Hi, Mike.
You wrote to Don Munro, in part:
Subject: theological question.
I also have a theological question that I cannot get out of my head,
=
and I haven't found any papers dealing with this issue. I know you =
aren't theologians but the question does have to do with nature and =
creation. Here goes:
Nature is complex and organized, suggesting a designer. As well as =
being perfectly designed, nature is perfectly cruel as well. If God's =
creation is supposed to reveal his nature, why then does nature seem so =
cruel and as if it was designed to be that way?
Please e-mail me back. Could you, if possible, shed some light on =
this question.
Thanks!
Mike Greenhalgh.
First, we ASAers are a widely assorted lot. There are a number who are
educated theologically, and all have a deep interest and some knowledge
in that area. Also, the question is more philosophical than theological.
Some of us come in on that side of things. I happen to be trained in
philosophy.
Is nature cruel? The way you phrase the matter strongly suggests that
pain is cruel and evil. Now, if I should go about cutting people up and
causing them pain, I would certainly be cruel. But surgeons whack away
and are paid handsomely to do it. Their ministrations have cause me pain,
but I do not consider them cruel. The pain they caused was a necessary
consequence of what they had to do to improve my health.
Consider pain in other circumstances. Robert Wadlow, the tallest known
human being at 8' 11", died because he did not feel pain the way
normal-sized individuals do. A poorly fitted brace on one foot produced a
lesion which he did not feel. Consequently, he died of blood poisoning.
(Note that this was in 1940, before the general availability of
antibiotics.) So the physical pain which we often find inconvenient turns
out to be important to our survival. I understand that injured animals
will hole up and remain quiet while the injury heals.
The other notion of cruelty is commonly associated with the phrase,
"nature red in tooth and claw," and with death. I will agree that a
predator tearing at prey is not a pleasant sight for most of us. But I
recall what happened at the Grand Canyon North Rim when the wolves and
cougars had been driven off or killed and hunting was forbidden. The deer
population expanded until every bit of green had been eaten as high as
the deer could reach. Then they starved. If anything, mass starvation is
harder on the animals than becoming the prey of a carnivore. By the way,
no one seems to be concerned that plants have to die to feed herbivorous
animals. But it's still death.
Is there a way to avoid predation without producing starvation? Is there
a way to exclude death? I can think of one--a static world in which none
of the creatures reproduce. As soon as they reproduce, however slowly,
they will oversaturate all available environmental niches unless the
older ones die and give the younger room. I tried to run a simulation,
assuming that a microbe weighs about 10 pg and duplicates itself in an
hour, without anything interfering with its growth. I got about 4 1/2
days until the microbe and its descendants reached the volume of the
earth. Exponential duplication is mind boggling.
There is a tendency in human beings that I find exemplified in Alfonzo el
Sabio (the Wise (!)), king of Spain. When they tried to explain the
Ptolemaic system to him, with its comples of cycles, epicycles and
deferents, he remarked that, had he been present at the creation, he
would have had some good advice for the Creator. Members of the race seem
to have this foolish pride, so that we are compelled either to correct
the Almighty's messes or to declare that no proper deity would have
produced something like this. But often, as was the case with the
explanation the king was trying to understand, the problem is that we've
got it wrong. The solar system cannot be explained with the circles held
to be necessary to the heavens, a fact painfully discovered by Kepler,
who finally recognized the orbits as elliptical. Then Newton came along
and showed why this has to be if gravity falls off with the square of the
distance. But he had to invent a new kind of mathematics to do this.
Since omniscience may indicate someone a little smarter than me, ;-)when
I find something I don't understand, I defer to the Creator.
It seems to me that the "errors" on the part of the Creator spring mainly
from those who do not want to acknowledge him. After all, if there is a
God, he sets the rules, and the creature answers to him. Rather than
acknowledge this, many try to raise problems like pain, disease, death,
extinctions, natural disasters, or even child abuse (why doesn't God keep
the abuser in check?), in order to give an excuse not to recognize him.
The demons, who know better, tremble. Damned fools don't. As someone
remarked, pride is the anesthetic God grants to little people to assuage
the pain of being fools. A humility that honors God doesn't need even an
analgesic.
David F. Siemens, Jr., Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
Los Angeles Pierce College
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