groaning creation. Animals eat one another, parasites infect and slowly kill their hosts, and natural disasters wreak havoc with no regard for life or property. Why is it like this? Well, the Bible gives us the answer—but Christianity Today magazine doesn’t like that answer!
In a recent cover story for Christianity Today,
John R. Schneider, professor emeritus of theology at Calvin University laid out
the problem of a groaning creation and animal suffering, stating:
Modern science tells us that heartworm is just one source of animal suffering in nature among scores of others. Together, they confront Christians with a disquieting question: How could such horrific suffering exist within the good creation of the omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect Christian God? How to answer this question has become the center of intense controversy among leading Christian and non-Christian thinkers of our time.
But pay attention to Schneider’s next statement:
It was not always so. Premodern Christian theologians did not find this question hard to answer. Most
major Christian thinkers taught that the causes in nature that harm
human and nonhuman beings did not exist until the first human beings
sinned against God. 
Predation, disease, deadly parasites (like
heartworm), and violent terrestrial events were viewed as products of
the Fall. But revolutionary new developments in the natural sciences have made it difficult to accept that traditional answer. In the 18th and 19th centuries,
pioneering geologists made an unexpected discovery that still causes
consternation among Christians. The unveiling of an unfathomably long
epochal, prehuman history of animals calls the chronology of creation in
Genesis into question. More importantly, though, it seems to subvert
the traditional explanation that savagery among animals originated as a
consequence of the Fall. According to ancient rocks and fossils, predation and other sources of
animal pain reach back seamlessly throughout the entire prehuman history
of species as they gradually evolved. Recent studies of amber from the
Cretaceous period (150–70 million years ago) provide perfectly preserved
specimens of biting flies, ticks, mosquitoes, a host of parasitic worms
(ancestors of the heartworm), microbial diseases, and viruses that
preyed upon the dinosaurs, afflicting them with horrific physical harm
that possibly hastened their demise. The additional discovery that successive
cataclysmic mass extinctions of entire biomes of species have occurred
periodically on Earth further complicates Christian explanation for
animal pain. It seems that 99 percent of all species that ever existed
are now gone, most without so much as a genetic trace left in the
genomes of species existing now. On the surface, this sequence of
catastrophes, followed by evolutionary restarts, does not exactly evoke a
sense of divine providential design. A third development in science makes
it still harder to discern the Divine in both the history of animals and
the conditions of their existence in nature now . . . during hundreds
of millions of years, the law of natural selection guided the creation
of all species. It is this relatively random,
uneconomical, and inherently brutal means of creation that causes
intense animal suffering. The lawlike “hand” of natural selection
literally inscribes animal suffering by design into the conditions of
existence for animals. Since Darwin’s time, philosophers and theologians
have debated whether the God of the Bible could have employed such an
inherently inefficient and brutal means of creation.
*But mankind sinned against God. Because man was given dominion over creation, when Adam fell all of creation was cursed (Genesis 3:17) and now groans, awaiting liberation (For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. Romans 8:22).
But Schneider must reject the biblical, and historic, explanation for
animal suffering because of “revolutionary new developments in the
natural sciences.” In other words, God’s Word is not his ultimate
authority—man’s ideas are, and he will subject the Bible to man’s ideas!" AIG
