🚀 go-pugleaf

> >
> > >>>A Transcendent Intelligence responsible for sickle cell anemia and other
> > genetic diseases doesn't seem very benevolent. But I asked for your
> > evidence. You offered none.<<<
> >
> > Oh please. You know as well as I do that genetic mutations carry with them
> > the potential to develop superior adaptive responses.
>
> Why, the sickling gene does confer a heterozygote advantage in malarial
> conditions;
> that is why it is retained in the population, despite the fact that it is
> usually lethal in
> the homozygous state. This makes perfect sense in terms of natural selection.
> But it makes no sense at all in terms of intelligent Design by a beneficent
> Transcendental
> engineer.
>
> Unless he is constrained to work by natural processes, that is. In which case,
> * he*
> dies by Occam's Razor.

What we are talking about here is known as the problem of evil, a famous unsolved
problem for
theists.  In a nutshell, the problem is that an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent
deity is incompatible
with the existence of evil. [Since he is omniscient, he knows when there is evil.
Since he is benevolent,
he doesn't want the evil, since he is omnipotent, he can stop it. Yet there it
is.]

Two "solutions" are usually offered. One is that we have free will, and God won't
stop us from doing
evil because that would be interference with our free will.

This is why I picked sickle cell anemia. It's not easy to see how any human bears
the responsibility
for this sort of suffering, or how it could have been avoided if we had behaved
better.

The other "solution", due to Leibnitz , is that if you look at the evil from a
sufficiently cosmic
perspective, it isn't really evil. it's really good. Leibnitz even thought  it
would turn always to be
the best thing that was possible, but that part of his idea isn't essential to
this "solution".

Voltaire mocked this "solution" famously in Candide, where Leibnitz appears as Dr.
Pangloss. As a
result, this is known as Panglossianism. Starbuck appears to be offering us some
form of  Panglossianism.

In the Panglossian solution, whatever happens in nature is "good" even if it makes
us suffer. This is a
peculiar notion of "benevolence", not at all what people usually mean by the word.
If "benevolence"
includes letting a child die of a disease, or programming humans genetically in
ways that make it easy
to stir them up into wars and atrocities against each other, then, if such
"benevolence" were a deliberate
act by a human, we would regard it as monstrous.

Of course these things aren't deliberate acts by a human or a god. They are
manifestations of a blind
process -- natural selection. Since Darwin, we don't need "Transcendental
Intelligence" (i.e. God)
to explain such things. The real solution to the problem of evil turns out to be
that nobody willed this
stuff, it just happens --  ultimately because it can.

Here is another problem that theists have never solved: if nature was made by an
intelligent
Designer,  what made the Designer?

If the answer is that nobody made the Designer , or he made himself,  then why
can't nobody
have made nature, or nature made itself?

A non judeo-christian answer might be that a bigger Designer made the Designer,
and there
is an infinite stack of ever smarter Designers that goes all the way up,  each one
requiring a
bigger one to explain it. [A sort of converse of the infinite stack of tortoises
holding up the Earth.]

Natural selection is the only theory known that can explain how complex order
arises in nature
from a simpler starting point.  It breaks out of the infinite regression of ever
more complex
orders needed to explain the base order -- an infinite regression that  logically
results from
Paley's argument.

But most western theists use a different "solution" when you ask them about who
made God.
As Bertrand Russell pointed our, their anwers typically come down to "let's talk
about something
else." :-)

--
Alan McGowen