Stephen Jay Gould

If God is benevolent and the creation displays his “power, wisdom and goodness” then why are we surrounded with pain, suffering, and apparently senseless cruelty in the animal world?

William Buckland, England’s first official academic geologist, discussed this most pressing problem of natural theology. Buckland considered the depredation of “carnivorous races” as the primary challenge to an idealised world where the lion might dwell with the lamb. He resolved the issue to his satisfaction by arguing that carnivores actually increase “the aggregate of animal enjoyment” and “diminish that of pain”. Death, after all, is swift and relatively painless, victims are spared the ravages of decrepitude and senility, and populations do not outrun their food supply to the greater sorrow of all. God knew what he was doing when he made lions.

Such arguments did begin to address “the problem of evil” for many of Buckland’s contemporaries — how could a benevolent God create such a world of carnage and bloodshed? Yet this argument could not abolish the problem of evil entirely, for nature includes many phenomena far more horrible in our eyes than simple predation. I suspect nothing evokes greater disgust in most of us than slow destruction of a host by an internal parasite — gradual ingestion, bit by bit, from the inside. In no other way can I explain why Alien, an uninspired, grade-C, formula horror film, should have won such a following. That single scene of Mr Alien popping forth as a baby parasite from the body of a human host, was both sickening and stunning. Our nineteenth-century forebears maintained similar feelings. The greatest challenge to their concept of a benevolent deity was not simple predation — but slow death by parasitic ingestion. The classic case, treated at length by all great naturalists, invoked the so-called ichneumon fly. Buckland had sidestepped the major issue.

The “ichneumon fly”, which provoked such concern among natural theologians, was actually a composite creature representing the habits of an enormous tribe. The ichneumonoidea are a group of wasps, not flies that include more species than all the vertebrates combined.

The free-flying females locate an appropriate host and then convert it into a food factory for their own young. The most common victims are caterpillars. The ichneumon mother often simultaneously injects a toxin that paralyses the caterpillar or other victim. The paralysis may be permanent, with the agent of its future destruction secure on its belly. The egg hatches, the helpless caterpillar twitches, the wasp larvae pierces and begins its grisly feast.

Since a dead and decaying caterpillar will do the wasp larvae no good, it eats in a pattern that cannot help but recall, the ancient English penalty for treason — drawing and quartering, with its explicit object of extracting as much torment as possible by keeping the victim alive and sentient. As the king’s executioner drew out and burned his client’s entrails, so does the ichneumon larvae eat fat bodies and digestive organs first, keeping the caterpillar alive by preserving intact the essential heart and central nervous system. Is it any wonder that ichneumons, not snakes or lions, stood as the paramount challenge to God’s benevolence during the heyday of natural theology?

Our naturalists knew that God’s benevolence was lurking somewhere behind all these tales of apparent horror. Charles Lyell, for example, in the first edition of his epochal Principles of Geology (1830-1833), decided that caterpillars posed such a threat to vegetation that any natural checks upon them could only reflect well upon a creating deity, for caterpillars would destroy human agriculture, “did not Providence put causes in operation to keep them in due bounds”.

In this strange and apparently cruel operation one circumstance is truly remarkable. The larva of the ichneumon gnaws the inside of the caterpillar, carefully all this time it avoids injuring the vital organs, as if aware that its own existence depends on that of the insect upon which it preys! Should we not regard such an instance as a perfect prodigy, as an example of instinctive forbearance almost miraculous?

Evolution could be read as God’s chosen method of peopling our planet, and ethical messages might still populate nature. St George Mivart, one of Darwin’s most effective evolutionary critics and a devout Catholic, argued that whatever the pain, “physical suffering and moral evil are simply incommensurable”. Since beasts are not moral agents, their feelings cannot bear any ethical message. Using a favourite racist argument of the time — that “primitive” people suffer far less than advanced and cultured folk — Mivart extrapolated further down the ladder of life into a realm of very limited pain indeed: He argued that only in man can there really be any intense degree of suffering, because only in him is there that intellectual recollection of past moments and that anticipation of future ones, which constitute in great part the bitterness of suffering. The momentary pang, the present pain, which beasts endure, though real enough, is yet, doubtless, not to be compared as to its intensity with the suffering which is produced in man through his high prerogative of self-consciousness.

The other argument, radical in Darwin’s day but more familiar now, holds that nature simply is as we find it. Our failure to discern a universal good does not record any lack of insight or ingenuity, but merely demonstrates that nature contains no moral messages framed in human terms. Morality is a subject for philosophers, theologians, students of the humanities, indeed for all thinking people.

The answer to the ancient dilemma of why such cruelty (in our terms) exists in nature can only be that there isn’t any answer — and that framing the question “in our terms” is thoroughly inappropriate in a natural world neither made for us nor ruled by us. It just plain happens. Caterpillars are not suffering to teach us something. Perhaps they will evolve a set of adequate defences sometime in the future, thus sealing the fate of ichneumons. And perhaps, indeed probably, they will not.

I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.

(This extract is taken from Nonmoral Nature by Stephen Jay Gould)

Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation