posted
OK, I said evidence, not proof. I recognize that many of you will find this completely unconvincing and easily dismissed. Feel free.
I was watching a nature program a couple of night ago. It was about agressive insects. In one segment they talked about weaver ants. These bugs work together to take down prey many times larger than they are individually. They do this by swarming the prey, biting it repeatedly while injecting it with venom then taking it apart and eating the bits. They showed this happening to a large caterpillar. It was one of the most disturbing things I've seen on TV. The caterpillar was writhing around, clearly in pain. It was covered with ants that were biting, pinching, and chewing all over it. The video segment of this lasted for several seconds. To the caterpillar it must have seemed like eternity in hell.
Here we have two creatures just doing what they do. A caterpillar minding its own business and a group of ants out providing for their young. From these seemingly innocent motives comes a moment of near unimaginable cruelty and pain. How does one reconcile this with the concept of a benevolent creator who keeps tabs on each sparrow? To me it is more evidence of a random uncaring universe self-shaped by brute force and amorality.
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This is largely unrelated since when it comes to me you're preaching to the choir, but I sometimes find it amazing how these kinds of TV segments can convey emotion. For example, the music video for the Philosopher Kings' (You Don't Love Me) Like You Used To shows an extreme close-up of two snails copulating. I swear to you that it is one of the sexiest things I have ever seen on television. I don't know how they made it sexy, but they did. Unbelievable.
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>>How does one reconcile this with the concept of a benevolent creator who keeps tabs on each sparrow? To me it is more evidence of a random uncaring universe self-shaped by brute force and amorality.
In the Christian religion, natural misery and horror on earth are generally explained by the Fall.
But you probably knew that.
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Well, KarlEd, I'm with you on this one: I can't understand a God that would allow so much cruelty. And I'm not talking only about ants towards caterpillars stuff. I don't buy the "greater good" nor the "mysterious ways" interpretations. As Roger Zelazny had one of his characters say in "Lord of the Light", I'd rather have a merciful God than a just one. And I see no mercy in everyday life dramas - no justice either, for that matter.
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In the Christian religion, natural misery and horror on earth are generally explained by the Fall.
But you probably knew that.
Well, yes. I guess for me this provides a vivid example of the failing of this particular intellectual justification. How does one man's mistake justify all the random cruelty in the world. Human cruelty can at least be explained by a divine need to preserve free will. Do you believe that weaver ants did not exist in Eden, or that they were not carniverous? Or something else? How do you believe the fall changed that? Do you believe weaver ants choose to inflict pain and suffering rather than eat grass and will be judged accordingly? or were they unwillingly changed by The Fall into amoral inflicters of torture and death?
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It's not one man's mistake, but the capture of earth by what can loosely and without melodrama be called "the forces of evil". Why an Omnipotent God would choose to lose part of the battle just to give us a chance at freewill and autonomy is the mystery, and a good one.
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Jim-Me: Hmm, but suppose there's a God that wants you to be an Atheist because of these reasons, would you accept his judgment when that day would come? I remember seeing an episode of "The Twilight Zone" where a mother receives God's command to kill her child, and then at the "end of time" she's the only person that refuses God's judgment because she can't understand how such a God would have the moral authority to judge her. That's somewhat my position too; I mean, I'd like to have a *looong* explanation of God's reasons before accepting to be judged by Him. Otherwise I'd feel tricked into accepting a judgement without knowing all the circumstances.
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This only casts doubt on the Christian all-knowing, a-powerful, all-merciful God. Still the possibility of a less-perfect God running things, or one that started everything off and is now watching it go.
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I wouldn't think God is deserving of worship just because he exists. Its not like existance is all that hard to pull off. Somehow I managed to exist, after all .
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to me it seems that if God had wanted us to believe in him, he wouldn't have given us rationalism. if God does exist, and he's this all powerfull, rational being, then even "he" shouldn't believe in "himself" (if only english were more like german.. damn lack of neutral pronoun).
haha i love that
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The simplest way to answer this is with the action reaction arguement. That is to say, for every negative thing that happens there is an equally positive thing that happens. Everything on earth has an opposite. For every evil there is good, for every good there is evil. This concept is key to our free-agency.
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quote: For every evil there is good, for every good there is evil.
So, every time something good happens to you, or you pray for something good to happen, do you feel guilty, knowing that it means that something bad is happening to someone else, or that you are basically praying for something bad to happen to someone else?
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...and if a bunch of roving, barbarian ants is the best evidence you can uncover for a lack of God, I think your looking in the wrong place.
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So if there is a God I'm supposed to worship Him just like that?! Huh, no thanks. I appreciate certain things in people, things that make them "good" in my eyes. If God isn't an "improved" version of a good person, then I see no reason in worshiping Him. It's like looking up to someone you don't think is better, why the heck would you do that? 'Cause He exists?! Edit: Or because he's more powerful than you?! "The ultimate bully"??
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Yes, because us being helpless to prevent an evil from happening when a good does clearly preserves free agency.
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Seriously, I don't expect to change anyone's mind by this thread. The episode I mentioned simply drove home to me something I've long suspected. I'm sure it's very similar to someone who sees God's hand in the exquisite construction of every flower and the unnecessary beauty of the rainbow. We're both approaching the evidence with some degree of preconceived verdict. However, unnecessary beauty and seeming design are not really problems in an atheistic view of the universe, but wanton suffering and cruelty are problems in the "Benevolent Creator" view of the universe. To me they are problems only inadequately and tortuously addressed. When applied to my example, "The Fall" comes across to me with the same degree of reality as the story that spiders spin a dull monochromatic tapestry because Arachne offended the Gods with her hubris. YMMV.
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quote:This only casts doubt on the Christian all-knowing, a-powerful, all-merciful God. Still the possibility of a less-perfect God running things, or one that started everything off and is now watching it go.
But who cares, right? Aren't you an apatheist?
quote:The simplest way to answer this is with the action reaction arguement. That is to say, for every negative thing that happens there is an equally positive thing that happens. Everything on earth has an opposite. For every evil there is good, for every good there is evil. This concept is key to our free-agency.
But this isn't true. Even a cursory glance at our world shows that there is far more "evil" than "good." Action-reaction only works for forces in Newtonian mechanics calculations.
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Read Worthing Saga.........without pain we would know no joy, without fear there can be no calm. without death, life is meaningless.
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Hang on. The Fall could hardly happen before the human species existed, right? So short of believing in a really literal interpretation of Genesis, how to explain all those dinosaurs and whatnot that died in agony before any creature with free will walked the Earth?
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Karl.. the answer is that the catepillar had actually been torturing flowers and other plants by slowly eating them and killing millions of bacteria and other cells slowly through a proccess called "Digestion".
The ants were actually the liberators of a place called "The Lawn", and seeing as the rebelion took place with mob justice, the only thing left to do was to loot the riches that were left behind so they could take some extra food home to their controling wife that they all answer to.
It was a fleeting moment in ant history that will probably be forgotten in the history books behind such things like the great burning of "yesterday" when a giant being managed to focus a sun ray in order to kill off half of the population of one colony, not to mention when the giants decided to use chemical weapons on unsuspecting civilian ants on an nice summer day.
It completely ruined the picnic.
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quote:Here we have two creatures just doing what they do. A caterpillar minding its own business and a group of ants out providing for their young. From these seemingly innocent motives comes a moment of near unimaginable cruelty and pain. How does one reconcile this with the concept of a benevolent creator who keeps tabs on each sparrow?
Well, one thing I'd wonder is... Do caterpillars even feel pain? They'd need a consciousness or mind to feel pain, and that's a rather complicated thing, no? Of course, similarly horrible things can happen to more advanced creatures too...
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quote: The episode I mentioned simply drove home to me something I've long suspected.
What bothers me, though, Karl, is that while you've been hanging onto that end of agnosticism for a while, I've been hanging onto the other end, the one that's just shy of full-on atheism. And the problem there is that when you look at nature from a rational and atheist POV, you almost have to be an Objectivist.
But I find Objectivism morally repellent.
So I rationalize -- with as little reason and as much blind faith as any worshipper -- that intelligence and self-awareness make it possible to overcome our biological drives, that in essence those ants could, if possessed of empathy and a sense of their place in the universe, actually choose to kill the caterpillar more humanely, or abstain from caterpillars altogether. There's some evidence that this is true of human society, but not nearly enough for it to be anything more than my version of a religious belief.
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quote:But this isn't true. Even a cursory glance at our world shows that there is far more "evil" than "good." Action-reaction only works for forces in Newtonian mechanics calculations.
Wow. You really believe this?
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I don't know, Karl--the example you give doesn't strike me as evidence for the nonesistance of god so much as it does evidence that god, if it exists, doesn't have the same perspective on suffering as humans do.
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I think animal suffering is often accepted because of a lack of sentience... but that doesn't answer Karl's question.
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Its certainly possible to believe that some things just are in the universe, such as morality, without believing God just is (or is at all); after all, most atheists are willing to believe the universe exists.
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oh, Corwin, I saw a movie like that... starred Mimi Rogers. I thought it was very thoughtful and did a great job of explaining why Freewill ultimately necessitates a "hell" (in the sense of a separation from God). Some people will just not be able to accept what God means or wants. Why else would Angels revolt?
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quote: I don't see why you have to be an Objectivist, Tom; could you elucidate?
Because from a truly Rationalist POV, self-interest is the only form of morality that makes any sense; anything else requires taking at least a few points on faith. Now, you can argue -- as Objectivists usually do -- that the most effective form of self-interest is enlightened self-interest, but it's still an inherently selfish philosophy.
It is impossible to live without doing harm. It's absolutely impossible. And yet many of us -- most of us -- try to live our lives in such a way as to do as little conscious harm as possible. What's our motivation for that? And, moreover, how does one actually rationalize it?
It's not that atheism is inherently amoral. But I think Rationalism is, since the existence of external morality is something that I still haven't seen a completely rational logical argument succeed at proving.
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quote:Hang on. The Fall could hardly happen before the human species existed, right? So short of believing in a really literal interpretation of Genesis, how to explain all those dinosaurs and whatnot that died in agony before any creature with free will walked the Earth?
Naturally, I agree with you. I think you get something that many Christians fail to - Christian beliefs without this literal interpretation of Genesis is inconsistent, especially with regard to the idea of the origins of pain, suffering, and sin. Christians who believe that these things are part of what God intended for his creation worship a God that I cannot respect or admire.
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again, see my post... the Fall is not *just* the result of one man's action, but of a whole world being in captivity. Are y'all familiar with C.S. Lewis's "Space Triology"?
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Well, maybe God doesn't really care about bringing peace and happiness to caterpillars and other nonsentient beings. I'm fairly certain that those creations were made more to serve man rather than enjoy the paradise of Eden.
So even before and during Adam and Eve were prancing around the garden, everything else was already going through the natural process of life and death.
And then through free will, humans got into it as well...
And as others have already said, it doesn't necessarily disprove that God exists, just a God that vanquishes pain and death from the Earth because wouldn't that just be a grand thing to do...
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quote:But this isn't true. Even a cursory glance at our world shows that there is far more "evil" than "good." Action-reaction only works for forces in Newtonian mechanics calculations.
Wow. You really believe this?
Hm. I would say that I believe it weakly enough to dismiss the idea that "good" and "evil" (as used in this case by scottneb) are in balance either in our world or in the universe writ large. Because the scope of my existence is so limited, though, I don't get too depressed by it. I'll make an analogy to entropy. "Order" and "disorder," used in this sort of context, are not in balance in the world or universe either. However, just as the part within the scope of my existence exhibits more "order" than most of the universe, it also exhibits more "good" than most of the universe.
It also helps (with the not being depressed) that the universe doesn't care about me, or about "order" or "good," but that I pursue these things for my own personal satisfaction.
posted
>>How does one man's mistake justify all the random cruelty in the world.
Adam's transgression is justified (in Mormonism) by the subsequent capacity of the whole of creation to learn and progress, and come nearer to being what God is. In Mormonism, there is no progression without trial-- that apparently applies to all of reality, not just human-deity relations.
That's the justification.
Like all justifications, for some people it will fall short. It's not an explanation, and not a really comforting idea when it's examined closely.
quote: Do you believe that weaver ants did not exist in Eden, or that they were not carniverous? Or something else? How do you believe the fall changed that? Do you believe weaver ants choose to inflict pain and suffering rather than eat grass and will be judged accordingly? or were they unwillingly changed by The Fall into amoral inflicters of torture and death?
I believe that Eden is largely metaphorical.
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