“We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.”
—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Quote of the day
March 14, 2013 • 1:37 pm
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
God is about the eternal, not mundane things like flicking beetles around.
This is about your eternal soul.
Yeah, he’s about flicking humans into eternal fire and allowing horrible suffering (that he could prevent) to occur.
You don’t really understand the quote, do you?
Oh, do you need to find a new site.
Not a very nice comment about our host! 🙂
I beg to differ with you. If a god is not concerned about my integrity and how I treat other creatures than I care not to spend one moment with such a god, never mind an eternity, for such a god is not worthy of the beetle’s interest let alone mine.
Um… Matthew 10:29?
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Yes, but then there’s Genesis 1:26 and 1:28.
And that’s not even getting into the animal sacrifice/snuff porn parts of that big book full of bad ideas.
Ah, but that’s OT God; NT God had mellowed (as so often happens when you start a family…)
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A family with yourself! (3 agents-in-one-deity package deal.)
Narcissism, your name is Abraham.
A kind of ménage-à-un.
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lol!
Sort of. The whole Hell idea comes from the NT.
Oh, that was just God Jr. mouthing off.
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Wait, I thought Jesus was the logos, and always existed.
Yes, he did. But he became a spirited kid.
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Damn, if I hadn’t already sold it on ebay it would be yours for the right price.
Do you know who bought it?
Some guy called Louis Cypher …
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Does he have good feedback?
Hell, yes.
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You know, I don’t I’ve considered all the implications of an immaterial soul, one of them being you can sell it as many times as you want.
The sale of the soul was accompanied by an iron clad contract with rather punitive non disclosure provisions. I could tell you but then you’d be damned to hell.
Do tell. Hell would necessarily be better than eternity with any of the disgusting christian gods.
Yeah, pretty much anything would be better than being stuffed under a chair and singing forever.
What a comparison you’ve unwittingly made in an attempt to defend your monstrosity of a God. Every other type of creature, from beetles to Basset Hounds, he lets slip into the darkness of death with no further attention. But humans alone, the supposed pinnacle and crown of his creation, are subject to an eternity of screaming torment if they do not worship this God in precisely the correct way.
And we are told, “wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” So the odds going in that you’re going to escape this fate aren’t good.
Which, incidentally, has always made me wonder how Christians who believe in Hell could have children in good conscience. I mean, even if the odds of them going to Hell were one in a thousand, what kind of monster would be willing sign a child up for such a risk? A one in a thousand risk of Hell, of eternal torture without possibility of parole, is just unconscionable. Better by far to never have been born. The only way I could see that Hell believing Christians could have children in good conscience is to believe that if they didn’t have the child themselves that that soul would be born anyway, just to someone else.
In reality, I know most just don’t think about it very clearly. Religion is best experienced in a very very soft focus.
Yes, zoom in on any aspect of religious dogma and it’s all equally incoherent.
– Your god is omnipotent and omniscient ?
– An omniscient god gave us free will ?
– Uncaused first cause ?
– The whole issue of theodicy, to which the quote alluded.
Speaking of hell, I recall hearing a debate between an atheist and a Calvinist (so long ago I can’t recall the names) and the question of all those that lived and died before the coming of Jesus and their disposition in the afterlife came up.
The Calvinist claimed that those poor souls who died without knowing Jesus would indeed go to hell but that was all right as god arranged things so that only those that deserved to go to hell would have been born before the coming of Jesus.
I swear that you just can’t make this shit up any weirder or more depraved that a true Christian can.
I am unaware of any biblical passages that suggests that beetles, bassets, and other creatures are not also punished in lakes of burning hellfire for not having the right beliefs or putting their genitalia in the wrong places. It would be consistent with how the Bible says he treats humans.
You only further make the point.
I am benevolent enough to care about humans AND beetles; what’s more I’m benevolent enough to actually help whoever or whatever I have the power to help.
If I can do it, why can’t god?
Is god not as benevolent or powerful as I?
I do like this quote!
It’s not about flicking beetles and pain and suffering. You seem to have the intelligence to make the decision to be an atheist, but the flaw is in your user name “myatheistlife”. My atheist life!!! you have obviously thought about that title but it contradicts your being. God is in every man, women and child alive, therefore being a living, material soul makes you a part of God. Remember, if there is nothing but darkness when you die then every thought, every perceivable action would not exist. What would be the point of existence?! For there would be no light from the stars, no dark matter binding the Universe together; there would be no universal law within the heavenly ethos. Look around and you will see that from atoms to galaxies all are governed by definite physical laws. Coming down to our own solar system we find another superbly organised arrangement. Evidence indeed of a Creator, of a “Lawmaker!”
So you see: it’s not about flicking beetles and comparing that to God’s mercy. The Earth is sick with the evils of men, the Deceivers corporeal legions.
For him who has an ear let him hear….
Oh, for Chryssake. Robert Hampton, you are babbling religious gibberish.
Please tell us how you know that you have identified the correct god to worship?
To which of the many gods available are you referring? I suggest the following user ID name for you, Mr. Hampson: MytheistlifewhereIarbritarilydecidewhichofthemanygodsavailableisthetrueone.
Not all the gods can be true, but they can be all false, including the one you believe in.
“God is in every man, women and child alive,”
[citation needed]
Mike.
Silly me, I was blaming my lunch burrito.
😀
Robert, do beetles have souls ?
Are we more or less important than beetles ?
Can animals other than humans experience pain and suffering ?
If the earth is sick with the evils of men, how do you know that you’re not one of the evil ones ?
Do you think that “Deceivers corporeal legions” would be a good name for a rock band ?
You seem to be in the know so I thought I’d ask.
Perhaps when you finish your latest tour of the Universe you could let me know.
“What would be the point of existence?!” To exist is enough. I don’t need you to tell me what it means to me, what I should be doing, or that I’m “doing it wrong.”I just really don’t.
If your god is in every man, woman and child, then how come (you say that) the earth is sick with the evils of men? Do you mean that your god is not powerful enough to override this evil? If it was due to free will, how come the free will of the ones who want to do evil override the free will of the ones who do not want to be subjected to evil?
Mysterious ways?
But not mysterious enough since Mr Hampson has the knowledge that this god is in every man, woman and child…
Only mysterious when theists are just trying to wriggle themselves out of a situation they’ve created.
“Seem to have the intelligence . . .”?
You’re not only wrong, you’re rude.
I missed that! You’re right!
And he seems to be saying that if only “myatheistlife” had picked a different name then that would make it OK to be an atheist.
I mean, as much as you can ferret out any meaning from the religio-babble.
But even after you wade into the weeds to figure out what the hell he’s whacking at, there’s no there there.
Well, I suppose you won’t hear this, despite your bigoted boiler plate religious claim of openness which somehow never applies to the speaker.
Come on, every biologist knows this!
Existence just is, and social animals make their own cultures. If morals are hence relative, so are ideals. (What to do, reasons to exist, what is joyful, et cetera.)
“Heavenly ethos” is unobserved religious gibberish with no apparent meaning.
What remains is a claim that, consonant with the standard cosmology the universe spontaneous (zero energy) so no theistic magical agents, a deistic magical agent created physical laws.
Good for you! While theistic magical agents can be rejected out of hand today, there is a case for deistic magic. I have given it 10-20 years, because today it looks like an inflationary multiverse and environmental selection is the most predictive theory for laws we have, and it could be that we have tested this within that time period.
It is already apparent in the current cosmology. Consider that the universe is isotropic, and that our observations on our observable volume tests this. One of the successes of inflation is that it dilutes the singularities that appears in simple physics theories, or else we would see small scale magnetic monopoles or large scale spacetime topological defects.
However, dilution means _some_ observable universes will have the larger defects. Since they are large scale, the inhabitants could and likely would take as physics laws the effective laws those defects usher in. (Say, non-isotropic laws.)
Hence already in the current cosmology some “laws” can be taken as outcome of natural selection bias. _Not_ as outcome of magical agents. Bad for you.
And with “case” I mean gap.
Not a compelling case by any means, seeing how the agents are magical (unobserved and purported unphysical), how small and transient the gap is, et cetera.
If I was betting, this wouldn’t be the way to bet.
So, only infinite things have a point? I fail to see why that would be the case. If a finite life is pointless, how does extending this pointless activity infinitely confer a point to it? What if we only lived for fourteen billion years, but not infinitely?
In any case, I grant that every lawful thing, like the universe, must have a cause. That’s precisely why I don’t worship God. Since everything lawful is evidence of a creator, there simply must be a creator for God, a meta-God who created God, and there must by the same logic, of course, be a meta-meta-God who created that God, and so on. It’s just gods all the way up! Once we find the top of this hierarchy of necessary creators I plan to ask that God it’s will and I plan to thenceforth follow that will assiduously. In the mean time, don’t bother me with these petty lower-level gods.
I kept reading your comment thinking that sooner or later you’d get around to making a point.
“Look at atoms; look at galaxies; what’s the point of existence; therefore it’s not about flicking beetles.”
I’ll be damned if I can find an actual argument in there.
(I don’t think our two theist commenters understand that Dillard means flicking the beetles back onto their feet, i. e., assisting the beetles.)
Robert wrote:
Could you please explain to me the properties of a “material soul”? Evidently it can store memories forever. How does it do this, and how do you know that it does?
If we are to live eternally, what exactly is the point of first having 60-80 years here on earth? Doesn’t it seem rather ridiculous to come here for a few decades first before trillions upon trillions of decades to follow? And those trillions don’t even begin to scratch the surface of eternity. So this “material soul” requires a tiny slice of time on earth, and the memories of that experience to somehow prepare it for an infinite amount of time afterwards? What is the point of that?!
Look around and you will see that from atoms to galaxies all are governed by definite physical laws. Coming down to our own solar system we find another superbly organised arrangement. Evidence indeed of a Creator, of a “Lawmaker”
Now that the laws are in place and there is regularity. What does your god do? There is no need for him. Does he make the atoms ‘swerve’?
Is it just me or does it seem like there is an uptick in the number of godbots/trolls commenting on this site in last couple of days? Any idea where they are coming from Dr. C? There was the “outer experience” troll on some other thread, there’s Robert Hampson here. There seems to be one in every thread.
The beetle is simply not trying hard enough. It’s probably a lazy socialist beetle, waiting for the government to flip it over.
(This is a joke. I am actually the kind of person who would turn a turtle or beetle right side up out of instinct. Irrational, because the ants will likely be upset with me for spoiling their dinner, but it makes me happier.)
Ah! A Voig(h)t-Kampff test!
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I would unhesitatingly turn the beetle over.
The ants, on the other hand, I am quite likely to stamp on, never mind spoiling their dinner.
This doubtless reflects a totally arbitrary and illogical view of the merits of different classes of insects. (Similarly, I like spiders and detest wasps).
If this makes me capricious and dangerous (to bugs) doubtless it’s the God in me. 🙂
Yes, it’s a very nice quote. But how many humans avail themselves of the opportunity to right the beetle. Speaking metaphorically, of course.
‘…right the beetle?’, that is.
I’ve seen more children’s hospitals built by humans than by other animals, or God. It’s a start.
Better to right the beetle than congratulate oneself on someone somewhere else having done so at some time.
I’ve righted lots of beetles, but never expected one to worship me for it.
You are both generous and astute.
I always go out of my way not to step on a bug, or shoo a spider out of the house rather than kill it. But I often wonder, do I have any reason to believe that these devices are more sentient than my computer, just because they are animate? Their brains have less processing power.
But Mr. Bug and Ms. Spider’s respective brains operate in a totally different fashion from von Neumann computers. The term “processing power” is inapplicable to our arthropod friends because of this difference.
Input and output are quantised (because matter and energy), therefore digital, therefore equivalent to another digital process connecting the same input and output. What is the problem with defining ‘processing power’?
The problem is that the noise and uncertainty in the system is much larger than the quantal size of the matter and energy involved. Because of this, in practice, you can’t tell how many quanta are involved, and the inputs to the computational units of the brain behave as though they are continuous.
Yeah, technically moving your arm results in plank-length jumps, but the uncertainty is so much larger than the plank length that it can’t be effectively described as a number of discrete steps.
* Planck length
You’re welcome.
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PS. ℓₚ is equal to 1.616199(97) × 10⁻³⁵ metres
digital systems break data into numeric representation, and then a fairly small set of simple operations repeatedly work on that encoded data a few chunks at a time at very high speed, with sequencing instructions that specify the character of processing at a meta-level. The use of paralellism in most digital algorithms is minimal compared to what the brain can do.
The brain is an analog system. It’s structure is its processor in a sense. It doesn’t represent data with discrete numeric codes, as digital computers do. It uses massive complexity and parallelism to make up for the very slow speed at which neurons fire compared to the cycle time of modern digital computers. Neurons fire at tens or hundreds of times per second, whereas digital processors handle hundreds of millions to a few billion instructions per second.
Trying to compare the two is like comparing apples and oranges in terms of any metric of “processing power”.
A digital computer can add or multiply numbers, compare values, sample input, and cycle between different tasks way faster than the human brain can. But the brain can perform feats of pattern recognition, abstract reasoning, deal with the subtle meanings and resolve the ambiguities of language in ways that present day software and digital computers can only dream of and can barely pretend to simulate. So it’s quite hard to compare the “power” of the two in a meaningful way.
The brain does this using very slow processing speeds and massively parallel algorithms. It’s hard to even call what the brain does “algorithms”, because you can’t really identify step by step procedures. It seems more like an organic fabric of logic (networks of networks of networks…) that is structured to accomplish complex tasks in very few steps or cycles of neuronal signal propogation.
Yes, yes, yes, but I am talking bug brains here, not neocortex. The behavior of the digger wasp, for example, appears as if it follows an algorithm. If its nest building routine is disturbed, it goes back to step one.
Here is a bit of interesting perspective on that wasp story: http://philpapers.org/rec/KEITHT
I only read the abstract, but it looks possible that the simple-mindedness of the sphex has been overplayed.
I don’t know if the wasp has sentience. I think it is at least possible. But it certainly could be dark inside the sphex brain, and purely a matter of robotic hard wired behaviors. But here’s the thing: I think it would take pretty sophisticated programming to be able to exactly mimic even the digger wasp’s behavior.
I don’t think that the need to restart their nest activity from the beginning necessarily implies they have no sentience. In memorizing a piece for the piano, at first it is much easier to play from the beginning than to start from an arbitrary part of the music. This goes away with practice.
So They may just have very few neuronal connections to the memory of the procedure. Certainly they don’t “think” about what they are doing, but they could have some very dim sensation of being a moving sensing hunting eating copulating thing.
When it comes to love and addiction humans can be pretty sphexish too. I quit smoking at least 50 times before it finally took hold. And just look at the House Republicans voting to repeal Obamacare 34 times! 🙂
Life is so wonderful that it simply deserves to be regarded with awe and respect, regardless of whether there is suffering or not. There is no reason the golden rule can’t be extended to tiny critters, even though they may not understand or be able to reciprocate.
Even spiders display avoidance behaviors that look for all the world like they don’t want to be eaten. I don’t see any reason to gratuitously thwart nature’s designs when not absolutely needed for human thriving.
Of course the ants that occasionally invade my home don’t seem very open to persuasion. I suppose one needs to draw the line somewhere. But there is no harm in treating a harmless beetle harmlessly.
I’m suddenly reminded of one of my favorite parts in “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”, when he became fascinated by the ants invading his dorm room, and improvised a way using index cards or something to investigate how they navigate. I think a fascination for nature automatically gives one an aversion to destruction.
I do wonder if some far future ethics will require us to transform the earth into our ethical likeness… to make of it the herbivorous Eden-like park of our imagination. This sounds less crazy when you’re talking to an eight year old daughter who wonders aloud why we take our cat to the vet, and rid it of fleas and ticks, but not the deer that live all around us and obviously suffer from these things too. Of course, resources, lack of understanding of the implications, and the need to pick winners, immediately suggest themselves as barriers to her vision. When I hear my young daughter imagine a world without predation or parasites, though, it sounds like a worthy, if quixotic, goal.
“Life is so wonderful that it simply deserves to be regarded with awe and respect…”
Hear, hear.
But I often wonder, do I have any reason to believe that these devices are more sentient than my computer, just because they are animate?
I very much doubt it.
Factory farming is awful, but I don’t think squishing an inconvenient bug is morally troubling at all.
The trinity of compassion even holds true for entomology: Indolence, impotence, and incompetence.
Wait…what?
Two people walking along a beach where turtles are hatching & racing to the sea. One rescues a stuck turtle, the other says “that makes no real difference” and the other replies “well, it did for that one!”
I try to apply that idea. (CC forgive me if I heard that in a ch….)
The biggest con of religion is that it owns all good or pleasing ideas. I’ve heard this same story, in a church, applied to starfish on the beach. It’s a pleasing story, and I think we could do worse than to try to expand, rather than contract, our circle of empathy in this way.
…except starfish are in many environments dirty, rotten, overpopulated, coral-destroying buggers. I’d save them poor polyps myself. What to save… what not to… hmmmm…
Some starfish in some environments, you mean; places into which they were introduced, and where they do not belong.
I don’t think that was what was meant. Starfish populations can go bananas and become destructive in their native habitat due to environmental damage. Sea urchins also can wipe out everything else when (if I remember correctly) phosphates from agricultural on land disrupts normal water chemistry.
Well, a lot of spp have the potential to run amok under certain conditions, including starfish prey, when starfish are removed. The coral-eating star-of-thorns is certainly a disaster, but remove mollusc-eating Pisaster ochraceus from the NE Pacific coast and, well, everyone remembers that one!
I just don’t think we can make sweeping statements about echinoderms… 😀 (Or I could have just said, “I agree with 3cheers…”)
We all might want to visit coral reefs, though, while we still can… 🙁
It looks as though I was wrong. Acanthaster planci seems to be the only starfish agent of significant damage to coral reefs, but the reasons for their ‘overpopulation’ are not well understood; some researchers suspect that normal fluctuations are at play, and that concern about the apparent destruction of reefs may be misplaced. However, there appears to be a growing body of evidence correlating post-drought heavy rainfall nutrient runoff triggering phytoplankton blooms with increased populations of the crown of thorns, and skepticism about altered starfish predator populations being a significant factor.
Funny that those on the right would have left the beetle while those on the left would right the beetle.
Maybe it would have been clearer if it had said: “ … onto its feet.”