I find it hard to believe this world was created with any kind of benevolent intent. Especially when I see first-hand the predation that is prevalent everywhere in nature. That is apparently a key part of “the plan.”
Latest example: for the past few weeks, I’ve observed a robin diligently building a nest in my garden. In a small way it’s brightened my day. They seem very confident and inquisitive as a species.
Anyway, today I notice a sleek black shape climbing up to the spot. The chirping seems to be significantly more frantic than usual. Too late, I realise what’s happening, and bang on the window. The neighbour’s cat flees, but the damage appears to be done. The chirping coming from the nest has stopped. I didn’t look to check. I don’t want to see what remains.
For an hour or so afterwards, I see the robin, flitting back and forth around the area, then back to the nest, urgently chirping, as if searching for the chicks.
I don’t know what it’s like to be such a small bird. Apparently they’re relatively intelligent. Apparently they have emotional range. I don’t know how similar distress or grief are between species.
But yeah, I find it hard to see benevolence in this system. Especially since apparently our hominid ancestors were subject to similar predation (obviously from much larger felines.) You work to build a family. To provide for them. Then one day they’re brutally taken from you in an instant, swallowed up to feed a larger being. What’s the purpose? What’s the lesson? What is the good that justifies such a creation, that couldn’t be obtained in other ways?
And I’m not claiming to be better than this world. Far from it. I eat chicken. But in my view, the evil is built-in. It’s integral. It’s part of “the plan”. Why not make “the lion and the lamb lay down together” from the start? Why create millions of years of pain & suffering? What was the purpose? And if it was created thus, what can we infer about the creator?
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Yes I agree. I can’t believe that a superior being would design such a system. It’s clearly not designed.
For me, whether or not it’s designed is 50/50. The Simulation Argument seems entirely plausible, which I suppose would imply a creator somewhere down the line. I just can’t see how such a creator could be classified as “good” by any metric we would understand.
Perhaps it’s just a callous scientist, running experiments to see what happens. Or a petty vindictive tyrant, like the ancient civilizations seemed to worship (Zeus, Yahweh etc). Or it has priorities that are utterly alien to us. There’s really no way of knowing. But I just can’t see it as good.
Funny, my mind always goes to those books I read as a child, the CS Lewis books Chronicles of Narnia pretty decent British Fantasy as these things go, overly alegorical as hell but that’s what you get with an oxford grad I expect. Anyway the alegorical representative of Christ is a lion called Aslan.
They have adapted it a few times, most recently Disney made three movies out of the three best known books in the series. Points given for irony in “Bend the world to my will” Disney producing three movies about a world that absolutely does not do well by organizations with that sort of values.
Anyway, it would appear any time there is a contrived conflict at least in those movies, the two I rewatched recently that if someone asked “where’s the F***ing all powerful lion eh?” Then someone responds “He’s not a tame lion.” or some rot of similar vintage.
Like your mum or your pastor saying “mysterious ways” as to why some people you pray for die and some recover, those angels do seem to be selective don’t they?
I read a book once by a fella who thought that you could work the bible like you could work a spell, as though it was a mechanical agreement, any words in the bible between you and god. I’m not saying he’s wrong, I’m just saying his particular choice of verse, and the way I tried to use them, mysterious ways didn’t cover it for me.
He found verse after verse saying that if God’s faithful prayed and believed, had faith in god, they had to keep praying and believing, but God would arrive and help. He was convinced, God was no shirker, they just had to pray and believe.
I’ve been at it for more than a decade. He didn’t say a specific schedule, he just said prayed and believed, and I did, I do.
Here I still sit. I’m still waiting to see what happens, because he hasn’t brought around any kind of otherly events. I’ve been praying, I’ve been believing.
The only thing that eats at me is that I’m getting older, and whatever is left of me won’t have long to see anything if it ever even arrives.
So that’s my response to anyone that comes around saying they’ve got something impressive to bring over. That’s cool and good, glad for ya, I won’t rain on your parade any more than you make me. If you make me a partial owner though, you’d better eventually show me some proof.
Don’t send me chasing dust and dreams again. I’m too old to find myself where things never work out and where even hope couldn’t latch on.
Yup, that’s where I got the title. It really stuck with me that Lewis chose the apex predator, best known for tearing innocent creatures apart (including the offspring of rival males), as his representation of god. And lions are beautiful, and powerful, and kind of majestic. And terrifying. Which I suppose is what he was trying to invoke. But good?
And I read a bit of Lewis’ christian apologetics, back when I was still desperately trying to get it. Can’t say anything clicked for me. I just can’t see how any of this is ok, from a compassionate worldview. Like make it make sense. I really want to believe that this world is fundamentally good, and all the pain is somehow worthwhile. And any answer given always just seems incredibly hand-wavy.
Don’t people normally bring up Job when it comes to prayers going unanswered? Not really sure what the lesson’s supposed to be there either? Seems to kind of boil down to “Who are you to question the creator? He has his reasons, and you aren’t capable of understanding them, so just keep your head down and get on with it.” Which just seems so utterly lacking to me… like I don’t get how intelligent people are satisfied with this stuff, absent of emotional need to maintain belief. But then that may just be my wicked prideful self denying the obvious truth, that I know deep in my heart.
Getting deeper into the philosophy of CS Lewis, as I do after more time doing reading on any subject, I have a bit more thought on what he was trying to do. I think he was trying to reconcile how a child might try to understand complex spiritual structures, which would make him an apologist.
He wrote other books of alagory and apology, so there is that. I remember being more entertained by his black comedy The Screwtape Letters about a nephew Demon writing his uncle Demon about some human he’s trying to tempt towards turning away from God.
Which like Paul he used as a commentary on morality, but in a tongue in cheek way I quite appreciated at the age I read it, somewhere in middle childhood. Something along the lines of how people pretend to be moral when they are just as flawed as anyone and that is as sinful as being a flagrant and awful sinner yourself.
I found that biting. Chesterton wrote along similar lines, and Luther. You dig deep enough almost every single damn Christian apologist does. I’m not counting any Calvinists, predestinationists or unitarians because I don’t have the memory space nor the philosophical shake for that. They aren’t counted out, just not included in doctrine calculations.
Which is my rarely brought out thing; if you went according to the way that most biblical scholars and apologists interpret, modern preachers are so far down the wrong hole it doesn’t even matter.
The popular view of Christianity is not Christ like. Simple as that.
So I don’t know that anyone can be apologist enough to mend that gap. Purity tests don’t work. I think it’d be ambitious for the church to just stop shedding numbers.
Except if you cut out fear, I’m not sure what the numbers would be. Not this high I’m sure of that.
I know what I am, and the more I try to deny or ignore it, the harder it comes creeping back up on me. If nothing else though, its the consequences. But its also Consequences vs Dying and never knowing. And that haunts me daily.
Assuming I understand you right, I’d say that if you have a conscience, knowing is never worth it. The regret is never worth it. That’ll haunt you far worse than the not knowing. I may be wrong, and we may be living in a satanic reality where breaking moral taboos is actually somehow eternally rewarded. But probably, for certain taboo things, dying with the regret of never knowing is preferable to dying with the regret of knowing. To the extent that traditional religion has anything right, it’s that.
Maybe there’s ways to not deny or ignore it, without giving in to it. To some extent, we are tame lions. We don’t just act on impulse and instinct. We might not be totally “safe”, but whether from fear of consequences or conscience, we inhibit ourselves every day.
You do understand correctly. And you make a good point.
There is no benevolence in the universe. But on the other hand I don’t think there is malignity–with the exception of 1 dust speck called Earth and 1 fungus of a species called homo sapiens.
Animals don’t kill, cause violence or suffering for the sheer pleasure, thrill or cruelty of it. The cat sees a food source and takes it. If you were to put a dish of cat food next to the nest, the cat would choose logic and eat what’s in the dish.
Humans are the only scourge that choose to cause harm and suffering even when a nonviolent alternative is available. We do it because we feel entitled, or because we’re just plain cruel. I don’t see this in the wild. Animals eat to survive, animals fight to defend themselves, but they don’t invent devices to torture nor do they hunt down and exterminate entire communities just for vanity’s sake the way humankind has defined itself.
There may not be benevolence in the universe, but humans sure do have the monopoly on evil.
*Forgot to make my point.
My point is that unfortunately animals in the wild don’t have the convenience of lions & lambs laying down together because the struggle for survival is too overwhelming. Humans, on the other hand, have not only the opportunity but the (purported) desire for peace. We don’t have to kill but we do. And we seem to relish in it, feel like it’s our god given privilege, and sometimes we just do it for kicks. We are the imbalance. We are the only evil here.
Kind of disagree. Malignity seems to be a product of intelligence and complex social structures. Plenty of animals “play” with their food before killing, especially felines, and often won’t even eat what they kill. I believe Orcas are known to launch seals high into the air, often just to show off. You’ll observe groups of apes carrying out vendettas against each other based on personal resentments etc.
I think when you have a society as complex as humans do, the desire to hurt others often just gets suppressed more, so it can erupt later in ways that seem entirely random. Someone beaten as a child with no outlet for payback grows up to be violent to other innocents, for example. The instinct for vengeance is the same. It’s just suppressed by social complexity. Clans grow into tribes and then nations, and the possibility for genocide emerges, where once you’d just beat up the rival family across the valley and take all their stuff. It’s just complexity. You take instincts born in nature and stretch them across social and technological development and time, and you get what we are as a species. There’s no secret evil ingredient that we’ve wilfully added to the mix.
We’re a part of this world. We’re a product of it. The desire to hurt others emerges from nature. We just make it more complex. It’s all part of the striving, the competition, to dominate.
Animals do it too. Just usually in less subtle ways. Stags clash heads. Walruses maul each other. Lions butcher each other’s cubs. Humans develop elaborate ways to undermine each other, and weapons of mass destruction. The drive, the instinct to dominate, it comes from nature. The evil is built-in. It’s instinctual. It evolved.
But hey, don’t listen to me. Your position is far more hopeful. If you can attribute it all to human free-will, then there’s always the possibility that people could freely choose to forsake evil, and the world would finally be good.
Violence certainly exists in nature, but animal violence is a far, far, far cry from the sort of calculated, ingenious torture that humans engage in. Look up the Spanish Inquisition, the Witch Trials, Vietnam (both sides), or even as recently as Abu Garib, Russia and Israel with soldiers committing brutal sex crimes, I’m talking sick shit, against prisoners and occupied civilians just for laughs. That’s the sort of evil that is distinctly, exclusively human. If you can show me 1 example in all the animal kingdom in all of history, of an animal taking another one captive and butt raping him or her for laughs, which seems to be a human tradition not just in times of war but in every city as we speak, then I’ll officially insert a “pear” (medieval torture device, look it up) in myself and twist.
I believe dolphins are known to be pretty rapey (including the corpses of other species – probably for the lols in that case). But animals don’t have the tech (or social complexity) for long-term wars or vendettas. Conflict tends to get settled in the short-term. So the same capacity isn’t really there for tribal hatreds to build and the war-crimes that result.
Their capacity to use tools is also extremely limited, so even if they had those kinds of deep-seated hatreds, there’s only so much you can do without hands. But I suppose if you really wanted to and you had the intelligence, you could kill extra slowly with teeth and claws, and that only seems to be done playfully, rather than specifically to cause pain.
You’re right though that generally speaking, cruelty between animals isn’t done with malice. Malice requires storing hatred and anger up for a long time, repressing it, and then unleashing it when the opportunity arises. You need defined concepts of self, the other, time, memory of perceived wrongs, all kinds of things that we don’t see in most other species. It’s not enough to want to hurt someone – you need a hierarchy in your mind of which things would hurt most, and why this particular person deserves that. Animals will sometimes kill purely out of anger/resentment (not just necessity), but I think generally they lack the ability to weigh up different ways of doing it, and pick the most painful. There’s probably exceptions I’m not thinking of though.
You’re seriously going to sit there telling me that dolphins are in the same league as the fucking depravity that humans display every day on the news? Or some bullshit about animals not having enough technology or sense of self to become serial child molesters, genocidal megalomaniacs, and religious fanatics who mutilate womens’ genitals to please their manufactured god?
It was obvious from your post but now it’s deafeaning that you’re vainly attempting to anthropomorphise the “evils” of nature in order to justify the sins of man, implying your own sins. That’s how you can get away with life’s daily hypocrisies. Your own sheepish admittance that you eat birds while condemning an animal for doing the same thing sorta reeks dude.
All I am saying is own your evil. Don’t pass it off on nature or the will of god or whatever. Humans consistently display evil of a magnitude that no animal ever has. I personally display evil of a magnitude that would make you run to your rapey dolphins for protection. My point is that we are the only cancer on this planet, and that’s possibly why so many of us are so disgusted with our species, if not our individual selves, that we’re on this site to die. You owe it to your self to swallow this one truth: no one ever killed themselves because an animal wronged them. We’re all here because the human race fucked us, or we humans fucked ourselves.
Not “in the same league”. But part of the same continuum. Consent not really a big thing across much of the animal kingdom, so comparisons don’t really make sense. “Depravity” requires a sense of moral code that varies massively from species to species.
It’s possible that I’ve anthropomorphised animals too much (while still continuously insisting on the psychological differences), but again I maintain it’s all part of a continuum. I would say that you’re far too committed to seeing humans as an exception, apart, separate, rather than as what we are – a product of evolution. Explanation is not justification – to say why something happens is not to say that it’s an ok state of affairs.
I didn’t condemn the cat. Far from it. It was just acting on its instincts. Evolved. A product of a world that is not compassionate. That is fundamentally not ok, at a base level. That was my point.
Calling me a hypocrite is fine, but I’m not sure I ever claimed anywhere to hold particularly high moral standards. Not sure I condemned any animal at any point for its behaviour. Mainly just trying to emphasise: this is not good. This is not evidence of a compassionate creator.
It may be that we have fundamental disagreements on the nature of agency and the self. I believe the evil in me has roots that ultimately lie before me, that stretch back, that can be explained by prior states of the universe. I didn’t consciously choose to be this way from a position of neutrality. Perhaps you believe that individuals manifest their own evil into the world from nothing, chosen entirely freely, and it needs no other explanation? If so, I don’t think there’s anything I could say to argue that. You’ll believe that I have my positions because it’s psychologically easier for me, and I’ll assume the same of you.
Believe me, nothing you could say would shock or scare me.
But sure, yep, probably very few people in the 21st century kill themselves because an animal did something to them. Whatever the fuck that point means to you, whatever nerve I may’ve hit, just whatever. I like to argue the point just because I’m an argumentative asshole, and it’s my post so I feel entitled to, but at this point it feels kind of pointless.