. No doubt, in agonizing over this riddle it is we who actually suffer more. Innocent suffering, be it of little children or even of animals, seems to make little or no sense in the scheme of things attributed to a supposedly good God.

By suffering, in this context, we mean primarily psychological evil as distinct from, although connected with, the moral and physical evils which give rise to it. We might begin with the moral evil of sin which perhaps causes some physical loss or even death to a victim, but even more, in that same process we almost surely inflict psychological suffering on the victim (and, perhaps more justly, on ourselves as well).On the other hand, physical upheavals like earthquakes hit and thousands die, causing untold human misery and perhaps an untold amount of moral evil as well - looting, degradation of human life, even loss of faith in God.

Truly, moral evil (sin), physical evil (death, sickness, violence) and psychological evil (suffering, emotional breakdown, loss of freedom, etc.) seem to form a vicious circle. At whatever point one kind of evil enters the other kinds invariably follow in its wake. It may be argued that moral good nearly always accompanies such upheavals -- heroism, repentance, conversion, and the like -- but is it possible to say that such elements balance the evils or that, even more, good has emerged victorious, allowing us to say that things are "better" for the evil having happened? As we know, it is impossible to reckon this with any certainty. Again, even if we believe that these things must turn out so, we may, like Ivan, still be forced to protest. Is some imagined eternal harmony worth the price, even if it be only the death of one innocent person or infant who can suffer pain, separation, or the loss of existence?

The real crux of the problem is to be found precisely in the situation just described. There seems to be some link between physical and moral evil, and this link is shown unmistakably in the experience of suffering. Yet, the questions persist: why this link and how necessary is it? We can see, quite clearly, that freedom necessarily opens the way not only to the possibility of, but even more to the probability of, moral evil. We also know that physical evils, or the occurrence of pain and death which we take to be evils, are a necessary part of the evolutionary process, so much so that we are hard put to explain how they are really "evil" unless it be in terms of the suffering they entail. Thus we can, like Ivan Karamazov, admit a certain human "solidarity" in sin and retribution, and we can, in a similar way, discern a kind of solidarity with the rest of nature in our experience of pain and death. We may, for our own comfort, even project some strong reasons why the two should complement each other, with physical evil serving both as a punishment for moral evil and as a spur toward moral excellence. Yet it is here, in this claim that one serves the other, or that they are necessary to each other, that the problem posed by suffering, particularly innocent suffering, receives its most critical test and the claims of theodicy, their stiffest resistance. It is precisely when the condition of innocence, is coupled with suffering, that the theological consistency of the link between moral and physical evil seems to fail. It is here, in the lack of any clear grasp of how and why there is necessarily a kind of solidarity in suffering, that all pretenses to some kind of an "eternal harmony" become, as it were, a cosmic joke and the claim of a "good God" a blasphemy in reverse.

Any way around or through such an impasse, will have to involve the discovery of some more vital, even organic connection between moral and physical evil, one that avoids the pitfalls of all past attempts. While it is clear that there is very much a moral issue that is involved (the whole question of God's justice), it is equally clear that the solution can no longer be sought in a presumption of some universal guilt. For, despite the manifold connections between moral and physical evil, it is just as obvious that suffering exists in countless occasions without any possible imputation of sin as a justifying cause. Instead, our path must take us through a better understanding of suffering itself and its role in creation. It is only when we have probed its place in the evolution of the cosmos and its relationship to human freedom, that we will be able to understand its solidarity with all that happens. Only then, can we even begin to judge whether or there is some "eternal harmony", and, whether such harmony is worth the price.

Suffering: Human Affliction or Universal Lot?

It is a paradox that the principal obstacle to our understanding of the place of suffering in life has been primarily its identification with our own experience of psychological evil. Experienced by humans mostly in conjunction with reflective awareness of both physical pain and the consequences of moral evil, suffering is often reduced to the status of an epiphenomenon (a kind of sideshow or evolutionary spin-off) regarded as a peculiar by-product of the human capacity for anxiety and regret. No doubt there is much truth in this, perhaps even the promise of salvation from suffering. Thus if, as Buddhism teaches, one can eliminate ego-centered desires, not only the pains of life and the fear of death, but also the sources of moral deviation, can be rendered harmless as well. Somewhat in the same way, Christians are taught; "Neither death nor life...neither the present nor the future... neither height nor depth nor any other creature, will be able to separate us from the love of God..." (Romans 8:38- 39).

Are we then to conclude that suffering, the psychological experience of evil, is of little consequence, except to alter our perception of the hard facts of existence in the world? I do not think so. In fact, I believe that such a reductionistic approach, rather than eliminating suffering, could have just the opposite effect. Remove suffering in this way (if indeed you can) and you will have eliminated neither pain nor sin, but only your sensitivity to their existence. On the other hand, admit suffering, contest with it, and you will have come to grips with the universal struggle of life.

However, such a claim -- no matter how self-evident it may seem - - involves a great deal more than just our awareness of the laws of life. In some way, suffering is the key that alone can unlock the problem of evil in much the same way as the problem of innocent suffering remains the lock that seems to bar the door to understanding or acceptance. If there can seem to be no comprehensible solidarity in suffering that would allow for the death of the innocent, it is because we have failed to grasp the true nature and scope of suffering. It is something more than our psychological reaction to evil or even our awareness of a universal condition. It is, in itself, that condition, human awareness or not!

To make such a claim is to venture, I'm afraid, into unpopular territory. Such a view smacks of universal pessimism. Life, after all, is for living! If pain and death there must be, or even sin, well then, let them be. But no need to dwell on these inevitabilities or aberrations. If they must be admitted to consciousness, then they must also be dismissed from it as quickly as possible, lest we suffer or doubt life itself.

Suppose, nevertheless, we open our consciousness to this inverted view of life. What shall we find? For one, rather than seeing suffering as an unfortunate by-product of human awareness of that which it would rather not acknowledge, suffering takes on a new shape. Not that it becomes good in itself, for it remains the sign of incompleteness, imperfection, and of being struggling toward fulfillment. Suffering, which is passive by definition (even the Latin word passio itself means suffering), would nevertheless take on, at least in many cases, a new active meaning. Not that suffering should ever be sought for its own sake. It remains something that is passive in the sense that it is to be endured, even avoided when not strictly necessary. Most suffering is inflicted by disorder and failure, by deterioration, by anxiety and alienation. This suffering must not be merely endured; it must be fought and as much as possible overcome. However, there is also the suffering that is entailed by struggle towards further growth. Such suffering, like the work of a farmer who turns, pulverizes, and rakes the soil clean of foreign growth, must be undertaken as part of a task that is actively pursued and sustained.

Suffering, understood from this perspective, is part of all created reality. It is, in a way, the moral dimension of physical evil, if physical evil be taken to be the incompleteness and frustration of fundamental existence and morality is understood as the quest for fuller being and life. So too, suffering is the physical dimension of moral evil, if by physical we mean concrete existence and by moral evil we include the failure, at least when caused by ourselves, of nature to achieve its full potential for good.

How is such an expanded vision of suffering possible? What are its presuppositions?

First of all, we must reject all dualistic or other related idealistic views of the universe, views which would separate the world of ethical life and moral decision-making from any logical or even metaphysical connection with the world of physical being. The consequence of such a bifurcated view of reality, when applied to the problem of evil and suffering, is all too evident. It results in a kind of schizophrenic world-view in which statements, such as this one from H. J. McCloskey's discussion of "God and Evil", are all too readily taken to represent the "logic" of the standard theistic position:

...if free will alone is used to justify moral evil, then even if no moral good occurred, moral evil would still be said to be justified; but physical evil would have no justification...Physical evil is not essential to free will."
(see Peter Angeles, Critiques of God, 1976, pp. 215-16)

Do we live in such a world, one in which human freedom could stand in such isolation, so much an absolute good in itself, that any amount of misuse of free will could not detract from its solitary splendor? Or can we suppose that any connection between physical evil (which for McCloskey includes psychological evil or suffering) and moral freedom, whether it be for good or ill, is purely accidental, or at best the caprice or some sadistic whim of God? Would not such a view lead quite logically not only to the rejection of any such God but equally to the denial of any intelligible order in the universe?

Rather than reject out of hand such a God, whom we cannot see, is it not more logical to first question our understanding of the universe which can be seen? Does the universe in fact present such a disjointed picture of the relationship between human freedom and the physical order of things? Do we not need, first of all, instead of a new faith in God despite the things we think we see, a new way of seeing, a fresh way of interpreting all the evidence that lies before our eyes?

Thus the second step in remedying this state of affairs must concentrate not so much on some kind of theological apologetics or even a moral reevaluation of traditional theodicy but on a new understanding of basic physics and biology, somewhat like Teilhard's "ultra-" or "hyper-physics", which instead of separating the physical from the metaphysical world, would unite them. What we need is a world-view that integrates the physical, biological, and psychological levels of existence, not by reducing any of them to one or another, but by incorporating all of them within a single spectrum of being, one in which their modes of existence are nor only seen as interrelated, but also in which their values in terms of that existence begin to make new sense. Only in such a way will physical, psychological, and moral goodness as well as evil be understood in terms that are comprehensive in respect to each other and comprehensible to the modern mind. Only then would the full dimensions of the relationship between suffering and freedom be revealed.

Seen in this fashion, the world is one in which matter and spirit not only coexist, intertwined on all levels of existence, but one in which the material and the spiritual form two aspects of one and the same reality, two manifestations of a single, all-pervasive substance or "stuff". On the level of creation, matter or what we take to be the purely material side of reality, is but the fragmented, particulate, unorganized diversity of created existence. Spirit or the spiritual side of this same reality is, on the other hand, manifested in the organized, unified, and, most of all, conscious level of existence.

The evidence for such a view is all around us, at least for those who are open to it. No atom, no subatomic particle, is without its spiritual potentiality, at least in the rudimentary sense that it is capable of entering into a higher, more complex, more organized unity with others of its kind. But as we know equally well, no organism living upon this earth, least of all ourselves, is so entirely spiritual as to be free from the material side of being. On the contrary, we find that the higher an organism stands on the scale of psychic capability in this world, the more complex on the physical level it is. Each is,an interwoven system of highly organized and integrated molecules and cells and organs, all of them composed of the most basic material elements of the universe. We, as much as, or even more than, the lowest protoplasmic life, depend on a delicate balance of physical and biological interactions and processes that make even the most complicated atomic reactions look like basic math in comparison to higher calculus.

In terms of this incredibly complicated interdependence of the physical and psychic elements in nature, it is unreasonable to restrict what we call "suffering" to the purely human segment of creation. No doubt humans suffer in a unique way, especially as a consequence of moral evil, But there can be no question that animals also suffer. While it is quite evident that their suffering arises primarily from physical causes, such as starvation, cold, heat, and death as it comes in its many violent ways in the wild, still it is no mere anthropomorphism to ascribe to animals, at least the higher ones, the capability of suffering the psychological experiences of loss, separation, or even a kind of neurosis induced by confinement in captivity. Nor can there be any doubt that domesticated animals, in particular our companion pets such as dogs, often exhibit the same psychological or emotional traits as their human masters. Nature, it appears, is a single interconnected whole. Any view of evolution which would affirm a merely physical interdependence of species without allowing for a certain amount of psychic relatedness would be a strange and disjointed hypothesis indeed.

In this total evolutionary context, one in which spirit and matter interpenetrate, suffering is more than merely a psychological accident or by-product of moral or physical evil. On the contrary, suffering is the basic condition of the universe while physical pain and moral evil are the subspecies of this universal fact. Suffering is that core reality which ties moral and physical evil into a shared destiny, linking them together not only as a mental or verbal construct (in which physical defect is in some way likened to moral evil) but even more as actually constituting that underlying reality of which both physical and moral evil are particular manifestations. "All creation groans and is in agony...eagerly awaiting the revelation of the sons of God" (see Romans, 8:18-23). These words of St. Paul are no mere analogy. They reveal a vision of the universe where all forms of evil -- physical, psychological, and moral -- form the background for one great expression of a cosmic longing for perfection, a world where incompleteness and defect on all levels of created being share a common travail until all things are consummated in one great ecstasy of union with God.

Freedom and Chance

If we accept, with the help of a Teilhardian "hyperphysics", this pauline vision of all of creation caught up in a universal condition of suffering until its redemption is achieved, then we may also find ourselves in a better position to understand the link between physical evil and human freedom. Suffering, in this context, would no longer be seen simply as the human awareness of physical pain or as the psychological effect of human failure, but as the price exacted from all creation in its struggle towards consciousness and freedom. Born in the creative play of chance, true freedom is won only through suffering. Pain, ever present within the struggles of the material side of existence, is deepened in the human consciousness which suffers not only from the whims of unorganized matter but also from misuse of human freedom.

Freedom, particularly human freedom, is not an easy concept to define. There are many varieties of freedom: physical freedom (lack of physical confinement or constraint), political freedom (with its right to participate in government as well as its responsibilities toward others), ideal freedom (the opportunity to act according to one's highest values), creative freedom (the ability to bring about new ideas and expressions), or even the freedom (license) to do what one pleases. But most of all there is the kind of freedom we have so far taken for granted, simply the freedom to choose, or what is generally called "free will". Of all the varieties of freedom, this concept is the most difficult to pin down, for as self-evident as its existence seems to us in our immediate consciousness, it turns out to be less obvious when subjected to close analysis.

It will not be necessary to go into the historical controversies that have raged over this question, ranging from the intellectual determinism implicit in Socrates, through the theological predestinarianism drawn from Augustine, to the modern behaviorist school of psychology as championed by B. F. Skinner and his followers. What suffices for our purposes is that we see human freedom or, more precisely, free will, as that power of self-determination that exists within us, no matter in how limited a way, in the face of whatever else determines our lives. Thus no matter how constrained our freedom is, we resolutely defend its existence, even if the proof is only in our refusal to deny it in the face of all the evidence to the contrary (the same kind of proof the critics of free will inadvertently supply when they choose to deny its existence!).

If there seems to be a kind of stubborn resistance to any theories of complete determinism, it is not merely because little in human life and culture makes sense without the presumption of freedom and a corresponding responsibility. Very little in the whole pattern of evolution, as well, makes sense without it. Perhaps evolution can only be understood, as Bergson insisted, as the evolution of freedom. Thus, if we are constrained or "determined" to believe in at least a minimal freedom (at least enough to choose to imagine we are free!) it may only go to prove the truth of the paradox voiced by Sartre, that "we are condemned to be free."

Rather than retreat in confusion from this paradox, could we not exploit it? If we find ourselves continually forced to defend our own freedom does this not tell us something about its nature? Could it be that freedom even in the strictest sense of free will is more a potentiality than an actuality? -- that our imagined freedoms are more of an illusion, mr perhaps a goal, than the reality we take them to be? (In this, B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity may be much closer to Eric Fromm's Escape from Freedom than Skinner's critics might wish to admit.) Whether one argues that other freedoms have either grown or diminished, it may be that true freedom, at least on the level of completely undetermined human choice, has yet to exist.

This partial concession to deterministic behaviorism would completely destroy belief in the existence of free will only if one adheres to the dualisms of the past. Rather than seeing ourselves as either determined or free, can it not be that we are both -- impelled by the forces of the past and self-directed toward the future? Although such a view runs the risk of an oversimplification of a very complex matter, still, does not the play of determinism and chance (or better, the determinisms of chance) in the basic origins of the evolutionary process point to a new and higher, more self-conscious level of the same process on the level of human life? As beings who are both rooted in the materiality of creation as well as manifesting its psychic potentialities to a high degree, we either tend to place too much emphasis on one sphere or the other, adopting either a strict materialism or equally strict idealism or else end up taking a disjointed view of both, which like the cartesian view of the soul as the "Ghost in the Machine", ends up creating more problems than it solves. Thus while either of the extreme positions leave us at a loss to explain the paradoxes of human existence, a merely superficial juxtaposition of materialism with a corresponding spiritual idealism abandons us to a morass of outright contradictions. Not only do the counterclaims of determinism and free-will remain irreconcilable, but, in addition, any coherent relationship between suffering and sin, except by way of punishment, would disappear. Innocent human suffering (and in such a world only humans could suffer) would have to be explained either as an accident of blind nature or as the whim of a cruel God.

No doubt there are accidents in nature, but "whims" are distinctly human. More partially aware of possibilities than fully conscious of our responsibilities, we make innumerable choices during our lifetime. But, as Gabriel Marcel has pointed out, choosing is not the same as willing. We choose again and again, impelled by our predilections, our inborn, inbred, even indoctrinated "determinacies". Rarely, if ever, are these made with anything resembling full reflection. Not unlike love at first sight, we are driven, attracted, even compelled against our better judgment. Only consequently, however, are we faced with true decision-making, a fully conscious willing that depends on reflective awareness. It is at this point, usually long after we made the choices which have determined the circumstances in which we find ourselves, that truly free willing becomes possible. No doubt, even when this point has been reached, there remain hidden motives, unrecognized determinisms, and unconscious drives that continue to affect us. The Freudian revolution has made us supremely wary of them. Yet it was the avowed purpose of Freud's psychoanalytic therapy to free persons from such determinacies so that fully conscious and truly free decisions could be made.

But to free ourselves from such determinacies is not to eradicate them. Freedom consists not in the wiping out of the past, but in its utilization and in the transformation of the chance influences of the past into the material for new, conscious, self-determination. We cannot alter our own genetic make-up or change the circumstances of our birth, rearing, or education. These are fixed in the past. Nor can we control, for the most part, even the chance occurrences of our present lives; we can at most only trade one set of uncertainties for another. The only thing we can have complete control over, and this in theory more than fact, is our intentions for the future, and as we know all too well, often these have very little effect.

For some, all this is a cause for despair if not an outright denial of free will. But, again, need it always be a question of either determinism or free will? Is it not rather a matter of both? Rather than all determinisms being enemies of freedom, which so often seems to be the case, can they not be seen, at least in certain aspects, as a basic constituent of freedom, if not the very material from which all created freedom is made?

To begin with the most basic levels of the physical-biological universe, the so-called "determinisms" are themselves under the sway of chance. If we accept as "laws of nature" statistical averages that express the normal outcome of the play of large numbers of particles displaying basically random behavior, what is to prevent us from seeing chance itself as a kind of determinism in its own right? Likewise, without the play of chance (as in random genetic mutations) biological change would be impossible. Yet without the relative stability imposed by determinisms that control the result (as in the formation and preservation of distinct species) chance alone would produce only chaos. If there is a paradox in this, it is again only a matter of perspective. Not unlike the old riddle about the chicken and the egg, the relationship between determinism and chance is one of organic interdependence. We can imagine one without the other, or even isolate them as objects of analytical inspection, but in the reality of evolutionary growth they are inseparable.

Taken a step further, this same interplay of chance and determinism forms both the background of and the material for the acting out of human life. Without the variety rooted in chance occurrence, what could be object of free human choice? Isolated in a world of predetermined, robot-like actions and reactions, what would there be left to choose? Conversely, if the exercise of free will were not itself a kind of "determinism", a regulating force imposed on nature and modifying our own behavior and attitudes, would human freedom have any meaning at all? Would it not be reduced to an exercise in wishful thinking conducted in a vacuum of non-response?

If this last point strikes one as a sophism or seems like some kind of verbal conceit, I would suggest that the real relationship between freedom and chance lies deeper still. If this overall view of the universe as the product of the interplay of chance and necessity be admitted, should it surprise us if our own inner universe is not much different? If we admit, as an evolutionary interpretation of the universe would demand, that we ourselves are a product of this same creative process, must we not only look at the universe as the field of opportunity for our exercise of free will, but also as the organic source of our power to choose or will?

No doubt such a suggestion is threatening to many who may have been schooled in more classical or humanistic philosophy, and even to the scientifically oriented may appear as a simplistic reduction of a very complex human issue. Likewise, any assertion that the human intellect or will could have evolved from lower stages of biological life may also appear to be particularly subversive of traditional religious views which insist on the uniqueness of mankind as creatures made "in the image and likeness of God." Even Teilhard de Chardin hesitated, for religious (or let us say "religiously diplomatic") reasons, to openly draw such conclusions. However, once they are understood, the implications are not as destructive of traditional human values as they might seem.

On the other hand, if the possibilities offered from an evolutionary perspective are ignored, the consequences would be very grave, especially for philosophy and theology as disciplines claiming relevance to our interpretation of all reality and even more for any humanism or religious belief that looks to these fields for intellectual assistance. More specifically, such a refusal would be completely destructive of possible success in any further attempts to arrive at a fully comprehensive as well as fully comprehensible theodicy. After many centuries of deadlock, the fear of reductionism or theological heresy must be put aside long enough to explore new possibilities. No doubt, any first attempts in such complex questions will appear reductionistic and highly unorthodox. In this, like many other matters in life, "a tree is known by its fruit." No fair judgment can be made unless the fruit is allowed to appear.

This much said, the next step should be to simply take the basic insights of such an evolutionary approach and allow them to be carried to their logical conclusions. The most basic of these insights is a phenomenological one, that is, based on our observation of the general pattern of the facts of evolution. It would hold that the degree of consciousness present in an organism is in proportion to the complexity of that organism. It is this basic pattern, generally seen to be on the increase in the universe (as described by the Darwin Centennial definition of evolution quoted in Chapter 2), and which Teilhard went on to formulate in terms of a "Law of Complexity-Consciousness" -- a phenomenon he described as a general drift of "convergence" or "unification" in nature.

Furthermore, considered strictly on the phenomenological level, the uniqueness of the human type is not in the fact that humans can know things, for so do animals, but that (as Teilhard liked to put it) "man knows that he knows." This is to say that humans, apparently alone among all the animals (all although there appear to be the beginning of such in self-recognition experiments with chimpanzees) truly have the power of reflective thought. How explain this phenomenon? Teilhard suggested that there is nothing in the uniqueness of the human thinking process that cannot be quite readily explained by the extraordinary complexity of the human brain, particularly the overwhelming dominance of the neo-cortex or "gray matter" when compared even to other primates. As to why or just how this came about, Teilhard, as both prudent churchman and prudent scientist, chose to remain silent (or at least non-committal), but that it came about as part of the course of evolution, there can be no doubt. Nevertheless, he insisted that it was no mere quantitative difference that resulted -- that is, not just more brain matter leading to more intelligence -- but a real qualitative "leap" resulting in a whole new kind of intelligence -- reflective thought.

However, suppose we take this phenomenological description of human uniqueness and couple it to Teilhard's "hyperphysical" theory which, as we have seen, postulates the existence of "spirit" and "matter" not as separate entities in the created order, but as distinct, yet dynamically interdependent manifestations of a single Weltstoff (perhaps better described today in terms of distinctly manifested but conjoined energies). Understood in terms of this dynamism, the phenomena of life, particularly the gradual appearance of life that is more and more sensitive or "conscious", but even more, the appearance of a consciousness that "leaps" into the realm of reflective awareness, becomes plausible. But there is more, particularly when this explanation of the origin of human intelligence is extended into the realm of human freedom.

Might we not say, according to Teilhard's way of thinking, that human reflective thought is animal awareness or consciousness "squared" -- a kind of shorthand expression to emphasize the phenomenon of "knowing that we know"? Going back to our observations on human free will, particularly those drawing on Gabriel Marcel's analysis of the difference between mere choosing and truly willing, can we not, in a very definite sense, observe a similar qualitative leap, indeed, one that is based on the same advance as that of reflective thought over basic unreflective awareness? Is not what Marcel describes as mere "choice" capable of being described as a more or less random selection determined by the basic awareness of stimuli? On the other hand, to truly "will" something, and to do so freely, would mean that the immediate sense impressions, and perhaps even more, the instinctual drives and other psychological compulsions within ourselves will have to be reflected upon in a way that we would "know what we are doing" as the phrase puts it.

All this is obvious, or at least should be, yet what so often seems less obvious is the connection this whole process of choice and willing has with chance. Most basically, evolution depends on chance as a major element in its working mechanism; without chance mutations there is no evolution. Secondly, if chance also is a major element (as the behaviorists insist) in the reason why we choose one option over another (as it is also a major reason why we have any options to choose from in the first place) then we must also conclude that without chance there is no choice. Finally, willing in the highest sense of the word depends on reflective human awareness in order to be able to exist, and that same reflective power of the brain is in turn a product of organic evolution (involving its own complement of chance). We must therefore conclude that without the element of chance in the universe, the exercise of free will as we know it would also be impossible; in a word, without chance, no human, free will. If a little linguistic shorthand of my own is permissible, it might be said that free will is "chance squared", or as raised to as many powers as one can detect quantitative leaps from its role in physics, to biology, to psychology.

Certainly, thus formulated, the charge of reductionism has to be taken seriously, but almost every area of human knowledge involves some degree of inductive "reduction" from the complexity of the facts to an approximate formulation of the truth. In this same field of thought, the "Eudaimonism" of Socrates, which held that no one chooses except in terms of what he or she thinks is best for him or herself, is certainly also such a reduction, a kind of intellectual determinism that explains most behavior, but not all of it. Aristotle voiced reservations about the principle, but no one has ever come up with much else adequate to replace it -- except perhaps diabolic possession or its psychoanalytic equivalents! Thus even this account of the element of chance working in the operating of choice depends largely on Socrates' old principle.

As for the charge of unorthodoxy in terms of the highest valuation of human nature given by the Judeo-Christian tradition, while the 1950 Papal Encyclical "Humani generis" admitted the possibility of a physical origin of mankind from lower forms of life, it drew the line at the suggestion that the human "soul" might have similarly evolved. According to this official view, the human "soul" was (and still is, in each case of human conception) created directly (or "immediately") and "specially" by God. (So too in the most recent papal address to the Pontifical Academy of Science in 1997 in which human physical descent from earlier forms of life is all but certain).

However, it should be pointed out that as far back as 1968 that the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner suggested that in terms of the aristotelian categories of causality, this "direct and special" creation need not apply in the sense of efficient or instrumental cause -- that is, it is hardly necessary to imagine God as specially engaged in a separate creative act every time a child is conceived. Instead, said Rahner, "direct" creation in this context would be best understood in terms of "exemplary" or "formal" cause -- that is, in terms of God drawing or influencing the course of evolution in such a way that it would result eventually in the appearance of the human type exhibiting the "image and likeness" of God, especially in its intellectual-volitional capacities. Furthermore, what is "special" about the creation of the human species when seen as part of the evolutionary process, is most of all the operation of the divine "final" causality -- that is, the "end" or "destiny" for which each individual is equipped by the possession of a "transcendental" capacity for sharing God's life forever. Rahner's suggestion was never officially called into question, and so the door seems to have been left open (despite the 1997 repetition of the 1950 "direct and special" creation of the soul) to this more evolutionary view of mankind's origin and, along with it, to the immense advantages that this approach affords theodicy.

In the course of this rather technical, but altogether necessary discussion concerning the relationship to freedom to chance, the whole point has been not that evolution is in some way compatible with traditional theodicy. It has been that none of the traditional theodicies made any sense, at least on the problem of the suffering of innocents, because they did not in effect really allow for evolution to take its place in the organic, much less the theological, scheme of things. Traditional theodicies, beginning with Augustine, for the most part tended to stress human free will as the reason, one way or another, most evil occurs, but in doing so the theodicies also tended to reproduce (indeed if not sometimes cause) the proclivity of the Church, as the philosopher Whitehead is said to have observed, "to teach all the right things, but for the wrong reasons!"

Human freedom is indeed the reason evil exists. On this point we can be in complete agreement with Augustine, Leibniz, Bergson, or whoever else would champion humanity's sense of self- responsibility. But we must pay the price. Human freedom, like all forms of awareness and like life itself, depends on the existence of a world where accidents not only happen, but on chance itself as a precondition for the emergence of anything beyond a dumb and sterile existence enmeshed in a world of sameness and predictability.

Yet, merely human freedom as we know it is not the whole answer. In a very real way, God has "subjected" the whole world of nature to chance, but not for its own sake. Rather it is for the sake of infinitely higher stakes. God has taken a chance on chance, or so it seems, that not only ourselves, but even all of nature, might "enjoy the same freedom and glory as the children of God."

Freedom and Futility

If, in the above allusion to St. Paul's theology of suffering as found in the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, the word chance has been substituted for the vanity, futility, or even decadence as found in the various translations, the substitution was quite deliberate. In the pauline perspective, which must always be understood with the primary emphasis on the place of Christ rather than on a doctrine of original sin, creation suffers as a result of the sentence imposed upon it because of humanity's fall. Taken less literally, we may see the situation the other way around, with a fallen humanity suffering along with the rest of creation as a result of the very nature of things. Either way the import of Paul's message is the same -- Christ's victory will be total and final and the universal condition of corruption and suffering will be reversed. Put in other terms, this belief expresses our conviction that true freedom will win out over the blind determinisms and fatal accidents of chance.

This is, of course, the answer of faith. But this is not to really answer the whole question that lurks beneath. For underneath any assurance of ultimate victory lies the doubt of whether or not such a victory would be worth the price. This is the hidden question that becomes manifest in the rebellious protest of Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov; dare we speak of some kind of "general harmony" that can be won despite the suffering of even one innocent child much less the suffering of millions of innocent humans or even billions of subhuman creatures? Does not our claim of a kind of "solidarity in suffering" (unlike Ivan's refusal to admit such) only further complicate the problem? For even if we were to judge one such tragedy as being admissible as a part of some divine plan, then what are we to say of a plan that somehow includes untold amounts of misery? Wherein lies the "victory?"

The answer to this question depends, of course, to a great extent on how we understand this victory of divine goodness. If we persist in thinking of it in terms of an eternal harmony which admits of no discord, no false notes, then we are faced with an impossible task. The progress of the universe, for all its magnificent splendor, is not a perfect symphony. It is not a finished masterpiece. Even granted some kind of divine plan, it resembles more the fitful and halting rehearsal of an orchestra which is still in the process of trying to understand the idiosyncracies of its members as well as the expectations of a new conductor. To extend the analogy even further, it may seem, at least some of the time, that even parts of the score, particularly the conclusion, remain unwritten. Yet this "rehearsal" will turn out, as far as we know, to be the final performance!

Clearly, then, the answer to the second question, that concerning the price of victory, is just as much a matter of faith as any assurance of victory in the first place, for they both depend on some kind of vision of what victory can possibly mean. Faith may very well be, as Paul Tillich insisted, "ultimate concern", but even that must have some object, some faith (or more properly speaking, a "belief") that something or other is going to turn out in such and such a way, or else concern degenerates into mere anxiety.

For the religious person, of course, faith in a good God supplies its own answer -- that the victory will be whatever God decides it should be and it will have been worth the price paid. But, for the non-believer, it cannot be that simple, unless he or she does not mind the accusation of sentimentality. Thus, for some, any such appeal, whether religious or otherwise, to a final, yet unrealized, state of things is an evasion; a kind of whistling in the dark to ward off the terrors of the universal void. For such as these, any talk of victory is the chatter of fools, any imagining of harmony an illusion produced in a world of silence. Such faith, whether it be religious or merely humanistic in its inspiration, is seen as the ultimate escape hatch from the world as it really is. To such skeptics nothing really can be said. Such words as harmony or victory are, in the final analysis, co-relative terms. Victory implies defeat ; one person's triumph inevitably is someone else's failure. Harmony, for all its objective foundations in the contrasting frequencies of sound, still must be heard to be recognized and some will persist in perceiving only one side of the contrast if they will consent to listen at all.

Thus, there is an active aspect to faith as well, active in the sense that it may be just as or even more important to believe that a thing can happen than to believe that it will happen whether we believe it will or not. No one attempts what is believed to be impossible, whether it is a matter of landing on the moon or curing cancer. From the evolutionary standpoint, faith has been just as essential to the progress of the human race as has been intelligence or free will. Without this faith, this lure and promise of self-transcendence, whether it be either religious or worldly, any further evolution of the human race comes to a standstill.

It is then only in terms of some kind of faith that we can conclude that freedom is worth the price that must be paid. Yet such faith need not be blind. All the indications, the invitations to faith, point in one direction. Suffering in all its aspects, its physical and moral dimensions as well as its directly psychological repercussions, reveals a cosmic struggle on all levels. There can be no doubt that this struggle has taken a terrible toll whether it is measured in terms of individual lives that have been sacrificed or even whole species. Decimation (literally, reducing to a tenth) is far too conservative a word to describe the statistics of failure in the course of the evolutionary process. And yet the process itself has survived, and that in itself should tell us something.

In just what sense evolution can be equated with progress is for many still a matter for debate. Can the emergence of even one new species, one showing greater spontaneity and intelligence, be said to justify the disappearance of a hundred others that are less gifted, as the partisans of progressive evolution would argue? Or from that question can we transpose to whether or not the survival of one solitary superior individual (which means obviously only a very limited survival!) could justify the sacrifice of numerous others? Or reverse either of these questions: is the sacrifice of a single superior individual or group justified by the survival of many less gifted individuals or groups or species?

It should be just as obvious, however, from the very nature of such questions (quite apart from how they are answered), that evolution, however defined and evaluated, involves struggle, struggle which in turn implies suffering, physical pain, and death. In the case of the human species, it also means moral failure, or sin. All these are a price, a price that is unfortunately often paid, at least in part, by those who, whether they had much to gain or not, certainly did not deserve to lose -- in other words, the innocents of this world. Yet, in a way, can we not also speak of the innocent species as well? True, we cannot place moral categories on amoral objects, but is that really the problem, or at least part of it, when we talk of innocent human victims as well? They did nothing to deserve their fate. Yet, they, too, had to suffer. If this is all the price of freedom it seems all the more appalling when we realize how many who paid the price did so with no realization of what was being purchased. To accept this indeed takes faith.

Yet the pattern is clear. Freedom has emerged, and with it, sin, while life has always meant death, and any degree of sensitivity has brought with it suffering. None of these has been possible without the other, nor have any of these fated pairs existed over the aeons of time without a direct relationship to the rest. It is all of one vast piece. There is a solidarity in sin, as well as in retribution for it, and there is a solidarity in freedom as well. But there is also a solidarity in suffering which makes it one with life and death, sin, and freedom. One may dream of a better world, even of a best possible world. No one has forbidden us to do so, least of all God. We might even envision a world where no innocent ever suffers, only the guilty. We might even imagine a world where death itself has disappeared. We might even wish for a world where no moral failings occur. Religion, most definitely biblical religion, does encourage such hopes, in fact even encourages us to do our best to make them come about, even guaranteeing that some day they will be fulfilled. On no account, however, are these wishes and visions ever to be confused with the world as it presently exists. Here another world is still supreme, one in which the price of freedom must be paid daily by all who would enjoy it and even by many others who never will.

No "mere biologist" (as Teilhard called himself in his appendix to The Phenomenon of Man) could have said it, perhaps only one who, like himself, had fathomed the central, paradoxical mystery of the Christian faith. Once humanity's origins are clearly seen as linked to the whole history of our universe, it becomes all the more true that "the human epic resembles nothing so much as a way of the Cross."

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