Kari Tyree

“The butterflies are here!” I commented to the young man helping me load groceries into my car.

“Yeah, passing through on their annual migration,” he responded. “I always hate to see them in front of the car, though.” I knew what he meant. My husband had commented about the same issue. The Snout Nosed butterflies are on their way from Canada to Mexico, and have been passing through San Antonio this week. They fly so thickly across highways that it’s impossible to commute without killing some. My husband and the man at the grocery store felt dismayed and slightly guilty about this fact, though it’s unavoidable. “Survival of the fittest, I guess,” said my grocery helper, shrugging the small worry off.

Yes, many of the butterflies don’t make it to their destination (although whether “fitness” has anything to do with which ones are hit by cars, I doubt). But the man’s reference to naturalistic evolutionary and social theory got me thinking. His comment and the concept itself are attempts to explain suffering and death, the basic fact that not all creatures survive, which for some reason makes us feel, well, sad.

But why? Why do we feel sad that some butterflies get squashed on their journey? Many more of them surely reach the final destination and are able to replenish the population of the species to return again to the same place the following year. Overall, what is the death of some butterflies, when the population as a whole is fine? If all of the butterflies survived, they would probably create some kind of overpopulation problem in an ecosystem somewhere anyway.

If a naturalistic explanation for the world and life were truly sufficient, then our response to the butterflies would not make any sense. Indeed, where would this response even come from? The emotions of guilt and sadness at the inconsequential loss of some insects could serve no purpose in terms of evolutionary development. Rather, our response reveals that there is a standard of what is good, an ideal that we are somehow programmed to seek. When we see death, especially the sudden quashing of fragile creatures on their seemingly hopeful and harrowing journey across a continent, we recoil. The situation seems horrible to us because we sense that something isn’t right. In an ideal world, all of the beautiful butterflies would make it, and then they wouldn’t cause an overpopulation problem; everything and every creature would live in perfect balance with everything and everyone else.

It is relatively easy to see how the beauty in the world points us to God. After all, if God does exist, we expect He is good and would make good things. The intricate patterns and delicate strength of the tiny butterfly’s wings present themselves to us as belonging to the purview of a great Designer who knows much more and has more creative power than we humans could ever presume to possess. The thought that random mutations in the absence of any informed plan could produce such wonders might strike us as comical, outlandish, ludicrous, like assuming all of the works of Shakespeare were produced not by an intelligent author but by the random shaking of ink bottles against paper. It takes a great and blind faith, indeed, to believe in such a thing.

But what of the brokenness of the butterfly wings smashed into the grills of our cars? Surely the existence of such ugliness makes us question whether a good God exists or is in control of anything. Much worse brokenness than dead butterflies often crowds into our lives or the lives of those we know or hear of in the news. It is a natural first response to question the existence of a good God under these circumstances, but the very fact that they repulse us actually gives us a clue that a good God does exist. If the universe existed without a designer outside of it, it would be in a sort of moral vacuum. There would be no standard outside of the natural world itself to differentiate good and bad, right and wrong, or beauty and brokenness. The natural world hardly gives us any clues as to why we have such a negative response to death; after all, isn’t death “natural,” and in many cases, even necessary? According to the natural order, then, we should accept it without qualms. So we must look outside of the natural universe to make sense of the fact that we respond to death as though something were inherently wrong. We sense something about the universe is broken, which implies that perhaps once it was, and we long for it to be again, whole.

In That Hideous Strength, one of his space trilogy novels, C. S. Lewis argues that even if the natural universe is all that exists, it would be better to fight against the nastiness and insanity within it than to side with all of its brutish baseness. Mark Studdock, a man driven by the desire to belong, finds himself fighting against an attempt at what essentially boils down to brainwashing by the “elites” he’s been trying to get close to throughout the whole story:

But after an hour or so this long, high coffin of a room began to produce on Mark an effect which his instructor had probably not anticipated. . . . the built and painted perversity of this room had the effect of making him aware . . . of this room’s opposite. As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else – something he vaguely called the “Normal” – apparently existed. 

Mark quickly realizes that no matter what the elites say with their “scientific point of view,” he wants to be on the side of the “Normal.” Later, when asked to stamp on a crucifix, Mark refuses, asserting in his mind that Christ had been forsaken by a God who turned out not to exist, and he wonders, “If the universe was a cheat, was that a good reason for joining its side?” In this brilliant philosophical and psychological depiction of the common human experience of the clash between an ideal standard of good and a broken reality, Lewis posits that at the very least our experience shows us a standard does, in fact, exist (the “Normal”). Without an objective standard somehow ingrained in us, we would not be able to recognize the crookedness of the world.

The next step is determining where the standard originates, and the crucifix scene, of course, provides a clue as to where Lewis finds the answer: the God of Christianity and the Bible. It is reasonable to explain our awareness of a standard by the existence of a God who reveals the standard (by being Himself the standard for all perfection), and who created us with an inherent awareness of it. It also makes sense to say that if the universe was created by a good God, and was, at one point, good, then we can understand why now we question the presence of broken and terrible things; they are broken and terrible not by design, and they were not meant to be this way. When we startle and weep at brokenness, ugliness, and death, we agree with the “Normal”; we take sides with God against the brokenness rather than accepting it as part of an amoral and nonsensical universe containing no explanation within its own boundaries for the existence of any standard of morality or even for life itself.

The beauty in the world – its landscapes, delicious foods, self-sacrificial love, butterfly wings – reveals the beauty of a Designer who is good. But the brokenness of the world, and the fact that we perceive the brokenness as such, also point us to God. In the face of the brokenness and our grieving, let us recall that He even entered into our world and partook of its brokenness, becoming broken Himself and overcoming that brokenness, in order that all things might one day be restored and made whole and beautiful again.

The tiny specks are butterflies; the picture cannot do justice to the true effect of walking through what feels like swarms of butterflies all heading in the same direction across our neighborhood!