This book offers a fine example of the way in which analytic philosophy has opened up its imagination. After decades in which its practitioners feared to venture beyond a very narrow compass of subjects, its careful precision and clarity is now being applied to major theological and ethical topics. Michael Murray has chosen a problem that is fundamental for Jewish, Christian and Islamic thinkers at least: how could a good and powerful God allow so much suffering of non‐human animals?
He begins with an overview of the general debate about the problem of evil, concluding with a careful explanation of the standards of proof that a defender of theism requires. He argues that for God to have a ‘morally sufficient reason for permitting an evil’ (p. 14), the evil must be necessary to secure a good the value of which sufficiently outweighs it, and it must be within God's ‘rights’ to permit this. If an explanation shows this in a way that the believer is not justified in rejecting in the light of the overall claims that he or she justifiably accepts, that explanation will count as adequate. Although Murray is too subtle to resort to crude utilitarianism, the language of weighing total goods and harms may make anti‐consequentialist readers uneasy.
Murray next treats neo‐Cartesian accounts of apparent animal suffering that see it as either illusory or morally insignificant. He concludes that these are difficult to disprove categorically, but will convince few people. He then looks at arguments based on the idea of the Fall of ‘Adam’, or of Satan; the latter, while more weakly attested by tradition, has the advantage of offering an explanation for ‘pre‐Adamic pain’. The next chapter discusses the positive usefulness of pain for individuals and for animal life in general, making use of very interesting medical evidence. Murray then goes on to examine various arguments for the value of stable, ordered, regularity in the world. He cautiously concludes that a world that moves from chaos to order via ‘nomic regularity’ could be sufficiently worthwhile to outweigh the totality of animal suffering that is its by‐product. Finally, he draws on elements of possible defences from all his chapters to conclude that a combination of these can provide a sufficient defence, as it were, to clear God's name.
Murray explores the possibilities of each argument with exhaustive care; he is cautious and judicious in his judgements, often appealing to sceptical or agnostic intuitions, in an even‐handed but occasionally arbitrary way. He is genuinely open‐minded, being willing to examine with respect the logic of, for example, the case for creationism. He is also extremely sensitive to the way in which different arguments will have more or less persuasive power depending on the other commitments of one's interlocutor. The consequent hesitancy of his conclusions will disappoint some readers, but the journey to them will be constantly thought provoking.
Within the parameters of his chosen strategy, Murray leaves no argumentative stone unturned. Yet there are puzzles about the way he sets up his argument. It is taken for granted that Darwin greatly exacerbated the theological problem of animal suffering. This is curious. Before The Origin of Species, every literal believer in Genesis, every Aristotelian, and every ordinary observer knew that many animals suffered pain and that every single one of them would die. They knew that many lived by eating others, that the stronger outlived the weaker, and that very often non‐human creatures (as most human beings at the beginning of the nineteenth century) did not live to maturity. Darwin's theory did not alter the plain evidence. In terms of individuals, all it did was explain that animals with certain characteristics are more likely to breed successfully and pass on those characteristics. It did argue that some kinds of animals were lost over the millenia (as fossil evidence already showed), but that is not a fact that increases the amount of animal suffering. It is true that the geologists, reinforced by Darwin, showed that there was a long span of time in which animals had suffered before human beings appeared. On certain interpretations of the Fall this might be apologetically significant. In general, however, if animal suffering is a problem for theism, it is not obvious that it becomes a problem of a different order simply because it has been going on longer than we once suspected.
A second difficulty: given what we know about human suffering, what does the suffering of animals add? Even if much of the earth's misery is caused by human beings whether directly or via the Fall it seems obvious that many of the human victims are themselves innocent. When we know of women and children being gang‐raped in the Congo, how can reflection upon eagles killing lambs make our problem harder? Murray cites Marilyn McCord Adams, who insists on the significance of the difference between relatively minor hurts and what she terms ‘horrendous evils’. It is arguable that the latter can affect only human beings, with their enhanced capacities of memory, imagination and sensitivity. Adams argues that Christianity cannot respond to such evils without recourse to the Passion and Resurrection. One might wonder why Murray himself is happy to discuss the Fall, but ignores Christology and Trinitarian theology in his own account.
Can the suffering of animals be ‘horrendous’? Murray hints that it will be limited by their capacities for thinking and feeling (in very different ways across the spectrum of animals); however, he does not develop the thought that this could mean that even from the point‐of‐view of the animal (insofar as we can make sense of that), its suffering might be worth it for the goodness of its life. As Chapter 2 very plausibly argues, neo‐Cartesian claims that no animals suffer are implausible, but a serious examination of the relevant scientific evidence can lead us to a more cautious and nuanced sense of the differences as well as the similarities in the ways in which other animals might experience the world.
Finally, a project like this raises interesting questions about the philosophy of religion itself. How far are reasons persuasive? Can arguments of this sort change hearts as well as minds? Again, how far is it appropriate to speculate about the mind of God in order to ‘defend’ God against human ‘charges’? Few readers will be persuaded by every step of Murray's case; all, however, should find here serious food for thought.
