Editing Problem of evil (section)

====Other responses to animal suffering and natural evil====
Others have argued:
* That natural evils are the result of the [[fall of man]], which corrupted the perfect world created by God.<ref>Linda Edwards, ''A Brief Guide'' (Westminster John Knox, 2001), 62.</ref> Theologian [[David Bentley Hart]] argues that "natural evil is the result of a world that's fallen into death" and says that "in Christian tradition, you don't just accept 'the world as it is'" but "you take 'the world as it is' as a broken, shadowy remnant of what it should have been." Hart's concept of the human fall, however, is an [[atemporal fall]]: "Obviously, wherever this departure from the divine happened, or whenever, it didn't happen within terrestrial history," and "this world, as we know it, from the [[Big Bang]] up until today, has been the world of death."<ref>{{cite web |url=https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/a-gregorian-interview |access-date=14 March 2023 |title=A Gregorian Interview |last=Hart |first=David Bentley |date=12 March 2023 |publisher=Leaves in the Wind |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230314140228/https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/a-gregorian-interview |archive-date=14 March 2023 |quote=[Starting at 1:13:08:] Moral evil has no essence of its own, so it can only exist as a fabrication of the will continuing to will defectively. And according to tradition, even natural evil is the result of a world that's fallen into death. Somehow, that too follows from the creation of moral evil. So in Christian tradition, you don't just accept 'the world as it is.' You take 'the world as it is' as a broken, shadowy remnant of what it should have been. But obviously wherever this departure from the divine happened, or whenever, it didn't happen within terrestrial history. Now, plenty will argue: 'Oh no. It really happened within history.' No, it really didn't. This world, as we know it, from the Big Bang up until today, has been the world of death.}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |first1=David Bentley |last1=Hart |year=2005 |title=[[The Doors of the Sea|The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?]] |location=Grand Rapids, Michigan |publisher=Wm. B. Eerdmans |pages=22, 69 |isbn=9780802829764 |quote=The Christian belief in an ancient alienation from God that{{nbsp}}[...] reduced cosmic time to a shadowy vestige of the world God truly intends.{{nbsp}}[...] Something far more glorious than the pitiable resources of fallen time could ever yield.}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |first1=David Bentley |last1=Hart |author-link=David Bentley Hart |year=2020 |chapter=The Devil's March: Creatio ex Nihilo, the Problem of Evil, and a Few Dostoyevskian Meditations |title=Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest |location=Notre Dame, Indiana |publisher=Notre Dame Press |pages=79–80 |isbn=9780268107178 |quote=The fall of rational creation and the conquest of the cosmos by death is something that appears to us nowhere within the course of nature or history; it comes from before and beyond both. We cannot search it out within the closed totality of the damaged world because it belongs to another frame of time, another kind of time, one more real than the time of death.{{nbsp}}[...] It may seem a fabulous claim that we exist in the long grim aftermath of a primeval catastrophe—that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is a phantom of true time, that we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, and that the universe languishes in bondage to the "powers" and "principalities" of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the kingdom of God—but it is not a claim that Christians are free to surrender.}}</ref>
* That forces of nature are neither "goods" nor "evils". They just are. Nature produces actions vital to some forms of life and lethal to others.<ref name="Claudia Card">{{cite book |last1=Card |first1=Claudia |title=The Atrocity Paradigm A Theory of Evil |date=2005 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=9780195181265 |page=5}}</ref> Other life forms cause diseases, but for the disease, hosts provide food, shelter and a place to reproduce which are necessary things for life and are not by their nature evil.<ref name="Patricia A. Williams"/>{{rp|170}}
* That natural evils are the result of [[natural laws]]<ref>{{cite book | last = Polkinghorne | first = John | author-link = John Polkinghorne | title = Belief in God in an Age of Science | publisher=Yale Nota Bene | year = 2003 | location = New Haven, CT | page = 14 | isbn = 978-0-300-09949-2 }} and also See esp. ch. 5 of his ''Science and Providence''. {{ISBN|978-0-87773-490-1}}</ref> Williams points out that all the natural laws are necessary for life, and even death and natural disaster are necessary aspects of a developing universe.{{refn|group=note|"When stars burn, explode and die, the heavy elements are born and distributed, feeding life. When the first living organisms die, they make room for more complex ones and begin the process of natural selection. When organisms die, new life feeds on them... the sources of [natural] evil lie in attributes so valuable that we would not even consider eliminating them in order to eradicate evil."<ref name="Patricia A. Williams"/>{{rp|169, 179}}}} 
* That natural evils provide humanity with a knowledge of evil which makes their free choices more significant than they would otherwise be, and so their free will more valuable<ref>[[Richard Swinburne]] in "Is There a God?" writes that "the operation of natural laws producing evils gives humans knowledge (if they choose to seek it) of how to bring about such evils themselves. Observing you can catch some disease by the operation of natural processes gives me the power either to use those processes to give that disease to other people, or through negligence to allow others to catch it, or to take measures to prevent others from catching the disease." In this way, "it increases the range of significant choice... The actions which natural evil makes possible are ones which allow us to perform at our best and interact with our fellows at the deepest level" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 108–109.</ref> or
* That natural evils are a mechanism of divine punishment for moral evils that humans have committed, and so the natural evil is justified.<ref>Bradley Hanson, ''Introduction to Christian Theology'' (Fortress, 1997), 100.</ref>