A Planet of Parasites and the Problem with God
joyfulpessimism.com
joyfulpessimism.com
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.
No one said you have to pick just one; maybe they were always parts of a bigger picture.
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.
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.
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
It isn't restricted to a domain because it can be applied everywhere, by everyone.
It is a way to find effective truth, faith or subjectivity be damned. Whether I believe in radio waves or electricity doesn't enter into it - the cell phone still works.
The scientific method as a mindset helps us uncover things but only if they can be tested and reproduced, as you said.
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.
"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.
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.
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)
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!
I don't believe this explanation, but reincarnation usually comes along with karma in a package.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
Did you choose your preferences, though?
That just describes sexual selection in general. Of course you think with your big head when choosing a mate, not the small one that's easily fooled.
You make it sound like choosing good genes for your offspring is evil or something.
The wasp has a choice like a tapeworm can choose to exist outside of the gut.. that is, it doesn't have any choice at all.
Your attitude is fatalistic. You're saying we're all doomed to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors until we die or get lucky. That's a belief. A false one at that.
The tapeworm has no choice because it has no ability to comprehend the context of its own existence. A lot of human beings find themselves in the same predicament through no fault of their own.
They are not. They are conscious beings in charge of their lives and evolution like any other being is. They might have less brain cells than us, but you don't know what they are thinking.
As we observe the natural world, it seems that various types of animals have different levels of "consciousness" and "sentience". I don't think the caterpillar is very conscious and thinking, it is running a smaller program on less hardware, but I think it may be more living than biology in general gives it credit for. I think we have the same functions as described, and more. Including limitations that we don't think about most of the time. As the cat also does not. This "more" is what separates us from animals. We have the same basic system, but we also have more than this. Which, among many things, gives rise to us contemplating what consciousness and sentience is, both in ourselves and in the animal world. And makes us perceive good and evil and have morals. For the cat good and evil is irrelevant. It does not have morals. It has a nature, which is the program running for that type of animal. The nature of the cat is to kill and eat the mouse. Good and evil is not involved. The wasp lays eggs in the caterpillar. Good and evil is not involved. It is nature and it is their programming. Where we humans may be able to use our consciousnes to change our programming to some extent, the animals cannot change their programming. It evolves indirectly over time and generations.
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.
Karma does not negate biology, karma is a law which acts on 'subtler' platform than gross law of biology. pleaseure and suffering decided according to law of karma is manifested by biology(through chance and probabilities)!
Thanks for such wonderful questions, am open to more.
Once its bad reactions( because of which he had to take a life form with so little consciousness ) are over it can get a new form with more intelligence.
Soul never takes a form, it is distinct from matter. Dull matter takes the form. It only 'directs' matter. After old body is destroyed it gets a new body.
2>. 'Frequently unanswered questions' https://www.amazon.in/Frequently-Unanswered-Questions-Chaita...
For a way too technical and scientific analysis of eastern philosophy check out 'Atma Paradigm' series(my respect to you if you actually complete that): 3>. https://m.youtube.com/@TheAtmaParadigm/videos
High quality articles on various controversial scenarios in terms of karma https://www.thespiritualscientist.com/?s=Karma________
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.
>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!
"We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
Of course, there's hundreds of more writings on this, but Lewis is always an easy place to start.
>Or, as Kevin Lafferty, a marine ecologist for the US Geological Survey puts it, “Parasitism is the most popular lifestyle on Earth.”
>So popular, in fact, that many parasites are themselves prey to their own parasites. In a phenomenon called “hyperparasitism,” parasites are invaded by parasites that are invaded by still more parasites. These Russian dolls of internal flesh-eating have been observed to five levels down, which one article describes as “an endless progression of interspecies abuse”:
Parasite meaning something taking more out of a system than giving back to it. Fear might not even be experienced or required or involved as with our gut parasites.
Life isn't a happy numbers game by any means.
Whereas our understanding of sentience is limited and we have not got ideas how consciousness works.
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.
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.
I haven't looked into Hinduism too much myself but it's hard for me to not conceptualize "moving toward enlightenment" as good and "moving away from enlightenment" as evil. Possibly because I don't know the context for what the end state of the universe is supposed to be in Hindu tradition.
As far as I understand the reincarnation philosophy, then, yes, there is no concept of good, because you can't have a concept of "good" without having the other end of the scale of "evil".
> I haven't looked into Hinduism too much myself but it's hard for me to not conceptualize "moving toward enlightenment" as good and "moving away from enlightenment" as evil.
I'm not a Hindu so I can't get into the weeds about this. What I remember from reading the religious texts (decades ago), such as the Bhagvhad Gita(sp?) is that "you do what you do, it will come back to you if it hasn't already".
It seems your post contradicts itself? First quote "... that you are reincarnated and move up or down the ladder of greatness ... depending on how you lived, then there is no such thing as "evil"." Second quote: "... balance - each act you do (consider good/evil on a scale from 1-10 with 1 being evil)".
So the system with no evil uses a scale based on good/evil? Also, what are the bad things you can do in a life-action-value system, where there is no evil? Seems to be cruel if your karma gets subtracted because one does a 'less good' but still good thing? And would such a system or the karma subtraction not constitute evil in itself?
I don't see the contradiction, because I asked the reader to consider it in simplistic terms - terms they already understand.
The system doesn't use a scale of good and evil, its simply "you get what you deserve".
Whether the reader thinks that fox hunting[1] is good/evil/neutral is irrelevant if they are reincarnated as a fox in their next life!
So, yeah, you and I could, and would, classify some stuff on the scale of good/evil that you (and I) use, but because the scale is irrelevant, what purpose does the scale serve in a reincarnation-based belief system?
If any act, $FOO, that a being does is done back to them (under the reincarnation belief system), does it matter if $FOO is "Killed for pleasure, not food" or "sacrificed much for some other beings benefit"?
I guess what I am saying is, if the concept of evil and good is literally irrelevant to the workings of the belief system, then that belief system simply doesn't have the concept of evil (or good).
[1] Using an example from a thread below. You can pick your own example.
"... if the concept of evil and good is literally irrelevant to the workings of the belief system, then that belief system simply doesn't have the concept of evil (or good)." In a real sense yes, but the actors in the system may still be under the belief that good and evil exists. That actually may touch a sore point in some religions, that claims to have explanatory powers and maybe also salvation powers. But at the same time, it seems not to allow learning about and approaching a subject or concept such as good and evil, from a point of incomplete understanding.
I think the whole thing ie. this entire interesting debate, shows that our understanding is incomplete. The concepts or beliefs we have in this area does not hold under analysis and scrutiny. And yet there seems to be something there that ignites curiosity.
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.
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?
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.
Do you think that any of those examples are in the category of "taking pleasure and directly taking part in seeing a live animals torn to bits"?
You don't have to see a live animal torn to bits to be implicated in the unethical farming and slaughter of animals, all you have to do is spend a dollar to support the system that makes it all possible.
I'm trying to clarify your position here: Do you think that eating a creature, farmed, raised and killed in accordance with current legislation, is the same level of atrocity as laughing with pleasure as a live animal is torn apart, just for the joy of the audience?
Because, TBH, if you argue that those two are the same in level and intensity of "evilness", then you are, in all fairness, not playing with a full deck.
If you argue that they are not, then your original comment is off the mark.
Why is there any more or less moral weight to the wasps lifecycle than any other predator along the food chain?
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.