It's only natural (but it still sucks)

Death of a duckling | Rage against who? | Nature, good and bad

What does the death of a duckling have to say about the nature of the universe and God?

Death of a duckling

I even chose my secondary school partly on the basis of a brood of ducklings

I've always been tremendously fond of ducklings (I don't mean crispy fried). I even unwisely chose my secondary school partly on the basis that there was a brood of ducklings in the quad pond when I went for the open evening. And this year my 4-year-old son has been asking for daily report-backs on how many ducklings I've seen in Greenwich Park. For the past week I'd sadly had to report dwindling numbers - 9 down to 5, down to 4, down to 2... but then on Tuesday lunchtime to my delighted amazement I came upon 17 ducklings in the main wildfowl lake. I happily watched the antics of the little swimming fluff-balls for some time and was about to turn away when I noticed a Canada Goose treading on a duckling that was sitting on the concrete sloping down into the water. The goose then picked up the duckling in its beak, shook it and dropped it. It lay still.

Angry and upset, I stood wondering whether I should transgress the park boundaries, step over the fence and pick up the duckling, although I was sure that it was already dead. Then a crow flew down and snatched up the little body in its beak, but a mother duck flew at it and it dropped the dead duckling into the water where it floated with its head underwater. The saddest sight for me was the mother duck swimming up behind it and repeatedly nudging the little floating body with her beak as though she could coax it back to life. At the risk of being written off as pathetically sentimental, it brought tears to my eyes and an intense feeling of loss and grief.

Rage against - who?

suddenly that dead duckling represented all the injustice of the world

I know it's all perfectly natural and normal, and that only a few ducklings - and other young animals - survive to adolescence, let alone adulthood. But suddenly that small bedraggled floating bundle of dead duckling became for me the representative of all the injustice and wrong and cruelty of the world, and my heart just wanted to shout out abuse and rage against whatever it was that made things be this way.

The obvious thought is that it's God who made things this way, and against him that my anger should be directed. But I can't shake the feeling that the God I've seen in Jesus Christ was grieving every bit as much for that duckling as I was. In some ways the duckling was like Christ - the very symbol of innocent suffering at the hands of the cruelty and injustice in the universe. I felt that my anger must be directed at all the evil in the world, and at the corresponding evil in myself.

Nature, good and bad

Is the universe fundamentally benevolent or hostile?

Nature is so full of beauty and loveliness, and simultaneously so full of suffering and death. Is the one necessary for the other, or are death and cruelty alien and unnatural evils that have found their way into a good creation?

What about lust, greed, anger and violence - these things feel entirely natural; are they just natural in-built parts of our evolved survival package, or are they a corruption of good instincts and impulses?

Is the universe fundamentally benevolent or hostile, kind or cruel? Is it more truly natural to be compassionate and caring or to compete and kill?

I have no easy answers to these questions. All I know is that I have chosen to base my life on the reality and goodness of God, to believe in the beauty and grace despite the very real pain and injustice. This present world, this nature, is good but it is not perfect, is not how it is ultimately meant to be. Perhaps the pain is part of the process of becoming perfect - or perhaps it is an evil to be fought and overcome.

Related posts:

• Evolution, fall and morality
• Earthquakes and God - why does God allow natural disasters?

Why does God allow evil?

'Rushing in where angels fear to tread' springs to mind, but in for a penny... ;-)

If God is perfect (and if he isn't, he's not God), why does evil exist and why does God allow it to continue?

A few quick provisos:

• A blog post can't do more than skim the surface of such enormous issues
  
• There are probably as many ways of answering the questions as there are thinkers about it
  
• People of faith have wrestled with these issues for millennia and the struggle has often enriched their faith without producing any simple answers
• A lot depends on our definitions/understanding of 'good' and 'evil', which there's not room for here. But for example, is all pain and even all suffering actually evil, or merely very unpleasant and difficult? Is death always and inherently bad? Can destruction sometimes be good (say of a cancer)?
  
• Ultimately, evil is not a riddle to be solved but a reality to be dealt with.
  

My own (tentative and provisional) view is that Evil is an unavoidable potential inherent in Good. Evil is not a separate entity from Good; it is merely Good corrupted, twisted, misused, misplaced or attenuated. It is the shadow side of Good: where there is freedom to bless, there must also be freedom to curse; where there is freedom to build, there must also be freedom to destroy, and so on. And as noted above, sometimes destruction (e.g. of a cancer) may be a right and necessary and thing. 

So God did not create or plan evil, but evil was inherent as a potentiality within the good.

Furthermore, Christian theology holds that God wanted morally free, responsible agents whose actions could have genuine significance; who could genuinely love and embrace the good out of free choice. Again, this implies freedom not to act this way; the potential for good inherently includes the potential for not-good, or less-than-good, or good twisted.

At some point then the potentiality for evil becomes the reality of evil, infecting and corrupting the goodness of the cosmos and perhaps even of all things in it. When this happens, one option would be for God to wipe everything out and start again - a bit like a writer ripping up a whole manuscript because of a flaw running through all of it. But this is not the action of one who truly, passionately loves. In all the corrupted things and creatures there is still so much of the original good, and God chooses the long, slow, painful path of redemption and restoration - ultimately even involving his own self-sacrifice and death - to heal the damaged creation. This is, more or less, the Christian story.

In Matthew 13:14-29 Jesus tells a story about a farmer who planted a field of wheat, but an enemy came and planted weeds among the wheat. Rather than trying to pull up the weeds and risk pulling up the good wheat too, the farmer let the two grow side by side until harvest time when they could be separated without damage. This is a picture not only of the cosmos but of everything in it, including our own hearts - good and evil are for the moment inextricably entwined, and God will not risk destroying the good by ripping out the evil. I for one am very grateful for this, as I know too well that many of my thoughts, attitudes, words and deeds do not put me unqualifiedly in the 'good' camp.

Anyway, these are all just my suggestions, not some definitive statement.