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The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. By Christopher Southgate. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. xii + 196 pp. $27.00 (paper).
With care and conviction, Christopher Southgate embarks on a task that daunts but beckons. Several acknowledgments launch his project: the Christian affirmation that creation is good as well as the sobering awareness that violence and death are endemic to it. Can such "grandeur and groaning" be reconciled? Southgate aims to engage creations groaning while yet espousing faith in a God who is "creative, redemptive, and all-loving" (p. 15).
This dilemma has elicited various prior approaches. In the first portion, Southgate rejects many. This list includes the path of creationism/intelligent design, which is insufficiently attuned to modern science. Metaphysical dualism is also jettisoned. There is no rival to God; there is no evil within God. Southgate also critiques the so-called "fall narrative" theology of Genesis. This conception attributes all violence and pain in creation to human rebellion against God (Genesis 3). It is an outlook that must be debunked: biological death cannot be regarded as a consequence of any long-past human activity. Support for this indictment draws both from biological science and improved readings...