Evolution, Angels, and the Origin of Evil in Aquinas, Ratzinger, and Pendergast

This essay confronts a classic tension: Christian tradition has long linked death in the world to human sin, yet evolutionary science reveals eons of predation, pain, and extinction preceding the emergence of Homo sapiens. In this essay, it is asked whether and how this history can be reconciled with belief in a good creation by the God who is love. After situating the stakes of this question with regard to evangelization, I examine Jesuit physicist Richard Pendergast’s ambitious proposal that fallen angels reshaped the material order and thereby seeded natural evil throughout evolutionary time. I set this account in critical conversation with major figures of the Christian tradition, including Augustine, but especially Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) and Thomas Aquinas, who—while upholding the fall and the need for redemption—locate suffering and death within natural order of creation and compatible with the divine goodness rather than as anomalies. It will be seen that Ratzinger, for his part, proposes a way to preach and live a “creation and evolution” synthesis in which the cross and resurrection illuminate, rather than erase, the hard facts of biological history. The essay concludes by assessing the metaphysical feasibility, scientific plausibility, and theological fittingness of attributing foundational and large-scale natural processes to angelic causation, noting that it risks dualism and the eclipse of creation’s fundamental goodness.