It’s a Sad and Beautiful World

“It’s a Sad and beautiful World”. These are Tom Wait’s expressive words in the Jim Jarmusch film “Down by Law”. Such a simple phrase, but so apt.

When tragedy strikes our friends or family members, or when some large scale disaster occurs, I suspect we are inclined to dwell more on the sad, or ugly, aspects. When thinking about the mysteries of the cosmos, or when on a walk on a gorgeous spring day, perhaps we focus much more on the beautiful. I wonder if it is possible to keep both in the mind at the same time?

There is a field of theology; called, I believe,“theodicy” that deals with how to reconcile the sad (or cruel or ugly or evil) aspects of the world with a “loving creator”. The popular Christian apologist C. S. Lewis wrote a book “The Problem of Pain” deals with this. Of course, as Lewis points out somewhere in that book, this is only a “problem” for people who are believers in some kind of God. Certainly for us agnostics, the difficulty of reconciling the negative aspect of the world inclines us a little more toward atheism. I also have to add that, even though it has been some years since I have read Lewis' book, I recall it involving relatively weak (by his standards) arguments.

There have of course been a great many attempts to reconcile the existence of evil with an infinitely good God. The most common justifications seems to involve mankind’s free will and his/her subsequent “Fall” (consisting of the free choice to disobey God’s rules). Related to this, I think, is the concept of “original sin”, which I admit to not understanding, and further do I do not understand its relation to “the Fall”. In any case, this argument tends to not appeal much to the skeptics among us, since it is not clear how all of humanity can be held accountable for an act of disobedience on the part of a distant ancestor.

An added difficulty is that pain and evil can be divided into “natural” and “human caused” portions. The former being tsunamis, earthquakes, and the like, the latter being murder and other crimes committed by people against other people. With a stretch, one can perhaps imagine the “Fall” causing the latter. But how could that explain the natural evils? Of course, we hear today, after every major disaster, some highly dubious pronouncement by a fringe element about how the disaster was punishment for sin, but such claims are rejected by the vast majority of the clergy of all religions, as far as I can tell.

The late philosopher Robert Nozick made a fascinating point in his book “The Examined Life” that I don’t think I have ever heard before, or thought of. I believe Nozick was a non-believer, so his argument, though ingenious, did not succeed in convincing him. It went like this: suppose there is a deity that considers making a vast spectrum of worlds, or realms, such as ours. The spectrum could be continuous (infinitely many) or it could be discrete. Further, imagine ranking them according to their foreseen “good (G) to bad (B)” ratio. It does not matter here how the G or B values are determined, we simply postulate that the Deity is sufficiently clever to be able to accurately make such an assessment. Now suppose that the Deity decides to create, or to embody with reality, all of the worlds where the G/B ratio is higher than some cutoff value. It might be a ratio of 1, or it might be a ratio of 1 million—the point is that a great many of the created worlds would involve B being non zero. So on this model it is not clear that one could necessarily “blame” a Deity for creating a world with evil in it. I think Nozick goes on to admit that this model is not very consoling; but I have to admire him for coming up with a novel and clever idea.

It is odd that the modern “Creationist” seems to object to the theory of evolution on the grounds that it implies many millions of years of animal suffering (“Nature Red in Tooth and Claw” ) , and indeed, it does. Their position seems to be that this is inconsistent with a “loving creator”. Again, indeed it does seem to be so. But how is this suffering any different from what goes on today in nature all around us? For an example, see “March of the Penguins” , or any nature show about animals in the wild. Surely the animals cannot be held accountable for man’s “Fall”, can they? Well, for completeness, I must add that in addition the “Creationists” tend to take the Bible literally, and hence they see evolution as contradicting that source. But surely nobody would really take all of it literally today, would they? To consider just one example, does any sane person believe in killing their recalcitrant children ?

Two kinds of intelligent design

Today, there is a strange movement afoot referred to as “Intelligent Design” (ID). I say strange because the motivation behind it is to me not so clear. It appears to be culturally related to the earlier and very dubious “young-earth creationist” movement. But whereas one could perhaps understand (but not condone) the theological motivation behind that (shifting the blame apparently for animal suffering from God to mankind’s “fall”), I wonder what the motivation is for this newer movement?

Well, I know that it focuses on claiming that certain animal cells or parts could not have evolved in the gradual manner that Darwinian evolution postulates. Simply put, a principle of evolution is that for a trait or organ to evolve in stages, it must represent an advantage to organisms at each stage along the line. For example, for an eye to evolve, partial light sensitivity must be useful for organisms in the lineage (and I think it is easy to imagine that it would be useful to have even a very slight degree of light sensitivity). I believe that the flagellum is one example of “irreducible complexity” that ID proponents use, and I do not pretend to know anything about these biological systems, I find it dubious on the surface to argue that some trait can not have evolved gradually just because it isn’t clear how it could have. A great deal of info can be found on the web about this controversy, but most of it seems to claim that there are plausible ways that it could have evolved in the gradual way that Darwinism requires.

From a theological angle, what does this “biological ID” solve? If young earth creationism tried to provide a way around the “problem of pain” in the animal world, this latter form seems to do nothing of the kind. Animals would seem to have still killed each other and suffered long before man appeared on the scene (it is my impression that the ID movement does not dispute the billions of years old earth idea).

For my part, I think it very likely that Darwinian Evolution (in the modern post gene discovery era where it is called Neo-Darwinism) can account for all of the life forms, given that life somehow started. Now whether we will ever fully understand how exactly living forms got started, I do not know, but again my strong suspicion is that life did begin in some natural manner. I do not believe this in a dogmatic sense, but I would be surprised if it were not true. Proving it to be true is another manner, and, short of actually producing life from non-life, it is possible that we never will.

But I want to distinguish what might be considered a different kind of ID from te biological version, one that wonders if the physical universe is somehow designed by (in some sense) an enormously subtle intelligence. It could be something like a “God”, though by no means necessarily the type of God that the world’s theistic religions imagine. Or it could be a collection or panel of supernatural beings, or some kind of entities that we cannot even possibly imagine or grasp. The point is, there might be conscious agency involved in designing the laws of the universe. Suppose that the emergence of life was designed to an inevitable outcome from the initial conditions of the Big Bang, for example. It would not be necessary to imagine that a particular form of life (such as humans) might have been foreseen by the designer---indeed perhaps the chaotic, unpredictable nature of things required something like evolution to eventually produce life forms that are conceptually aware. In this view, there could be countless billions of intelligent life forms scattered through the universe, or there could be just one (us). We have no data on this.

One can imagine hundreds of variations on this idea, some involving the eventual spreading of consciousness throughout the universe. As numerous speculative science writers have pointed out, this could be the reason for the universe having “life built into it from the git-go”.

I do not, of course, know if this any of cosmological ID is actually true, or even close to the truth. I must confess that it does seem highly plausible to me that something like it is true. But I do want to point out that such a position might be called a form of ID—perhaps, “cosmological ID” would be an apt term for it—and that it would be vastly more plausible and respectable than the position represented in the current ID movement.