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"Foxes seem well-designed to catch rabbits. Rabbits seem well-designed to evade foxes. Was the Creator having trouble making up Its mind?" I suppose the auth

by Dove 17y ago

"Foxes seem well-designed to catch rabbits. Rabbits seem well-designed to evade foxes. Was the Creator having trouble making up Its mind?" I suppose the author thinks God must be either pro-rabbit or pro-fox? That seems odd to me. Calvin and Hobbes argue a lot--just think of how self-defeating that is. How short-sighted of Bill Watterson to have overlooked that he could have assigned them milder temperments. Why all the villians and heroes in novels? Why all the weapons and defenses in the video games? Why all the contrasting elements in the painting? The engineer sees nonsense in creating one thing to foil another, but it is no mystery to the artist. Sometimes the conflict is what makes each part what it is, what makes it great. The desired rabbit-fox population equilibrium could be achieved with lower effort, but that presumes the wrong goal. The artist creates for the joy of the thing itself. One can delight in the rabbit because he is fast, and the fox because he is cunning. It is not the cruelty and conflict of nature that are alien to Christianity; famine and war and lion and sword and boil and rot and death are never far from the heart of that story. What Christianity would find so alien is the idea that life is about personally surviving and avoiding pain and embracing pleasure. That God is some sort of fool or underachiever for creating a jungle instead of a zoo.

MikeCapone 17y ago
Did you stop reading after a couple of paragraphs? The author is an atheist, and uses the supernatural as metaphor to introduce his subject. He states quite clearly that he believes that evolution by natural selection is quite sufficient (even necessary) to explain what we can observe and that no god or gods are necessary.
- goodside 17y ago
  I'm an atheist too, but Dove's point is a fair one. The fact that nature is filled with chaos and conflict doesn't conflict with the idea that it was created by a human-like mind, since humans have an aesthetic preference for stories and art that involve conflict. Presumably, God also saw it artistically pleasing that some children should live their entire lives in intolerable pain and then die before reaching their third birthday, but that's not even especially extreme by the standards of human literature.
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    Presumably, God also saw it artistically pleasing that some children should live their entire lives in intolerable pain and then die before reaching their third birthday, but that's not even especially extreme by the standards of human literature. Yes, but while it's acceptable to write about horrible things in a literary context, it would be considered extreme to enact them. So presuming that I actually exist, and that those children actually exist, God shouldn't get the literary dispensation. (While on the other hand, Frédéric Mitterrand certainly should.) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/08/france http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/08/france
    - swombat 17y ago
      Indeed. If you were to write a novel about an Ichneumon wasp, you might be considered a little bit twisted, but so long as the novel was good that would be accepted as part of your literary licence. If you were to create a world containing Ichneumon wasps, though, when you have the power to not do so, you're just a sadist.
      - Dove 17y ago
        In literature as in life, it depends entirely on why you did it. Sadism implies enjoying pain for its own sake. Literature that does that is no less sadist than worlds that do. But literature that includes pain is not generally evidence of sadism, and neither are worlds. What you can say about the creator's character is entirely driven by what you can say about his purpose. A simple motivating example: I spent a while undergoing some martial arts training, and at times it was painful. Injuries weren't intended, but could the class have possibly been conducted with a little more deference to my sore feet, with perhaps one less bruise here or there? In a philosophical sense, of course it could have. But this is not evidence of sadism on the part of the instructor (or the fellow students who gave me such a beating). In a practical sense, spending too much effort avoiding pain would have undermined one of the purposes of the class: teaching me to fight through it. Teaching me that some things are worth enduring pain to learn.
- Dove 17y ago
  Not at all. I only sketched an answer to what I took to be the article's broad point--that the cruelty and conflict in nature don't look like the work of the Christian God. Mostly, I was making a smaller point: atheists often see ironclad, unresolvable contradictions where Christians see merely interesting questions--or trivial questions, or even no puzzle at all. It is a simple case of confirmation bias, I think. An atheist does not expect Christianity to make sense, so when he runs across something counterintuitive, he is very quick to conclude it is a simple mistake. This is unfortunate; a bit of dialogue with Christian intellectuals would likely enrich him with ideas he would otherwise find alien. As a conoisseur of ideas, I have been tremendously enriched by serious dialogues with those of opposing views. The prejudices and biases are different. Even if we disagree on foundations, this leads them to say things I would not think of, to ask questions I would never have raised, to point out flaws in reasoning I think straightforward.

by Dove 17y ago

MikeCapone 17y ago

Did you stop reading after a couple of paragraphs? The author is an atheist, and uses the supernatural as metaphor to introduce his subject. He states quite clearly that he believes that evolution by natural selection is quite sufficient (even necessary) to explain what we can observe and that no god or gods are necessary.

goodside 17y ago
I'm an atheist too, but Dove's point is a fair one. The fact that nature is filled with chaos and conflict doesn't conflict with the idea that it was created by a human-like mind, since humans have an aesthetic preference for stories and art that involve conflict. Presumably, God also saw it artistically pleasing that some children should live their entire lives in intolerable pain and then die before reaching their third birthday, but that's not even especially extreme by the standards of human literature.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Presumably, God also saw it artistically pleasing that some children should live their entire lives in intolerable pain and then die before reaching their third birthday, but that's not even especially extreme by the standards of human literature. Yes, but while it's acceptable to write about horrible things in a literary context, it would be considered extreme to enact them. So presuming that I actually exist, and that those children actually exist, God shouldn't get the literary dispensation. (While on the other hand, Frédéric Mitterrand certainly should.) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/08/france http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/08/france
  - swombat 17y ago
    Indeed. If you were to write a novel about an Ichneumon wasp, you might be considered a little bit twisted, but so long as the novel was good that would be accepted as part of your literary licence. If you were to create a world containing Ichneumon wasps, though, when you have the power to not do so, you're just a sadist.
    - Dove 17y ago
      In literature as in life, it depends entirely on why you did it. Sadism implies enjoying pain for its own sake. Literature that does that is no less sadist than worlds that do. But literature that includes pain is not generally evidence of sadism, and neither are worlds. What you can say about the creator's character is entirely driven by what you can say about his purpose. A simple motivating example: I spent a while undergoing some martial arts training, and at times it was painful. Injuries weren't intended, but could the class have possibly been conducted with a little more deference to my sore feet, with perhaps one less bruise here or there? In a philosophical sense, of course it could have. But this is not evidence of sadism on the part of the instructor (or the fellow students who gave me such a beating). In a practical sense, spending too much effort avoiding pain would have undermined one of the purposes of the class: teaching me to fight through it. Teaching me that some things are worth enduring pain to learn.
Dove 17y ago
Not at all. I only sketched an answer to what I took to be the article's broad point--that the cruelty and conflict in nature don't look like the work of the Christian God. Mostly, I was making a smaller point: atheists often see ironclad, unresolvable contradictions where Christians see merely interesting questions--or trivial questions, or even no puzzle at all. It is a simple case of confirmation bias, I think. An atheist does not expect Christianity to make sense, so when he runs across something counterintuitive, he is very quick to conclude it is a simple mistake. This is unfortunate; a bit of dialogue with Christian intellectuals would likely enrich him with ideas he would otherwise find alien. As a conoisseur of ideas, I have been tremendously enriched by serious dialogues with those of opposing views. The prejudices and biases are different. Even if we disagree on foundations, this leads them to say things I would not think of, to ask questions I would never have raised, to point out flaws in reasoning I think straightforward.