Animal Joy

Reverend William Buckland (1784-1856) was an English geologist and paleontologist. He was invited to contribute to a series of books "on the power, wisdom and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation." In 1836 his book titled, Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology was published. In it Buckland explained that carnivores were consistent with a benevolent God, in that they provide swift death to creatures that would otherwise suffer from sickness or injury, thus reducing the aggregate amount of suffering. He concluded,

The appointment of death by the agency of carnivora as the ordinary termination of animal existence, appears therefore in its main results to be a dispensation of benevolence; it deducts much from the aggregate amount of the pain of universal death; it abridges, and almost annihilates, throughout the brute creation, the misery of disease, and accidental injuries, and lingering decay; and impose such salutary restraint upon excessive increase of numbers, that the supply of food maintains perpetually a due ratio to the demand. The result is, that the surface of the land and depths of the waters are ever crowded with myriads of animated beings, the pleasures of whose life are coextensive with its duration; and which throughout the little day of existence that is allotted to them, fulfill with joy the functions for which they were created [emphasis added].

I ran across this quote in The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins (and he got it from Nonmoral Nature by Stephen J. Gould). It immediately reminded me of the creation narrative from the temple where, as Hugh Nibley put it,

...it is the privilege of every form of life to multiply in its sphere and element and have joy therein. (Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints, p. 43)

Of course, Buckland published his work before the temple as we know it existed. It is tempting to think that whoever included the sentiment expressed by Nibley into the temple narrative (Joseph? Brigham?) was importing a view of nature already prevalent in the culture. On the other hand, I don't know how prevalent such a view was, and anyway it seems to me that, in the context of the temple, it represents God's creations in a state of paradise rather than in our fallen world.

Natural theology, however, held that nature reveals the character of God, so unseemly features of nature such as carnivores had to be cast in a positive light. Gould wrote,

We may find a certain amusing charm in Buckland's vision today, but 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.

Those flies made an impression on Charles Darwin too. In an 1860 letter Darwin wrote,

I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

Alas, the joy of animals notwithstanding, "the problem of evil" remains a difficult one.

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