a lot of footnotes.
That’s not a spoon.
This is spoon.
😉
I think about this all the time, so I’m glad you brought it up. As you may know from reading some of my stuff I’m a God believer, and as such it’s on me to have some way of answering that old chestnut, “Why would a perfectly good, perfectly loving, and infinitely merciful God create a world with [insert horrible thing such as insects that eat children’s eyes, earthquakes, asteroid strikes, floods, fires, famine, SARS-CoV-2, Tucker Carlson, whatever] in it?” without making God completely impersonal.¹
I don’t think impersonal is the issue.
Back when it was still possible to play Sim Earth and Sim Life … before technology advanced such that it was no longer possible to fake a VL Bus and they just wouldn’t run any more … I had loads of fun with them.
Sim Life in particular.
I’d set up worlds and scatter thousands of algae across them … the simplest lifeform there was in the game.
I’d watch and wait for them to speciate.
As soon as they did, I’d pause the game, locate the one individual zygote that had evolved to become a shrub, a grass, a tree, whatever … deciduous/evergreen … fruiting/nectar … dropping/pollen … water/desert/wherever climate niche … whatever had changed to make it a new form of life.
And I’d get terribly excited about it — a new lifeform!
It would take me hours sometimes to locate them amongst the hundreds that had survived. And when I’d found them, I’d clone them and repopulate the world with them.
Time and again, I’d cast thousands into the world … and time and again they’d all die. I kept going until I finally had some naturally evolved plant-based lifeforms that were native to the world in question.
And I’d repeat the process over and over … desperately saddened each time a strain … or even that first individual … didn’t make it, wasn’t fit enough to survive its environment.
But I wouldn’t intervene.
I’d set myself the goal of creating a world in which the things that lived in it belonged there … and the things that belonged there were the things that survived without intervention — if I cast the seeds upon the lands and waters, they germinated, grew, survived, reproduced and died in their turn.
Did I care?
I cared about every single individual plant — I was heartbroken whenever one of them died … overjoyed whenever one of them thrived.
Imagine my happiness when, finally, I had a thriving ecosystem that didn’t require me to keep repopulating, locating, speciating and repopulating again.
And those were just the plants.
Then I’d do the same, starting with urchins and letting them evolve into new lifeforms of various types: water/land/air, herbivorous/carnivorous, you get the idea.
Of course I cared about individuals … but, again, I didn’t intervene — if the world were to be viable then they had to survive without help.
I’m sure you’ll appreciate how heartbroken I was when some lifeform or other would eat another (plant or animal) to extinction, thus ensuring not only their demise but its own as well — what a needless tragedy.
I cared … about every individual lifeform.
But to intervene would have been to defeat the object: that they survive on their own terms, whatever those might turn out to be.
One might view the matter of free will similarly: we stand or fall on our own terms, without outside influence, let alone intervention.
If there’s a God, I have absolutely no problem in imagining that His approach is the same: the rule He made for Himself was that His creation should stand or fall on its own terms, without any outside influence, without any favouritism.
It’s not cold and uncaring.
It’s not impersonal.
It’s simply non-interventionist. — there is no favouritism … everything has the same right to life on its own terms, whatever they might be.
Other than earthquakes and storms it’s tough to think of acts purely of God² that are evil from the human standpoint.
Earthquakes and storms aren’t evil — no more so than a mountain is evil … or snow it evil … or the desert sun is evil. They aren’t acts of God … they’re the natural order of things in the Universe as it is. They just don’t exist in that realm and to anthropomorphise them is infantile — we’ve evolved past that now and no longer pray to the thunder or the sunlight.
Even if we exclude all of that sort of thing there is no lack of human-caused evil out there — murder, rape, war, Donald Trump, ABBA.
I shan’t tell my father you said that about ABBA 😉
Of course that begs the question of why God made us capable of evil.
Did He?
Or did we simply evolve to become so?
Like I said, for all we know, we really aren’t very high on the list of most beloved things in the Universe. The idea that God, if He/She/It/They exists, should necessarily hold us in such high regard is the product of the self-absorbed thinking that plagues us as a species — it’s vanity on our part, plain and simple.
Should there be a God and I learn He holds me in no higher regard than a blade of grass or a grain of sand, I won’t feel slighted, I’ll be comforted to know that my God is truly all loving: there is room in His heart for a grain of sand, an individual microbe, everything — now that’s a love, I can get behind and know that I am, in my turn, truly loved … for I am not less loved than anything else any more than it is less loved than I. What could be more reassuring than a love like that?
To which I would answer that if we were not capable of choosing good or evil (or meh) then we would not be free will beings, and therefore not be human beings.
Yep … just as to be human is to be, by definition, imperfect — no perfect being is human and, therefore, anything that is is not human, By the same token, therefore, free will without the freedom to choose is not free will.
Leaving aside the question of whether free will exists, can exist, or if the very concept even makes sense, I am still begging yet another question about what makes for a human being to which I answer if not free will then what? That freedom of will is the essence of what it means to be human explains why almost everybody considers slavery and similar forms of abuse dehumanizing.
“The question of why God allowed for this world to be populated by such unpredictable and potentially destructive beings remains a mystery.”
-Elizha PetroniasMore evil can be laid at our feet than we might wish to acknowledge. We make floods worse by clearing wetlands, fires — including those caused my lightning strikes — worse through global warming, and SARS-CoV-2 worse through sheer ineptitude combined with malice.
This is especially on display in my sorry-ass country. We just passed 13 million cases as of the morning I write this. Donald Trump is running around boasting about Operation Warp Speed. I happened to be in a store that was playing a Trumpie radio station the other day. He was going on and on about how the the recent good vaccine news is all thanks to him, as if he had manned the flow cytometry himself, and how we should not let anyone fool us into thinking that it had anything to do with Sleepy Joe, no sir, it was me, me, ME! — all punctuated by the announcer’s breathless acclamations. While I would not take that (Operation Warp Speed) away from him in spite of such tasteless self-promotion, it is still on account of him that people are dying of COVID-19 even as they deny that it exists, and abusing medical professionals in the process³. Such people are actually in the Garden of Eden⁴, that is, innocent babes. They have not grown up yet. They carry on as if the world revolves around them, that it is just as they would that it be, insisting on this even to the point of death.
What is perhaps even more sad is that although those same people probably thump (oh, sorry, thumped) bibles all day long they completely missed the point of the story of Garden of Eden, which is that we had to eat that forbidden fruit. God knew that the best way to get us to eat it would be to tell us not to. Once we did we knew the difference between good and evil⁵ and therefore were no longer innocent. Having lost the innocence of the animal world, we had to GTF out of the garden. There is no going back. We can’t go back to the garden any more than we can crawl back up inside our mother’s wombs.
Again … I find the idea vain.
Was it possible we would eat the apple?
Yes.
Was it inevitable?
No.
Was the apple there for us specifically?
I really couldn’t say …. but I wouldn’t trust human beings to judge whether or not that were the case: they’re the vainest, most self-absorbed creatures in existence that I have ever encountered and utterly convinced that absolutely everything … up to and including the entire f**king Universe … is about them.
There was a tree of knowledge.
We were told not to eat of it.
We disobeyed.
And now we’re trying to blame God for our transgression by claiming that He must’ve used reverse psychology on us to make us eat it?
I rest my case.
If it weren’t for free will it would be — I was going to say all evil all the time but without free will it wouldn’t even be evil would it? As you say, or at least imply, we should not attribute evil motives to the insect larvae eating children’s eyes out from the inside. The insects aren’t malicious. They don’t choose human children. They just lay their eggs in whatever eye happens to be handy. Human evil could not exist in the absence of the ability to choose evil, that is, in the absence of free will. Condemned to be free and all that Sartre.
Precisely.
Having beaten human caused evil to death (if only!) I need to move on to the other kind of evil, things like earthquakes and disease inasmuch as disease can be separated from the handling of disease, that is, why does disease exist in the first place, or for that matter earthquakes⁶, if God is all loving and all merciful and answers prayers and all that?
Because those other lifeforms have as much right to life as any other, great or small — I refer you in particular to my journal entry for Day 3 here.
Would it even be possible to be human if there was nothing to push back against?
Yes.
It’s just that what it meant to be human would be different.
Note that this is a species-wide as opposed to an individual thing. As an individual member of Homo Sapiens sapiens, I certainly could have done without this individual fire destroying my house and making me homeless. This gets to why we call someone a hero: We imply that they pushed back against their own fear and misgivings in order to do what they perceived needed to be done for the sake of the greater good, whatever the personal cost. During the pandemic we have called medical professionals heroes because they continue to minister to the sick in spite of the mortal danger⁷ to which this exposes them. Such heroism was even more starkly on display near the beginning of the pandemic when PPE was in short supply. During the 9/11 catastrophe first responders ran back into the teetering towers to rescue others — heroes. Others labor in obscurity attempting to create, say, a universal coronavirus vaccine. Or try to figure out a new way to use computer technology in order to amass a personal fortune, or try to figure out why their life keeps going sideways.
All of these scenarios have in common a problem and an attempt by human beings to find a solution to said problem. We need that sort of thing. Otherwise we could not grow as a species or as individuals.
There does arise the question of why it should be significant that we do so.
If I were God then, of course, if that happened, I’d be overjoyed, but it wouldn’t be necessary to make me happy. What would make me happy would be that my creations … my children, if you will … were happy and fullfillled — if they got to the end of their days doing no more than enjoying Life then that would be enough for me.
Every so often you read/hear the panic about the end of civilisation as we know it.
I really don’t see what the problem is.
Sure, Life would be tougher … and, as Joolz said, if/when it does, you’re gonna wish you’d spent more time at the gym — because the end of the World is (literally) gonna be fucking tiring.
But, that aside … and so long as it doesn’t involve total ecological and environmental collapse … water will still fall from the sky (for free) … food will still grow in (and walk about on) the land (for free) … shelter will be available for no more than the effort of building it or (in the case of caves) walking far enough to find it.
Which is why I find the idea of land ownership utterly ludicrous: all property other than that which one grows/husbands/gifts/or is gifted quite literally is theft — always has been, and always will be.
It is common these days to say that God does not deal out to us more than we can handle. On an individual level, I would beg to differ. If a lightning bolt strikes me and I die, then let’s face it, I couldn’t handle it. However, the aforementioned platitude would probably be offered up as verbal comfort food to my survivors.
If there’s a God then I have no problem with that — in fact, it would be immensely satisfying to me.
The problem I have is with Religion … not all, but far too many, of which boil down to “Do as you’re told, don’t make a fuss and it’ll all be alright … when you’re dead.”
Yeah … right … erm … wait … what?
It’s not that I don’t understand their purpose.
How are we supposed to get the evil to mend their ways unless we tell them to “behave, or else” …?
We can’t kill them all.
Can we?
But the problem is that … as the laws of Systemantics dictate they must … they become debased, warped, unfit for their original purpose …
Getting back to the question of why God throws so much shit at us. It’s for our own good, as we say to our children⁸. “We are God’s children.” How many times had that been said? But God’s a pretty good parent, sending us out there to cross the street and wait for the school bus by ourselves. We may get hit by a car or abducted by a weirdo but if we survive we will have learned something valuable. Such a stiff-necked⁹ species as our own requires the toughest of tough love, and that’s what God dishes out. Global warming is coming on and we Homo Sapiens sapiens may not get out of that one with our existence intact. Maybe there is a hero out there somewhere, but that seems like too much to ask for.
Maybe … or maybe the real tragedy is that there is no God, this is the only habitable planet in the Universe, containing the only lifeforms that will ever exist … and we’ve destroyed it not even by intent but sheer negligence — we didn’t even do it on purpose ¹.
If there is a God …
Well, allegedly, his last words to his firstborn were “Go forth and multiply” … which, given our clinical narcissism as a species, and the tendency for stories to get embellished and reworked with time … is probably really only the “rated ‘E’ for everyone” version of “Fuck off!”
So, I wouldn’t necessarily put my faith in our being welcome to darken His doorstep again.
If there is a God in the sense that we like to tell ourselves … I suspect that He’s not only the rag and bone man of the Universe (his refrain of “Any old irony ….” echoing through Eternity), but that he has a sense of humour that is simultaneously sublime and derisory: if we could stand back far enough to take it all in and join the dots, the picture might well turn out to be a child’s seaside bucket and spade.
However (having once found myself trapped inside the mind of God for a short while that lasted an eternity ²), I have to say that I think it as likely that He is as human as we like to think Him as that angels are beautiful, winged humanoids:
—
¹ If you are going to fuck me over, at least do me the courtesy of doing so with intent.
If you are going to hold the point of view “I’m alright, Jack,” at least preface it with “Fuck you,” so that I know you care.
Because there’s nothing worse than someone who doesn’t care enough to even notice you exist blandly apologising for their thoughtlessness — that’s just adding insult to injury!
² it’s not somewhere you would wish to spend any time at all, trust me: it’s beyond human capacity and, had I not been able to leave when I did, I would have been rendered permanently insane — drooling, gibbering, shrieking insane … (catatonic in all but demeanour) ³.
³ Quite how I got there … and how I escaped … are a story for another time, perhaps — but not here and not now.
