If God is real why is there so much suffering in the animal kingdom?

Published on October 18, 2026 3:00 PM GMT This is a crosspost from my Substack. The Role of Emotional Suffering in the Animal Kingdom The Problem of Animal Suffering for Theism While non-human animal emotions received very little attention during the heyday of behaviorism, scientific research interest has steadily grown in the subject of the last decades. But this does not mean that the subject has only been of recent interest to scientists. Indeed, Darwin dedicated a whole book to the subject, titled The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), collecting evidence for the parallels between the expressions of humans and non-human animals (henceforth animals for simplicity). As Rodgers et al. note, Darwin “laid an important foundation for viewing the defensive patterns of other species as essential evolutionary precursors to human fear and anxiety reactions” (1997, p. 291). However, the more we learn about the negative emotions of animals, such as grief, pain, anger, fear, depression-like states, and so forth, the more we are forced to think about the moral status of these states. How much emotional suffering is there in non-human animals, and how much should we care about them? Nature seems to be filled with suffering, thus forcing us to think about why such suffering exists. These questions are of central importance to the problem of animal suffering, which is the central theme of this edited volume. Philosophers of religion and theologians have long struggled with the problem of evil, that is, why is there badness and suffering in this world if there is an omnipotent, omniscient, and, perhaps more importantly, benevolent God who has created the world according to his design (McFarland 2018)? A special version of this problem concerns the problem of why an all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing God would allow non-human animals to experience suffering without seemingly any purpose, which has weakened the conviction many have in God’s existence, despite several arguments by theists to solve this problem. The goal of this chapter is not to address this question or problem of theism directly, which has already been done in preceding chapters. Instead, I will here take a deep dive into the literature on emotional suffering in the animal kingdom to explore whether these could further provide evidence for or against monotheism. The philosopher and theologian Michael Murray (2008), for instance, has attempted to justify animal pain by highlighting its benefits to animals, going so far as to suggest that pain may be necessary for creatures engaging in complex goal-directed behavior. Indeed, I have made a similar argument in my recent monograph on the evolution of consciousness that there was something close to necessary about the evolution of hedonic evaluation (pleasures and pains) to enable the evolution of complex animal bodies (Veit 2023). So I am not at all surprised that the adaptive benefits of pain have given rise to a body of evolutionary theodicy literature seeking to explain the problem of animal suffering as the natural outcome of God employing evolution to create the diversity of life forms we find in the world (Attfield 2000; Southgate 2002; Wahlberg 2015; Jang 2018; Messer 2018; Sollereder 2018a, b; Peters 2019; Lamoureux 2020). Similar to responses to the problem of evil concerning human suffering, theists have argued that the intuition that pain is intrinsically bad may have to be reconsidered due to the roles it plays for organisms, such as to live a longer and happier life by avoiding harmful situations. My goal here is not to directly engage in this discussion about pain. Indeed, I will largely side-step the common argument for the necessity of pain in this chapter in order to consider whether a similar argument could be made for the roles of negative emotions experienced by animals. As Kahane points out, “[e]volutionary history is awful primarily because it contains so much agony—largely physical pain and other negative physical sensations, but in higher animals also emotions such as fear and distress” (2023, p. 254). While most suffering in the animal kingdom is due to comparatively simple pains, it is these complex emotional states that require an ethical analysis. To do this, we must understand the value of these emotions, that is, what is the axiological status of the emotional suffering animals experience? On first glance, it may seem hard to justify the suffering animals experience from emotions like fear, but an examination of the role of these states in the lives of animals may offer a way out for the theist, by highlighting how important these states are for the survival of the animals and, thus, the continued existence of such creatures. As I shall argue, however, such reasoning can at best only offer a partial response to the problem of animal suffering. While there are survival and individual benefits that come from the experience of emotional suffering, and we can