The existence of evil in a world created by the God of light and love is one of the principle reasons why many reject God. However, God has given all the reasons for the state of affairs and has also provided a solution in Christ to repurchase the lost posses- sion. This same issue plagued Darwin, and he once wrote a letter to his friend Dr. Asa Gray regarding this matter:
I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see so plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence for 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.1
He also wrote in 1844 in his initial draft of The Origin of Species:
It is derogatory that the Creator of countless Universes should have made by individual acts of His will the myriads of creeping parasites and worms, which since the earliest dawn of life have swarmed over the land and in the depths of the ocean ….. We cease to be astonished that a group of animals should have been transformed to lay their eggs in the bowels and flesh of other sensitive beings; that some animals should live by and delight in cruelty; that animals should be led away by false instincts; that annually there should be an incalculable waste of the pollen, eggs and immature beings…2
Charles Darwin was thus swayed to reject the hand of God in nature and to accept the naturalistic approach, but his conjectures and conclusions were based on the assumption that the present biological interactions apparent in nature, must have existed since the inception of life. This is not necessarily true, and we could ask the question: Does the evidence point to decay with elements of perfection and design serving as reminders of a once perfect situation, or does the evidence point to past imperfection and progress toward greater and greater perfection? The fossil record already reveals greater diversity in the past than in the present, and life also exploded on the scene in what has been termed the Cambrian explosion. These two fac- tors alone point in the exact opposite direction to what naturalistic evolution would propose and they are consistent with the creation account. Let us examine some of the issues involved.