The first instinct of many would be to answer “Yes” to this question. For God to “act in the world,” they suppose, would be for God to “intervene” in the natural course of events. Such divine intervention would be an external supernatural cause that interrupts natural cause-and-effect relations and therefore contravenes the laws that govern…

You may have heard the claim that God cannot answer prayers because that would violate the laws of nature, which determine everything that happens. This view reflects an outdated, but still popular interpretation of the laws of nature. It dates back to the time when people were deeply impressed by the success of Newton’s laws…

“Complex question” is the label that logicians give to a particular kind of fallacy in which the answer to a question is already implicit in the way in which it is framed. The classic example is: “when did you stop beating your wife?” The issue that we are considering here is not quite a complex…

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion . . . ” Thus, every reader of the Christian Scriptures is presented with this design and purpose framework to understand humanity. The Genesis account includes both the uniqueness—from other created things—and the commonality—in form and function—of all humans. Christian…

  Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling, for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted. Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now. … Every place had been displaced,…

Deerfield, IL — The Henry Center for Theological Understanding is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2021–2022 Henry Resident Fellowship. This year’s recipients are: Christina Bieber Lake, Gijsbert van den Brink, James Arcadi, Philip Woodward, and Jon Thompson. The Resident Fellowship program is the centerpiece of the Henry Center’s Creation Project, a multi-million dollar…

I want to thank the contributors to this volume for taking time to review my book Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil. I especially thank Kevin Vanhoozer for his introductory essay. Anyone wishing to get an accurate picture of my multi-faceted discussion as a whole in concise form can confidently refer to it….

John Schneider’s Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil is a wonderfully rich and interactive book which advances the arguments of previous authors in interesting ways. In this short review, I welcome this chance to respond, while nevertheless acknowledging that the depths of the book would require a much longer essay. I will be…

John R. Schneider’s Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil is an important contribution to an important topic—namely, the theological challenge of animal suffering. Theodicy has traditionally been more focused on human suffering, but the emergence in the modern era of what Schneider calls “the Darwinian world” (the revolutionary new picture of nature that…

I have major presuppositional differences from Schneider regarding Scripture and creation. Although I agree with him that theodicy is nothing without eschatology, I also believe that eschatology is nothing without protology. One cannot take the Bible seriously about the end, without taking it seriously about the beginning. Schneider sees the happy ending of a new…

The foundational assumption of John Schneider’s book is that Darwinian evolution presents radically new problems for theology, for which his core proposal, which I can address only briefly, is offered as a solution. Yet of his four “interconnected unveilings,” presented as a “Darwinian problem,” only one arises from Darwinian theory itself, where it is viewed…

There is an old show business saying, often misattributed to W. C. Fields: “Never work with children or animals,” presumably because they will either behave unpredictably or steal every scene. John Schneider’s Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil boldly ignores this advice, and the result is a startling new take on the problem…