I want to live in a world where my loves ones don’t die.
Wouldn’t we all? But what would that mean? A static world populated by immortal beings who don’t reproduce? Because if no one could die, yet people multiplied anyway, what would happen?
We might deplete the world of resources, pack it shore to shore so tightly that the lucky ones get to climb around on top of the massive continental dogpile. But since we can’t die, we would just be stuck like that.
It would be a failure of entropy. And we might view entropy as a bad thing, but if we take an honest look at it we’ll see that it’s necessary for life. It’s not merely some cliché to say that without death there can be no life. It’s part of the natural harmony, balance, and equilibrium of the universe itself.
After all, what is cancer but a failure of entropy? Sure, it might start as a mutation of a cell. But that cell begins to reproduce, and the tissue begins to grow. If the body doesn’t succeed in breaking it down and removing it faster than it grows, then it only gets bigger, until it starts to kill everything around it, eventually compromising the whole system, leading to death.
If there were no entropy, there could be no life. Your body is constantly breaking itself down and renewing itself. The only way to eliminate death would be to eliminate entropy, but by eliminating entropy you would also eliminate life.
Of course it’s cruel and unfair that innocent children get sick and die. There’s no way around that and I’m not going to try to explain it away with some callous religious tautologies. So maybe that’s the difference between me and a theist.
It’s not “the mysterious work of a god whom we can’t understand.” It’s just nature in its brutal, unfeeling aspect: red in tooth and claw. It’s Murphy’s Law applied to the uncompromising mechanisms which make life possible to begin with. The cold, unnegotiable cost of living in a world where the grass is green and the birds sing, where flowers bloom and the wind carries puffy clouds across the sky after a heavy rain. You didn’t choose to pay it; neither did they, yet there it is. Life never came with a guarantee.
And I’ll reiterate once more that my intention here is not to make a theistic claim, but to pick apart the underlying assumptions we make when we say things like “Wouldn’t it be better to live in a world without pain, illness, or death?” And it just so happens that “the problem of evil” was the perfect container for this analysis.
So if you found it thought-provoking, I’m glad. That is the sum of all I could ask to get out of writing this.
Wouldn’t we all? But what would that mean? A static world populated by immortal beings who don’t reproduce? Because if no one could die, yet people multiplied anyway, what would happen?
We might deplete the world of resources, pack it shore to shore so tightly that the lucky ones get to climb around on top of the massive continental dogpile. But since we can’t die, we would just be stuck like that.
It would be a failure of entropy. And we might view entropy as a bad thing, but if we take an honest look at it we’ll see that it’s necessary for life. It’s not merely some cliché to say that without death there can be no life. It’s part of the natural harmony, balance, and equilibrium of the universe itself.
After all, what is cancer but a failure of entropy? Sure, it might start as a mutation of a cell. But that cell begins to reproduce, and the tissue begins to grow. If the body doesn’t succeed in breaking it down and removing it faster than it grows, then it only gets bigger, until it starts to kill everything around it, eventually compromising the whole system, leading to death.
If there were no entropy, there could be no life. Your body is constantly breaking itself down and renewing itself. The only way to eliminate death would be to eliminate entropy, but by eliminating entropy you would also eliminate life.
Of course it’s cruel and unfair that innocent children get sick and die. There’s no way around that and I’m not going to try to explain it away with some callous religious tautologies. So maybe that’s the difference between me and a theist.
It’s not “the mysterious work of a god whom we can’t understand.” It’s just nature in its brutal, unfeeling aspect: red in tooth and claw. It’s Murphy’s Law applied to the uncompromising mechanisms which make life possible to begin with. The cold, unnegotiable cost of living in a world where the grass is green and the birds sing, where flowers bloom and the wind carries puffy clouds across the sky after a heavy rain. You didn’t choose to pay it; neither did they, yet there it is. Life never came with a guarantee.
And I’ll reiterate once more that my intention here is not to make a theistic claim, but to pick apart the underlying assumptions we make when we say things like “Wouldn’t it be better to live in a world without pain, illness, or death?” And it just so happens that “the problem of evil” was the perfect container for this analysis.
So if you found it thought-provoking, I’m glad. That is the sum of all I could ask to get out of writing this.