Leaving the courtroom

This chapter introduces the main challenge the book intends to address: “How could a good and loving God create through an evolutionary process that involves so much suffering, death, extinction, and violence?” Instead of seeing the harms in nature as a result of fallenness, the author starts from the premise that the natural world is God’s good and creative work, created to allow creatures to “selve.” Sollereder sets out the nature of the project as an exploration in the theology of creation rather than as a traditional theodicy where God is defended by logical arguments and where suffering is “resolved.”