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A Planet of Parasites and the Problem with God

35 points by breck 3y ago

utkarsh858 3y ago
I did not read the whole articles but from few paragraphs I can understand that it is stating about 'problem of evil' that believers face. Actually this problem is faced only by western religious philosophy which is not wrong but have an incomplete conception of universe. Eastern philosophy states that God has created this world along with certain rules with which everyone should abide by i.e. 'law of karma'. Anyone who acts or tries to act in such a way as to harm any other living being will have to suffer reactions of his 'sin' either in this life or next life. And when that suffering is perceived it is termed as evil. But actually our acts are evil which come back as life lessons to help us introspect and improve ourselves. And this system given by God is a manifestation of his love else we may all have already be converted to Sickle wielding terrorists bent on taking each others flesh. (Of course above is a very brief description, there is much more to it)
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > about 'problem of evil' that believers face The problem of evil is something anyone studying Abrahamic religion encounters. Very few of the "believers" I've met have bothered. > Eastern philosophy states that . . . ORLY? Which one? > Of course above is a very brief description, there is much more to it I should hope so! I flagged this thing because it's going to lead to "religious battles," quite literally. And the article itself is full of nonsense. And fear of the natural world!
  - utkarsh858 3y ago
    1) Sanatana Dharma, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism they all have the concept of karma. 2) Yes!, It has lots and lots of description and details behind karma and ourselves.
- canjobear 3y ago
  Good luck coming up with karma-points-based explanations for all the pleasure and suffering in the world. What did the caterpillar do to deserve getting paralyzed and eaten alive by wasp larvae?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - archon1410 3y ago
    Obviously they must have done something very bad in their previous life as an animal with free will! Maybe they tortured someone as a human. I don't believe this explanation, but reincarnation usually comes along with karma in a package.
  - utkarsh858 3y ago
    You are right caterpillar, and similar beings dont have much choice, whatever they do they are mistly dictated by nature and they have to act accordingly. That is why there is no karma for them. They cannot create any karma or 'sin' BUT they can suffer the reactions of the bad karma they have done in past life (in a species when they actually had the intelligence to differentiate between right and wrong). A crude example: A man torturing a caterpillar for fun, may have to take birth in a life of caterpillar and endure the same pain, either by a human or different species. Thanks for the good question, am open to more.
- devwastaken 3y ago
  Karma does not require suffering from sin. Karma does not require future lives either. Karmas base is much simpler - what you do has effects. It may be good, it may not be. We don't get to know, but we hope that we do good karma and avoid bad karma.
- truculent 3y ago
  Not sure this is the slam dunk you suggest. Isn’t this just the free will defence with extra steps? Or, perhaps, Swinburne’s argument that natural evil is a force for maturation and spiritual development. The basic conception of the argument (“Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”) still seems valid if a God has created a karmic system. So I don’t think this is an issue uniquely facing Western perspectives. Personally, I don’t find the free will defence particularly convincing, either. Do we really have free will? Is free will truly necessary for education/moral goodness? And if so, is god truly capable of evil?
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > The basic conception of the argument (“Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”) still seems valid if a God has created a karmic system. The difference, as I understand it, is that the free-will argument requires the existence of a creator who is either impotent, malevolent or evil (or some combination of all three). A karmic-based system requires no creator to exist.
  - utkarsh858 3y ago
    1) not defending anything, just explaining what I know. 2) never heard of Swinburne. Natural evil is force for maturation and ALSO to uphold the principle of justice among all living beings. 3) No evil can harm a living being if he has not already bad stock of karma with him. And also God does not interfere with anyone's free will. If we are living with others then some laws will have to be followed. Now you will ask that how did evil actually generate because in beginning there was no bad karma. The thing is that even the intention of harming someone and attempts can generate bad karma. Our mindset towardds others must be good. 4) Nah, in eastern philosophy even beginners know this, yeah but in east also very less people actually know about themselves! 5) Yes we have free will. If given two paths with one path we know as thousand times better than other path, Still by our free will we can choose the bad one. 6) Free will is necessary for love i.e. relationship with ourselves and God. Love is morality harming any sentinent being is not. 6) God is capable of evil but he/she(whatever) does not do it.
- throwaway14356 3y ago
  imagine the accounting of it. It must be truly larger than life! The author is simply funny in his humanity. Without an observer nothing exists. What does exist depends on the perspective of the observer. If you were a lego structure, would it be upsetting to be made into something else? If you are trying to make the perfect widget, what to do with the previous attempts? What if reuse would allow for faster iterations? If perfection is the goal how hard is the choice? Old people need to make room for young ones who are always more deserving. The way we age we are still far from perfection. Nature needs a few more rounds. The cruel formula is how we got here. Im sure single cell organisms would have loved to be the final iteration but sadly for them that didn't happen. Our challenges are much like theirs. We also think we want a life without challenges eventho we are what we are because of them. Nice article tho, keep trying :)
- antihipocrat 3y ago
  What choice did the wasp have but to infect and inflict suffering upon the caterpillar? For through that suffering a hundred new wasps are given life, whose primary goal is to find other caterpillars and continue the cycle. The removal of this form of suffering from the existence of the caterpillar would require the extinction (and associated suffering) of every living member of that species of wasp. How can karma be negative to the wasp that has no choice but to act in the way it does by biological necessity? More generally, how does karma reconcile with any act originating from biology? If every creature on earth decided to inflict absolutely no harm on any other creature, then the only option would be to eliminate all life from the planet. Karma suffers from the problem of evil just as much as western religion.
  - hypertele-Xii 3y ago
    The wasp can choose to start integrating non-caterpillar food sources into its diet, reducing suffering at first while it evolves the necessary digestive system, ultimately minimizing and eliminating suffering. Wasps are somewhat doomed that they haven't made this choice before. The pit gets deeper and deeper the more you dig. The climb will be longer and harder the later you start. If fish can learn to breathe air, walk on land, and care for their young, wasps can learn to not eat caterpillars.
    - tumsfestival 3y ago
      You seem to think that evolution is both an intelligent and controllable process. It isn't.
      - hypertele-Xii 3y ago
        It literally is though. Sexual selection, emphasis on selection, is conscious. You choose half the genes of your descendants. Unless there's only one mating option. You also choose where you hang, and what you eat, which drives adaptations to that environment.
        3y ago
waynecochran 3y ago
Good article in giving a strong case for the problem of evil. Even as a Christian I appreciate an honest baring of how torturous life is. No need to whitewash it. My response, in brief, is that this is the price of creatures truly having free will. God could have created all His creatures to be benign Stepford Wives, but He decided to let us have a choice. The choices effect everyone including the innocent. Secondly, there will come a day when righteousness will reign and death, pain, and sorrow will be no more. Finally, God is not detached -- He took on flesh and suffered the horrors Himself. So He knows. He knows more than us.
- canjobear 3y ago
  Do caterpillars have free will? What free choices resulted in them being paralyzed and eaten alive by wasps?
  - waynecochran 3y ago
    No. Creation groans. The innocent suffer the effects. The Innocent One suffered.
  - JackFr 3y ago
    Maybe your empathy towards caterpillars says more about you than it does the caterpillars. It’s difficult for me to imagine being a caterpillar let alone a paralyzed caterpillar being devoured from within. Why is there any more or less moral weight to the wasps lifecycle than any other predator along the food chain?
  - utkarsh858 3y ago
    Yes they have free will but it is covered to the extent that it mostly acts mechanically. In its current life it may not have the intelligence to act morally. But once( before it became a caterpillar ) it had a body of moral sentiment being with power of discrimination. It made bad choices at that time and thus induced suffering in current life.
I_Am_Nous 3y ago
I'm a strange blend of existentialism and Catholicism where I started with "life is objectively meaningless so we make our own subjective happiness" and suffering was a thing that just was and you dealt with it just like anything else. Suffering is also subjective per person so what may be unbearable for one may be daily baseline for another. Catholicism has a concept called "redemptive suffering" where your suffering is offered up as a spiritual sacrifice, often for a loved one who has passed away. We usually can't choose not to suffer but we can choose how we respond to it. Modern Catholicism also has no issues with evolution so generally the "life is infested with parasites and therefore can't be declared good like the Bible says" is a fundamentalist problem to try to explain. Evolution appears to be how life got to its present stage on Earth and we have the history encoded in our DNA. Arguing against that is embracing blind, stubborn faith and ignorance.
- tumsfestival 3y ago
  >Modern Catholicism also has no issues with evolution so generally the "life is infested with parasites and therefore can't be declared good like the Bible says" is a fundamentalist problem to try to explain. Evolution appears to be how life got to its present stage on Earth and we have the history encoded in our DNA. Arguing against that is embracing blind, stubborn faith and ignorance. If only most Christians thought like that... I've grown around Christians of all kinds of denominations and I've never met anyone with that mindset, even the Catholic ones. They all took the Bible to the absolute literal and whenever reality didn't agree with their beliefs they always engaged in the most ridiculous and insane mental gymnastics instead of reevaluting their point of views.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    I am scientifically minded (so much so that I was atheist for a long time due to biblical literalism) and I also believe God has no reason to lie or mislead us about things like the age of the earth or our side by side evolution with animals. The first 15 chapters of Genesis are Jewish poetry, not a literal account of creation. There are even two creation accounts, one right after the other, which contradict each other! That no longer being an issue with my faith has helped my mental health immensely. I don't feel the painful cognitive dissonance I used to because the point Genesis is trying to get across is "God made everything and it wasn't hard for him, we can choose to do things he doesn't want us to do, and this tendency can lead to a lot of serious shenanigans. Then God promises stuff to Abraham." To be fair to most Christians, they are not apologists and as most atheists will tell you have a very limited understanding of most points of their faith, let alone individual points of contention in the bible. So the only defense mechanism they have is withdrawing to literalism and flail too much to reevaluate. Then there's the ones who are apologists, and most of them online are downright annoying lol
AlexandrB 3y ago
A lot of interesting food for thought in this article, but I find the focus on parasites as particularly fucked up or evil puzzling. It seems like an aesthetic distinction, not a categorical one. There are plenty of vertebrate predators that will bring their young still-living prey to "play with" and devour. This seems hardly better, especially since the prey in this case is often much more capable of experiencing fear and suffering than a caterpillar or a snail. It's also interesting to consider that fear itself is probably an adaptation that helps the propagation of DNA. The fact that animals and humans can experience fear at all tells us that we're not in a kind universe.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  A large portion of the issue Mark Twain and others quoted in the article took with parasites was that the prevailing religious explanation of life was that God created it in its current form on purpose and it was good. Therefore something as body horror centric as 75k species of parasitic "caterpillar hawk" wasps is easily rejected as it is clearly not good according to our sensibilities.
  - aliasxneo 3y ago
    Source? Not very familiar with Twain, but fallen creation has been in the Judeo-Christian sphere for a long time. I assumed that's what he would have been influenced by.
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
      Twain was mentioned in the article a couple of times with various works more or less stating "God apparently made everything like this on purpose: >In Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth (published posthumously in 1939), Satan sends a series of reports from Earth to the archangels Michael and Gabriel. In Letter VI, Satan marshals the evidence to call God a “malevolent lunatic”: ... >The Christian begins with this straight proposition, this definite proposition, this inflexible and uncompromising proposition: God is all-knowing, and all-powerful. >This being the case, nothing can happen without his knowing beforehand that it is going to happen; nothing happens without his permission; nothing can happen that he chooses to prevent. >That is definite enough, isn’t it? It makes the Creator distinctly responsible for everything that happens, doesn’t it? . . . . >Then, having thus made the Creator responsible for all those pains and diseases and miseries above enumerated, and which he could have prevented, the gifted Christian blandly calls him Our Father!
haltist 3y ago
> Man furnishes no exception to the rule. He seems to add the treachery and deceit that the other animals in the main do not practice, to all the other cruelties that move his life. Man has made himself master of the animal world and he uses his power to serve only his own ends. Man, at least, kills helpless animals for the pleasure of killing, alone. He breeds horses and dogs, and fixes a gala day which is a society occasion when both men and women dress for the event, whereupon they turn loose a puny fox and set on its trail a pack of hounds trained for the chase. The noble men and women, riding at a mad pace, follow over hill and dale until, after hours of effort, the exhausted fox is unable longer to escape them, and with great glee they see it torn to pieces by the hounds. Darwin making a convincing case for our unbounded "human" capacity of cruelty against other animals. The fact that he is describing the practices of the aristocracy is also very relevant because every human being in the "developed" world today lives like an aristocrat and commits so many atrocities throughout the day that it would be impossible to catalogue them all. This is why building the "panoptic computronium cathedral"™ is a moral imperative. I can get it all done for a mere $80B so tell all your friends about it. This is a bargain deal for saving the soul of humanity.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > The fact that he is describing the practices of the aristocracy is also very relevant because every human being in the "developed" world today lives like an aristocrat and commits so many atrocities throughout the day that it would be impossible to catalogue them all. Any example of these atrocities that every human commits every day which are on the same scale and personal involvement as the fox hunting presented as the example of an atrocity?
  - haltist 3y ago
    You ever buy a sandwich with meat in it? How about coffee? Chocolate? Driving a car? Use pesticides to clear your home of termites? Poisons to get rid of rats and other "pests"? Do you use smart phones and other gadgets with rare earth metals? Have you recently walked by a homeless person and what did you do about the situation? Do you have an opinion on Israel's actions in Gaza? Ever been in a car accident? Run over some animals/people because you were going too fast? Do you use makeup tested on animals? The list is endless. The soul of humanity can be saved for a mere $80B with the help of the "panoptic computronium cathedral"™ so tell all your friends about it. A better humanity is possible for a very cheap investment, all that's needed is some hardware and software that will enable governing the world with mathematics.
triyambakam 3y ago
This is not a problem in Hinduism but with Christianity.
- archon1410 3y ago
  No? The problem of evil is applicable to any religion that claims that an omnipotent and omniscient creator of the world exists, which many strands of Hinduism do. The doctrine of karma is a good attempt but it still doesn't solve it. In fact, I think it was a scholar from Jainism, a religion that does believe in Karma, who raised this a version of this the problem of evil against theistic schools of Indian philosophy in mediaeval times, independently from the Greek philosopher who first raised it.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > No? The problem of evil is applicable to any religion that claims that an omnipotent and omniscient creator of the world exists, which many strands of Hinduism do. It's mostly the religions descending from the Abrahamic belief system that holds the concept of evil as a central belief and holds the concept of an ultimate evil personified as a central belief, and offers itself as the only way to escape punishment for all evils. As I understand it[1], the concept of "evil" cannot exist in any belief system that is built around the concept of a reincarnation which depends on the way the person lived their life. If you believe, as most orthodox Hinduism strands do, that you are reincarnated and move up or down the ladder of greatness (ants vs humans, poverty vs wealth, etc) depending on how you lived, then there is no such thing as "evil". You simply get what's required to ensure balance. IOW, "you always get what you give" is not a punishment at all for doing "evil" things, because "you always get what you give" doesn't require the concept of evil or good to simply return what you doled out when you are reincarnated. Think of it as balance - each act you do (consider good/evil on a scale from 1-10 with 1 being evil) will eventually balance out some other act you do or did in a previous incarnation, and if not, will be balanced out by some future act in a future incarnation. [1] I'm an atheist, and as such much more aware of what and how different religions supply a "belief system" than followers of those religions themselves.
satisfice 3y ago
There's a lot of writing here, but the philosophical method is more or less one of dismissing things that FEEL absurd to the writer. If you allow yourself to do that, you might as well write a much shorter piece. The cosmos may be designed in such a way that our entire universe is dedicated to the production of a certain kind of moral experience which makes us delicious to beings in an enclosing master universe. We may be souls in a pickle jar on a cosmic supermarket shelf. I think it's far more likely that no one set this system up and we are merely living out the consequences of physical laws, but I can't rule out that a God of some kind set it all up for some reason that is Rational Unto Himself.
- Animats 3y ago
  Rational unto himself? The last line of the article reads: "Imagine a teenage fan of gross-out movies—whose all-time favorite movie scene was the chestburster segment in Alien—got access to a video game in which he could create simulated worlds populated with millions of species, many of them sentient, for his sick entertainment. Would that world look significantly different than our own?" A bit grim. Most polytheistic religions are an attempt to deal with the problem that the world isn't that tightly organized and has much built-in conflict. With what's been learned about AI in the last few years, philosophy and theology need to go back into the shop for an overhaul. Stuff which used to be pure speculation is becoming industrial strength technology. - Much of what humans think of as intelligence comes from scaling up some rather simple operations. How could brains evolve? Mostly by scaleup. Biology told us how similar nervous system components are across species, but not why bigger worked better. Now we are seeing that quantity, all by itself, yields smarter. - A lot of stuff that was thought to be uniquely human - isn't. - Munge enough data with some random inputs and creativity comes out. - Optimizing gets really effective in high-dimensional spaces. - Free will and randomness are closely related.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  I love your pickle jar analogy, as it really underlines the fact that we are trapped in our reality, the slowly decaying echo of the big bang. We can't get outside of that no matter how hard we try. We might as well be pickles banging against the glass :)
andrewclunn 3y ago
Odd that suffering should be equated with evil. It seems an almost universal aspect of so many secular philosophies to elevate reduction of suffering over achievement or joy. Then again, maybe this is just a left leaning political view, which just happens to be associated with atheism in our day.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  Modern society doesn't really have room for a definite description of "evil" but suffering is visible and experienced by all. Reduction of suffering is considered good because suffering is considered evil, even if there isn't any spiritual or philosophical thought given to it these days.
thedatamonger 3y ago
nature says eat or be eaten(or die). now that we are on top of the food chain, it's useful, for mental health and societal reasons, not not want to rip every one's throat out, even thou every other species (including us) continues to do so. You tend to steer and veer towards what you look at. The good news is we get to choose what we look at... the bad news is we (statistically) choose wrong. Race car drivers don't look at the wall when they drive, because when they do, they tend to hit it. stop looking at the wall guys ...
logicchains 3y ago
Islam solves this very simply: evil (as in people doing bad things) is an unavoidable consequence of free will; you couldn't have both a world with no evil and a world with free will. Animals doing nasty stuff to each other is just nature, there's no good or evil about it, because animals don't have free will, they just follow their instincts. Calling the actions of a parasite evil just because it makes one feel icky has no basis in theology.
- justanotherjoe 3y ago
  the supposed creator of parasites do have it though.
lll-o-lll 3y ago
How sad, empty and futile it is to look at the world as it truly is. “Meaningless! Meaningless! A chasing after the wind.” Follow the Ancient Greeks and revel in the glory of youth and the honour of deeds? Man is mortal, and whatever his accomplishments, the best to hope for is memory. Follow the concepts of Buddhism and hope for an ultimate dissolution of the self (Nirvana) or adopt Hinduism's practices for divine union and accounting (Moksha)? Or embrace nihilism. We are but patterns on the edge of Chaos. Passing complexity as negative entropy is slowly absorbed? The Christian answer, which is not for everyone, is that the sin of Adam was such a profoundly impacting event, that all of creation has been subsequently cursed. So devastating was the affect of this one seemingly trivial sin, that all humans are forever condemned without hope. So destructive is sin, that the only resolution was the suffering, humiliation and eventual death of God himself (in the form of his son). Death and suffering entered the world, and now cats torture mice. Of course Christianity provides hope for the believer. The believer is in a transient state of suffering in a broken sinful world. The righteous judge will return to create a new heaven and a new earth. Temporary suffering will all be forgotten in the context of eternity.
- jareklupinski 3y ago
  Reject the Chaos, atone for Adam, restore Moksha, attain honour / glory, dissolve into Nirvana. No one said you have to pick just one; maybe they were always parts of a bigger picture.
irrational 3y ago
I don’t know if I have ever come across the writings of a more miserable person. He talks about suffering an existential crisis for 30 years and it really comes across in his writings. Poor bastard. I hope he can get help.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  The only reason why you are not in a similar panic mode is because your hormones are evolved to keep you way above the baseline appropriate for the circumstances.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    Or perhaps most existential crises are individual issues which may be hard to relate to?
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      One does not have to search for mice when the room contains an elephant.
      - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
        Does such panic over things we have no control benefit anyone? Who is better off shitting themselves in terror over the elephant in the room rather than just making distance and leaving it alone?
thriftwy 3y ago
The article assumes we will "soon" be able to simulate sentient, conscious experience. Whereas our understanding of sentience is limited and we have not got ideas how consciousness works.
thyrsus 3y ago
I don't find the "we're in a simulation" argument convincing: Moore's law of exponential growth is bending into the S-curve dictated to all initially exponentially growing physical systems, and thus we will never have arbitrarily deeply nested simulations with atomic granularity on a planetary scale, to say nothing of a galactic or universal scale. Even more, were there containing universes with physical laws and resources sufficient to such simulations, the idea that the operators were teenage boys bored into cruelty is anthropomorphism at its most absurd.
verisimi 3y ago
If you think parasitical behaviour is wrong or if you think killing other creatures is wrong but also think that you have to get your hands dirty, then yeah, this place is a mess. But, if that is your sense (re killing, parasitical behaviour) perhaps your lesson here is to learn not do those actions that you abhor. Don't act like an Ichneumonidæ, if that is not what you are. You should act coherently according to your sense of right and wrong (not some external view of good and evil). Ie don't be a hypocrite to yourself or try not to be. Simples. Eg If you think it is wrong to kill animals for food, when there is fruit or produce that does not harm available, but you like the taste of a burger and eat what you think is the wrong thing anyway, you own that. You need to resolve the question in yourself - either meat eating is fine really or it is not and you shouldn't do it. It can't be both. Acting in a dissonant way according to one's own terms is wrong for you. Your job is to resolve the dissonance. Judge yourself.

35 points by breck 3y ago

I did not read the whole articles but from few paragraphs I can understand that it is stating about 'problem of evil' that believers face. Actually this problem is faced only by western religious philosophy which is not wrong but have an incomplete conception of universe. Eastern philosophy states that God has created this world along with certain rules with which everyone should abide by i.e. 'law of karma'. Anyone who acts or tries to act in such a way as to harm any other living being will have to suffer reactions of his 'sin' either in this life or next life. And when that suffering is perceived it is termed as evil. But actually our acts are evil which come back as life lessons to help us introspect and improve ourselves. And this system given by God is a manifestation of his love else we may all have already be converted to Sickle wielding terrorists bent on taking each others flesh. (Of course above is a very brief description, there is much more to it)

drewcoo 3y ago
> about 'problem of evil' that believers face The problem of evil is something anyone studying Abrahamic religion encounters. Very few of the "believers" I've met have bothered. > Eastern philosophy states that . . . ORLY? Which one? > Of course above is a very brief description, there is much more to it I should hope so! I flagged this thing because it's going to lead to "religious battles," quite literally. And the article itself is full of nonsense. And fear of the natural world!
- utkarsh858 3y ago
  1) Sanatana Dharma, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism they all have the concept of karma. 2) Yes!, It has lots and lots of description and details behind karma and ourselves.
canjobear 3y ago
Good luck coming up with karma-points-based explanations for all the pleasure and suffering in the world. What did the caterpillar do to deserve getting paralyzed and eaten alive by wasp larvae?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- archon1410 3y ago
  Obviously they must have done something very bad in their previous life as an animal with free will! Maybe they tortured someone as a human. I don't believe this explanation, but reincarnation usually comes along with karma in a package.
- utkarsh858 3y ago
  You are right caterpillar, and similar beings dont have much choice, whatever they do they are mistly dictated by nature and they have to act accordingly. That is why there is no karma for them. They cannot create any karma or 'sin' BUT they can suffer the reactions of the bad karma they have done in past life (in a species when they actually had the intelligence to differentiate between right and wrong). A crude example: A man torturing a caterpillar for fun, may have to take birth in a life of caterpillar and endure the same pain, either by a human or different species. Thanks for the good question, am open to more.
devwastaken 3y ago
Karma does not require suffering from sin. Karma does not require future lives either. Karmas base is much simpler - what you do has effects. It may be good, it may not be. We don't get to know, but we hope that we do good karma and avoid bad karma.
truculent 3y ago
Not sure this is the slam dunk you suggest. Isn’t this just the free will defence with extra steps? Or, perhaps, Swinburne’s argument that natural evil is a force for maturation and spiritual development. The basic conception of the argument (“Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”) still seems valid if a God has created a karmic system. So I don’t think this is an issue uniquely facing Western perspectives. Personally, I don’t find the free will defence particularly convincing, either. Do we really have free will? Is free will truly necessary for education/moral goodness? And if so, is god truly capable of evil?
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > The basic conception of the argument (“Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”) still seems valid if a God has created a karmic system. The difference, as I understand it, is that the free-will argument requires the existence of a creator who is either impotent, malevolent or evil (or some combination of all three). A karmic-based system requires no creator to exist.
- utkarsh858 3y ago
  1) not defending anything, just explaining what I know. 2) never heard of Swinburne. Natural evil is force for maturation and ALSO to uphold the principle of justice among all living beings. 3) No evil can harm a living being if he has not already bad stock of karma with him. And also God does not interfere with anyone's free will. If we are living with others then some laws will have to be followed. Now you will ask that how did evil actually generate because in beginning there was no bad karma. The thing is that even the intention of harming someone and attempts can generate bad karma. Our mindset towardds others must be good. 4) Nah, in eastern philosophy even beginners know this, yeah but in east also very less people actually know about themselves! 5) Yes we have free will. If given two paths with one path we know as thousand times better than other path, Still by our free will we can choose the bad one. 6) Free will is necessary for love i.e. relationship with ourselves and God. Love is morality harming any sentinent being is not. 6) God is capable of evil but he/she(whatever) does not do it.
throwaway14356 3y ago
imagine the accounting of it. It must be truly larger than life! The author is simply funny in his humanity. Without an observer nothing exists. What does exist depends on the perspective of the observer. If you were a lego structure, would it be upsetting to be made into something else? If you are trying to make the perfect widget, what to do with the previous attempts? What if reuse would allow for faster iterations? If perfection is the goal how hard is the choice? Old people need to make room for young ones who are always more deserving. The way we age we are still far from perfection. Nature needs a few more rounds. The cruel formula is how we got here. Im sure single cell organisms would have loved to be the final iteration but sadly for them that didn't happen. Our challenges are much like theirs. We also think we want a life without challenges eventho we are what we are because of them. Nice article tho, keep trying :)
antihipocrat 3y ago
What choice did the wasp have but to infect and inflict suffering upon the caterpillar? For through that suffering a hundred new wasps are given life, whose primary goal is to find other caterpillars and continue the cycle. The removal of this form of suffering from the existence of the caterpillar would require the extinction (and associated suffering) of every living member of that species of wasp. How can karma be negative to the wasp that has no choice but to act in the way it does by biological necessity? More generally, how does karma reconcile with any act originating from biology? If every creature on earth decided to inflict absolutely no harm on any other creature, then the only option would be to eliminate all life from the planet. Karma suffers from the problem of evil just as much as western religion.
- hypertele-Xii 3y ago
  The wasp can choose to start integrating non-caterpillar food sources into its diet, reducing suffering at first while it evolves the necessary digestive system, ultimately minimizing and eliminating suffering. Wasps are somewhat doomed that they haven't made this choice before. The pit gets deeper and deeper the more you dig. The climb will be longer and harder the later you start. If fish can learn to breathe air, walk on land, and care for their young, wasps can learn to not eat caterpillars.
  - tumsfestival 3y ago
    You seem to think that evolution is both an intelligent and controllable process. It isn't.
    - hypertele-Xii 3y ago
      It literally is though. Sexual selection, emphasis on selection, is conscious. You choose half the genes of your descendants. Unless there's only one mating option. You also choose where you hang, and what you eat, which drives adaptations to that environment.
      - 3y ago

waynecochran 3y ago

Good article in giving a strong case for the problem of evil. Even as a Christian I appreciate an honest baring of how torturous life is. No need to whitewash it. My response, in brief, is that this is the price of creatures truly having free will. God could have created all His creatures to be benign Stepford Wives, but He decided to let us have a choice. The choices effect everyone including the innocent. Secondly, there will come a day when righteousness will reign and death, pain, and sorrow will be no more. Finally, God is not detached -- He took on flesh and suffered the horrors Himself. So He knows. He knows more than us.

canjobear 3y ago
Do caterpillars have free will? What free choices resulted in them being paralyzed and eaten alive by wasps?
- waynecochran 3y ago
  No. Creation groans. The innocent suffer the effects. The Innocent One suffered.
- JackFr 3y ago
  Maybe your empathy towards caterpillars says more about you than it does the caterpillars. It’s difficult for me to imagine being a caterpillar let alone a paralyzed caterpillar being devoured from within. Why is there any more or less moral weight to the wasps lifecycle than any other predator along the food chain?
- utkarsh858 3y ago
  Yes they have free will but it is covered to the extent that it mostly acts mechanically. In its current life it may not have the intelligence to act morally. But once( before it became a caterpillar ) it had a body of moral sentiment being with power of discrimination. It made bad choices at that time and thus induced suffering in current life.

I_Am_Nous 3y ago

I'm a strange blend of existentialism and Catholicism where I started with "life is objectively meaningless so we make our own subjective happiness" and suffering was a thing that just was and you dealt with it just like anything else. Suffering is also subjective per person so what may be unbearable for one may be daily baseline for another. Catholicism has a concept called "redemptive suffering" where your suffering is offered up as a spiritual sacrifice, often for a loved one who has passed away. We usually can't choose not to suffer but we can choose how we respond to it. Modern Catholicism also has no issues with evolution so generally the "life is infested with parasites and therefore can't be declared good like the Bible says" is a fundamentalist problem to try to explain. Evolution appears to be how life got to its present stage on Earth and we have the history encoded in our DNA. Arguing against that is embracing blind, stubborn faith and ignorance.

tumsfestival 3y ago
>Modern Catholicism also has no issues with evolution so generally the "life is infested with parasites and therefore can't be declared good like the Bible says" is a fundamentalist problem to try to explain. Evolution appears to be how life got to its present stage on Earth and we have the history encoded in our DNA. Arguing against that is embracing blind, stubborn faith and ignorance. If only most Christians thought like that... I've grown around Christians of all kinds of denominations and I've never met anyone with that mindset, even the Catholic ones. They all took the Bible to the absolute literal and whenever reality didn't agree with their beliefs they always engaged in the most ridiculous and insane mental gymnastics instead of reevaluting their point of views.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  I am scientifically minded (so much so that I was atheist for a long time due to biblical literalism) and I also believe God has no reason to lie or mislead us about things like the age of the earth or our side by side evolution with animals. The first 15 chapters of Genesis are Jewish poetry, not a literal account of creation. There are even two creation accounts, one right after the other, which contradict each other! That no longer being an issue with my faith has helped my mental health immensely. I don't feel the painful cognitive dissonance I used to because the point Genesis is trying to get across is "God made everything and it wasn't hard for him, we can choose to do things he doesn't want us to do, and this tendency can lead to a lot of serious shenanigans. Then God promises stuff to Abraham." To be fair to most Christians, they are not apologists and as most atheists will tell you have a very limited understanding of most points of their faith, let alone individual points of contention in the bible. So the only defense mechanism they have is withdrawing to literalism and flail too much to reevaluate. Then there's the ones who are apologists, and most of them online are downright annoying lol

AlexandrB 3y ago

A lot of interesting food for thought in this article, but I find the focus on parasites as particularly fucked up or evil puzzling. It seems like an aesthetic distinction, not a categorical one. There are plenty of vertebrate predators that will bring their young still-living prey to "play with" and devour. This seems hardly better, especially since the prey in this case is often much more capable of experiencing fear and suffering than a caterpillar or a snail. It's also interesting to consider that fear itself is probably an adaptation that helps the propagation of DNA. The fact that animals and humans can experience fear at all tells us that we're not in a kind universe.

I_Am_Nous 3y ago
A large portion of the issue Mark Twain and others quoted in the article took with parasites was that the prevailing religious explanation of life was that God created it in its current form on purpose and it was good. Therefore something as body horror centric as 75k species of parasitic "caterpillar hawk" wasps is easily rejected as it is clearly not good according to our sensibilities.
- aliasxneo 3y ago
  Source? Not very familiar with Twain, but fallen creation has been in the Judeo-Christian sphere for a long time. I assumed that's what he would have been influenced by.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    Twain was mentioned in the article a couple of times with various works more or less stating "God apparently made everything like this on purpose: >In Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth (published posthumously in 1939), Satan sends a series of reports from Earth to the archangels Michael and Gabriel. In Letter VI, Satan marshals the evidence to call God a “malevolent lunatic”: ... >The Christian begins with this straight proposition, this definite proposition, this inflexible and uncompromising proposition: God is all-knowing, and all-powerful. >This being the case, nothing can happen without his knowing beforehand that it is going to happen; nothing happens without his permission; nothing can happen that he chooses to prevent. >That is definite enough, isn’t it? It makes the Creator distinctly responsible for everything that happens, doesn’t it? . . . . >Then, having thus made the Creator responsible for all those pains and diseases and miseries above enumerated, and which he could have prevented, the gifted Christian blandly calls him Our Father!

haltist 3y ago

> Man furnishes no exception to the rule. He seems to add the treachery and deceit that the other animals in the main do not practice, to all the other cruelties that move his life. Man has made himself master of the animal world and he uses his power to serve only his own ends. Man, at least, kills helpless animals for the pleasure of killing, alone. He breeds horses and dogs, and fixes a gala day which is a society occasion when both men and women dress for the event, whereupon they turn loose a puny fox and set on its trail a pack of hounds trained for the chase. The noble men and women, riding at a mad pace, follow over hill and dale until, after hours of effort, the exhausted fox is unable longer to escape them, and with great glee they see it torn to pieces by the hounds. Darwin making a convincing case for our unbounded "human" capacity of cruelty against other animals. The fact that he is describing the practices of the aristocracy is also very relevant because every human being in the "developed" world today lives like an aristocrat and commits so many atrocities throughout the day that it would be impossible to catalogue them all. This is why building the "panoptic computronium cathedral"™ is a moral imperative. I can get it all done for a mere $80B so tell all your friends about it. This is a bargain deal for saving the soul of humanity.

lelanthran 3y ago
> The fact that he is describing the practices of the aristocracy is also very relevant because every human being in the "developed" world today lives like an aristocrat and commits so many atrocities throughout the day that it would be impossible to catalogue them all. Any example of these atrocities that every human commits every day which are on the same scale and personal involvement as the fox hunting presented as the example of an atrocity?
- haltist 3y ago
  You ever buy a sandwich with meat in it? How about coffee? Chocolate? Driving a car? Use pesticides to clear your home of termites? Poisons to get rid of rats and other "pests"? Do you use smart phones and other gadgets with rare earth metals? Have you recently walked by a homeless person and what did you do about the situation? Do you have an opinion on Israel's actions in Gaza? Ever been in a car accident? Run over some animals/people because you were going too fast? Do you use makeup tested on animals? The list is endless. The soul of humanity can be saved for a mere $80B with the help of the "panoptic computronium cathedral"™ so tell all your friends about it. A better humanity is possible for a very cheap investment, all that's needed is some hardware and software that will enable governing the world with mathematics.

triyambakam 3y ago

This is not a problem in Hinduism but with Christianity.

archon1410 3y ago
No? The problem of evil is applicable to any religion that claims that an omnipotent and omniscient creator of the world exists, which many strands of Hinduism do. The doctrine of karma is a good attempt but it still doesn't solve it. In fact, I think it was a scholar from Jainism, a religion that does believe in Karma, who raised this a version of this the problem of evil against theistic schools of Indian philosophy in mediaeval times, independently from the Greek philosopher who first raised it.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > No? The problem of evil is applicable to any religion that claims that an omnipotent and omniscient creator of the world exists, which many strands of Hinduism do. It's mostly the religions descending from the Abrahamic belief system that holds the concept of evil as a central belief and holds the concept of an ultimate evil personified as a central belief, and offers itself as the only way to escape punishment for all evils. As I understand it[1], the concept of "evil" cannot exist in any belief system that is built around the concept of a reincarnation which depends on the way the person lived their life. If you believe, as most orthodox Hinduism strands do, that you are reincarnated and move up or down the ladder of greatness (ants vs humans, poverty vs wealth, etc) depending on how you lived, then there is no such thing as "evil". You simply get what's required to ensure balance. IOW, "you always get what you give" is not a punishment at all for doing "evil" things, because "you always get what you give" doesn't require the concept of evil or good to simply return what you doled out when you are reincarnated. Think of it as balance - each act you do (consider good/evil on a scale from 1-10 with 1 being evil) will eventually balance out some other act you do or did in a previous incarnation, and if not, will be balanced out by some future act in a future incarnation. [1] I'm an atheist, and as such much more aware of what and how different religions supply a "belief system" than followers of those religions themselves.

satisfice 3y ago

There's a lot of writing here, but the philosophical method is more or less one of dismissing things that FEEL absurd to the writer. If you allow yourself to do that, you might as well write a much shorter piece. The cosmos may be designed in such a way that our entire universe is dedicated to the production of a certain kind of moral experience which makes us delicious to beings in an enclosing master universe. We may be souls in a pickle jar on a cosmic supermarket shelf. I think it's far more likely that no one set this system up and we are merely living out the consequences of physical laws, but I can't rule out that a God of some kind set it all up for some reason that is Rational Unto Himself.

Animats 3y ago
Rational unto himself? The last line of the article reads: "Imagine a teenage fan of gross-out movies—whose all-time favorite movie scene was the chestburster segment in Alien—got access to a video game in which he could create simulated worlds populated with millions of species, many of them sentient, for his sick entertainment. Would that world look significantly different than our own?" A bit grim. Most polytheistic religions are an attempt to deal with the problem that the world isn't that tightly organized and has much built-in conflict. With what's been learned about AI in the last few years, philosophy and theology need to go back into the shop for an overhaul. Stuff which used to be pure speculation is becoming industrial strength technology. - Much of what humans think of as intelligence comes from scaling up some rather simple operations. How could brains evolve? Mostly by scaleup. Biology told us how similar nervous system components are across species, but not why bigger worked better. Now we are seeing that quantity, all by itself, yields smarter. - A lot of stuff that was thought to be uniquely human - isn't. - Munge enough data with some random inputs and creativity comes out. - Optimizing gets really effective in high-dimensional spaces. - Free will and randomness are closely related.
I_Am_Nous 3y ago
I love your pickle jar analogy, as it really underlines the fact that we are trapped in our reality, the slowly decaying echo of the big bang. We can't get outside of that no matter how hard we try. We might as well be pickles banging against the glass :)

andrewclunn 3y ago

Odd that suffering should be equated with evil. It seems an almost universal aspect of so many secular philosophies to elevate reduction of suffering over achievement or joy. Then again, maybe this is just a left leaning political view, which just happens to be associated with atheism in our day.

I_Am_Nous 3y ago
Modern society doesn't really have room for a definite description of "evil" but suffering is visible and experienced by all. Reduction of suffering is considered good because suffering is considered evil, even if there isn't any spiritual or philosophical thought given to it these days.

thedatamonger 3y ago

nature says eat or be eaten(or die). now that we are on top of the food chain, it's useful, for mental health and societal reasons, not not want to rip every one's throat out, even thou every other species (including us) continues to do so. You tend to steer and veer towards what you look at. The good news is we get to choose what we look at... the bad news is we (statistically) choose wrong. Race car drivers don't look at the wall when they drive, because when they do, they tend to hit it. stop looking at the wall guys ...

logicchains 3y ago

Islam solves this very simply: evil (as in people doing bad things) is an unavoidable consequence of free will; you couldn't have both a world with no evil and a world with free will. Animals doing nasty stuff to each other is just nature, there's no good or evil about it, because animals don't have free will, they just follow their instincts. Calling the actions of a parasite evil just because it makes one feel icky has no basis in theology.

justanotherjoe 3y ago
the supposed creator of parasites do have it though.

lll-o-lll 3y ago

How sad, empty and futile it is to look at the world as it truly is. “Meaningless! Meaningless! A chasing after the wind.” Follow the Ancient Greeks and revel in the glory of youth and the honour of deeds? Man is mortal, and whatever his accomplishments, the best to hope for is memory. Follow the concepts of Buddhism and hope for an ultimate dissolution of the self (Nirvana) or adopt Hinduism's practices for divine union and accounting (Moksha)? Or embrace nihilism. We are but patterns on the edge of Chaos. Passing complexity as negative entropy is slowly absorbed? The Christian answer, which is not for everyone, is that the sin of Adam was such a profoundly impacting event, that all of creation has been subsequently cursed. So devastating was the affect of this one seemingly trivial sin, that all humans are forever condemned without hope. So destructive is sin, that the only resolution was the suffering, humiliation and eventual death of God himself (in the form of his son). Death and suffering entered the world, and now cats torture mice. Of course Christianity provides hope for the believer. The believer is in a transient state of suffering in a broken sinful world. The righteous judge will return to create a new heaven and a new earth. Temporary suffering will all be forgotten in the context of eternity.

jareklupinski 3y ago
Reject the Chaos, atone for Adam, restore Moksha, attain honour / glory, dissolve into Nirvana. No one said you have to pick just one; maybe they were always parts of a bigger picture.

irrational 3y ago

I don’t know if I have ever come across the writings of a more miserable person. He talks about suffering an existential crisis for 30 years and it really comes across in his writings. Poor bastard. I hope he can get help.

thriftwy 3y ago
The only reason why you are not in a similar panic mode is because your hormones are evolved to keep you way above the baseline appropriate for the circumstances.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  Or perhaps most existential crises are individual issues which may be hard to relate to?
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    One does not have to search for mice when the room contains an elephant.
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
      Does such panic over things we have no control benefit anyone? Who is better off shitting themselves in terror over the elephant in the room rather than just making distance and leaving it alone?

thriftwy 3y ago

The article assumes we will "soon" be able to simulate sentient, conscious experience. Whereas our understanding of sentience is limited and we have not got ideas how consciousness works.

thyrsus 3y ago

I don't find the "we're in a simulation" argument convincing: Moore's law of exponential growth is bending into the S-curve dictated to all initially exponentially growing physical systems, and thus we will never have arbitrarily deeply nested simulations with atomic granularity on a planetary scale, to say nothing of a galactic or universal scale. Even more, were there containing universes with physical laws and resources sufficient to such simulations, the idea that the operators were teenage boys bored into cruelty is anthropomorphism at its most absurd.

verisimi 3y ago

If you think parasitical behaviour is wrong or if you think killing other creatures is wrong but also think that you have to get your hands dirty, then yeah, this place is a mess. But, if that is your sense (re killing, parasitical behaviour) perhaps your lesson here is to learn not do those actions that you abhor. Don't act like an Ichneumonidæ, if that is not what you are. You should act coherently according to your sense of right and wrong (not some external view of good and evil). Ie don't be a hypocrite to yourself or try not to be. Simples. Eg If you think it is wrong to kill animals for food, when there is fruit or produce that does not harm available, but you like the taste of a burger and eat what you think is the wrong thing anyway, you own that. You need to resolve the question in yourself - either meat eating is fine really or it is not and you shouldn't do it. It can't be both. Acting in a dissonant way according to one's own terms is wrong for you. Your job is to resolve the dissonance. Judge yourself.