On Lapsarian Theodicy

John R. Schneider’s Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil is an important contribution to an important topic—namely, the theological challenge of animal suffering. Theodicy has traditionally been more focused on human suffering, but the emergence in the modern era of what Schneider calls “the Darwinian world” (the revolutionary new picture of nature that emerges from evolutionary science) presents a number of its own distinctive and difficult problems for theism. Thankfully this challenge is now receiving more attention, and Scheider’s work is a stimulating addition to this field.