shadowofwind
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In appraising the overall picture, its reasonable to weight the experience of the higher animals more heavily than the lower ones, for the reason you mention: the lower ones aren't aware of as much. I think you diminish the awareness of animals like horses too much, to say that their suffering is mostly in our eyes. Yes our awareness is greater, but they are also closer to themselves than we are. Furthermore, when I look at the ways in which human awareness greatly exceeds those of other higher animals, it seems to me that those ways are peripheral even to most human suffering. Retarded people I've known who apparently can't reason or form word-thoughts about things clearly still have a human capacity to suffer. People nevertheless have treated them pretty much like they treat animals, and for mostly the same reason. It diminishes them falsely to suppose that our own projections about their pain are more significant than their direct experiences.
Whether other animals suffer or not doesn't actually impact my argument much though. Humans suffer. And if you look at how and why they suffer, they're not suffering because their behavior is departing from the natural order. They're suffering because their behavior is consistent with and deeply rooted in the rest of the natural order. And people are not so much their own makers that they can just snap their fingers and instantly free themselves from the results of a billion years of natural selection, irrespective of what they may say to themselves about that.
I think you make half of a good argument - our perceptions of things vary tremendously depending on our own assumptions and depth of understanding. Its only half of an argument though, because we are not entirely passive observers of life. Having truer perceptions lead us to objectively change things that we have power over, not merely to witness them differently. The forms in nature, limited as our perceptions of them may be, are also appropriate for a particular quality of moral inclination. If the witness/creator ultimately responsible for for those forms had a different moral quality, or if those for whom the forms were intended had a different moral quality, the forms would be different also.
Perceptions of brutality are not formed entirely from outside the system, we are part of the system, and the system is part of the reason we form those perceptions. When I say an experience is brutal, I'm describing something of how we experience it, I'm not commenting on whether its a good thing or a bad thing in the ultimate scheme of things. Generally I wouldn't say an event or condition is cruel, because I don't assume there to be an agent behind the event that is causing it for the sake of enjoying someone's suffering. I would however call a hypothetical God is cruel if there is another way for life to develop that is from the standpoint of our experience less brutal. I do not know if there is another way. However, having seriously asked the question, enough mental doors have opened for me to at least know there's much more to be understood in that direction.
'Cruel' goes away as soon as you assume an absence of maliciousness on the part of an intelligence which is capable of altering the process. 'Kind' would require that said intelligence use a less brutal means if another way works as well in other respects. Likewise with benevolence. So you have at this point either discarded the benevolence hypothesis, or you have chosen the other alternative, which is that a more benevolent alternative is not available. If you're taking a third branch I'm not seeing it.
Your statement that the copying errors are 'inevitable' is true for any world with a physics like ours. One could also assume that such copying errors are also present in all worlds with any possible physics. I wouldn't extrapolate that far from just one data point, even if I only had one data point. But I think we've actually got a little better than one data point, so to speak, even if we don't quite have two. I'll try to explain what I mean by that below.
In your description of evolution you also leave implicit the fact that the copying errors are pruned by natural selection. You say that the variation facilitates 'surviving', but of course there are also all the variations that don't facilitate surviving, but rather that cause 'dying'. And the reason they cause dying, is the copying errors themselves are by some statistical measure 'random'. For the most part they are not tuned for what the animals, individually or as a group, actually need to survive the current changes in their environment. (Yes I know there are biological mechanisms that affect the type and frequency of mutation, but that fact remains that an awfully large number of the mutations do not produce viable individuals.)
It would be a much more efficient process, and much less brutal, if types of mutations that have already proved unworkable were not repeated again. If a benevolent God presided over the process, and had even the faintest shadow of omniscience, then the distribution of mutations would not be random. Or else there must be some other reason they must be random. I'm pretty sure there is actually another reason, but its not that the mutations have to be random in principle.
Science, as most scientists currently conceive of it, is a process of gaining understanding by performing measurements on things that behave in a predictable manner. To the extent that there is anything is unpredictable, that element of uncertainly at least has to at least follow a predictable distribution. If any physical phenomena does not meet those criteria, it is not studied. Or at least its not studied successfully, and good luck getting your work published in a peer reviewed journal if the model you're proposing includes any other kind of unpredictability. How reasonable is it reasonable to assume that nature contains no other phenomena or processes besides these types which are relatively easy to model? I guess its reasonable if your model successfully accounts for everything, with nothing left out. But actually an awful lot is left out, even though a great deal of what is left out is declared to be unreal by people who regard things as real only if they are subject to these types of models.
This is what I mean that we have more than one data point, if not quite two. If a person pays enough attention, they may find that supposedly random events, possibly including copying errors, are not in fact entirely random. The non-randomness may not be controllable enough that an experiment can be described by which anyone with the proper instrumentation can repeat it in their lab. But it can be non-random enough that a person can find it out by objective observation, not merely as a matter of faith, fallacy, or wishful thinking. Or if they don't find it then so be it, but a necessary if not sufficient prerequisite is at least opening oneself to the possibility. And one implication of that possibility is a method of natural selection which is more effective than try-everything-and-see-what-survives. Even the worst of engineers have more tools in their design toolbox than so-called genetic algorithms, as effective as those may be within certain contexts. Maybe its possible that a 'supreme intelligence' can do better than that also.
Yes, it will occur with or without your approval, but evolution by random mutation and natural selection tends to require that you do not approve of it, at least not until you've succeeded in helping your genes propagate to the next generation. If you remove the element of suffering by managing to choose not to perceive the potential failure your line as unpleasant, then your line ceases to exist because you have broken a part of the feedback that keeps it going. Or, you can find another vision that keeps it going besides avoidance of suffering. But that's what we're talking about. Humanity, and the rest of nature that it is descended from, depends heavily on both aggression and fear. As you reach for something beyond that, eventually the effort brings you back around to re-evaluating evolution. The effort eventually leads back to that because your perceptions are tied to what you are, which has roots in where you came from. You can't abstract your perceptions entirely as if you have no biological basis.
I wouldn't say that its all about that at all. There's considerable beauty in evolution, more beauty than ugliness. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but in this case the beholder is contained within the ugliness also.
I did not say that Catholics assert that truths can contradict each other. My point was that they have not shown how their concept of original sin can be reconciled with what is known about natural history. There's nothing at all wrong with saying 'I see that A and B are both true, and believe they are ultimately compatible, even though they appear contradictory from my current standpoint and I do not understand how that apparent contradiction can be resolved'. Maybe the contradiction is apparent to individual Catholics, maybe its not. But in any case the problem is apparent to a lot of other people.
I think that there's a version of 'B' here that isn't quite what you're considering. Generally people who believe in a benevolent God already believe that turning one's mind away from God tends to lead to suffering. Perceiving wrong in natural selection doesn't require denying the goodness of God, it requires a reassessment of who is responsible for what, and how deep the effects of that go. There's an element of 'A' in this also, not in the sense that I'm suggesting that what is commonly agreed upon as objective reality isn't real, but that its only a sliver of a greater reality.
If I understand your argument, you chose the other alternative mentioned earlier, which is to assume that evolution by random mutation and natural selection, as we perceive it, is without qualification a good way for life to develop. Here 'good' is as determined by the benevolence of God.
I realize the particular dichotomies I'm stating are a bit arbitrary, sort of like picking a basis for a vector space. Other ways of thinking about this are as valid, but then they can still be related to the way that I chose, even if only in the sense of explaining where they extend beyond it.
I understand the virtue of seeing beauty where there is beauty. But a price of looking only for the goodness of our natural order, without seeing the wrong, is that it degrades one's vision of good. It makes a person, for example, focus on the beauty of diverse alleles, which is certainly beautiful, while glossing over the pain of a mother who can't produce enough milk for her baby. That mother is a part of the picture also, she is a part of evolution by natural selection.
