The Horrors of Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, August 10, 2008, 08:09 (5747 days ago) @ David Turell

David disagrees with my statement that if God is impersonal, we are on our own, there will be no compensation for suffering, and God becomes irrelevant to our condition. - With regard to suffering, I was certainly not talking about myself but was following up the subject of this thread ... the horrors of evolution, i.e. the unspeakable suffering of humans and other animals down through the ages. I'm not hankering for an afterlife, and am grateful for the life I've had, but I'm acutely conscious that I've been lucky and others have not. - David advises us to "start your thinking with the assumption that none of us know anything about God" and, in my view quite rightly, goes on to say we should not rely "on religious teachings or expectations". However, you then say that "each of us has the strength of intellect to find a comfortable relationship [with God]". If the object is to find a comfortable relationship, religion may well hold the answer, along the lines of: "Just ignore the suffering. God is good and kind and loving, and the suffering is a mystery. Have faith." But firstly my quest, at least at the start of my thinking, is not for a relationship. I'm simply trying to get as close as possible to some kind of truth about the world I live in. Secondly, even if ultimately I were to search for a relationship, I couldn't base it on something I know nothing about. I might just as well form a relationship with a light in the sky. I need to know who or what I'm relating to, and in this case I'm confronted by one known reality plus a hypothesis. The reality is the world I live in. The hypothesis is an unknown creator. I use my intellect to investigate whether this creator exists or not, but when I then use it to link this hypothetical being to the world he (may have) created, I can scarcely ignore the discomforting signs that confront me ... the horrors of evolution. My intellectual problem has nothing to do with religious teachings or expectations. I'm mulling over the implications of the evidence before me, not in my own personal life, but in the history of life on Earth as (possibly) created by the being to which I'm supposed to relate. - This does not mean that I reject the evidence of design, of love and beauty in the world, of near-death and out-of-body experiences etc. But I do reject the idea that the slaughter of the innocents can be brushed aside as one searches for some kind of truth. And although I'm not stating that God is impersonal, but merely that it is a distinct possibility based on the evidence available to us, I stand by my assertion that if he is indeed impersonal, then he is irrelevant to our lives. That is one of the various scenarios which an agnostic has to contend with.