Evolutionary theodicies are responses to the question of animal suffering as an aspect of the problem of evil. These theodicies assert that a universe which contains the beauty and complexity this one does could only come about by the natural processes of evolution, therefore, evolution is the only way God could have created the world we now have: the goodness of creation is intrinsically linked to the pain and evil of the evolutionary processes by which such goodness is achieved. As John Polkinghorne argues, the randomness that is a necessary aspect of developing new forms of life is the characteristic which also creates the unintended suffering of those life forms. Natural suffering, then, is defined as an unavoidable and unintentional side effect of developing life.