For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about how the evolutionary process challenges and reshapes our understanding of divine love.
Theologian and philosopher Mats Wahlberg, a professor at Sweden’s Umeå University, has long been fascinated by the theological implications of natural selection. “If you look at it superficially, the laws of evolution might appear to be antithetical to the Christian worldview — they involve a lot of competition, survival of the fittest, suffering and extinction,” Wahlberg says. “So the question arises, why would a perfectly good God choose to create by such a process?”
In theological terms, a theodicy is any attempt to understand how a good God could justifiably allow evil or suffering to exist. For Wahlberg, evolution requires its own version of theodicy — one with potential insights into the origin and purpose of divine and human love.