"The Value of Soul Making" from Evil and the Good of Love

Social/Cultural Evolution

Hick makes the argument that the phenomena of evil comes from the process of developing a human soul which is what happens through out our lives in our efforts to become more like God. He states that this is a necessary part of life and that evil is a necessary byproduct of this journey, but that this journey is the result of us as a human population having rational thought and the idea of a God to follow and is not the result of an evolutionary phenomena. Until this point I actually agreed with Hick, but being a biology major I found it difficult to discredit an evolutionary theory without examining it further.

The evolutionary theory I believe applies to this reading the best is that of cultural/social evolution. This theory describes how societies and cultures change over time, our human population has gone through more drastic change over time than I believe can be explained without the help of an evolutionary theory. It is important to note that sociocultural evolution is not the same as cultural development, development involves the integration of differentiations and increases in overall complexity of the society itself. This contrasts with sociocultural evolution because evolution implies this; the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure which is qualitatively different from the ancestral form. This can be easily seen in the contrast of the hunter gatherer lifestyle of the caveman to the relatively easy and carefree life comparatively we live as humans today. All pathways of evolution are based on the presence of variation in a population and the presence of evil is most easily explained as the essential variation that drives the process and makes it work.

It has been argued that the development of God himself is a product of the sociocultural evolution of the human race, and I think this is a good place to start class discussion on this reading itself; it is a fairly widely accepted fact that the structures and the way of life we live today as humans is vastly different from what it was at the beginning of the human race, but is God, the driving life force behind every being also just a product of a similar kind of evolutionary pathway? If yes, then the presence of God is a natural phenomena that has been allowed by nature, from a scientific perspective, how could this have benefited humans enough in order to be selected for?