Nice Try, Glenn: God's creation of carnivores makes him bi-polar, at least

I've decided to do a series of blog responses to Glenn M. Miller, a Christian apologist who, IMO, has far more justification to believe his Christianity than probably any 1000 Christians combined.  His website is here.

Miller's comments are often appealed to by lesser apologists in their effort to show that the Christian or biblical viewpoint on a matter is reasonable and the atheist or skeptical perspective is irrational.

The purpose of the series (all articles will begin with "Nice try, Glenn..." is to demonstrate that even the more "scholarly" apologists fail to demonstrate the unreasonableness or irrationality of atheist bible critics.  Our basic problems with the bible-god and miracles continue standing as more than sufficient rational warrants for rejecting theism in general and Christianity in particular.

In this first article, I respond to Miller's article wherein he tries to reconcile the sadistic suffering inflicted by carnivores, with the idea that the god who created them is somehow still "loving" to create such beasts.

This is my reply to an article by Glenn Miller entitled

Good question...

...does the savagery of predation in nature show that God either isn't, or at least isn't good-hearted?

 [original piece: July 6, 1999  updated: July 18/1999]

 Introduction and Table of Contents

The biotic food-chain of the natural world, with its savage predation and suffering is often given as evidence against the God of the bible.

Perhaps only by lesser informed skeptics.  The truly smart skeptics, like me, recognize that how cruel somebody is, doesn't help inform questions of whether they exist.  However, because the bible teaches both an apathetically cruel deity AND a compassionate loving deity, we are reasonable to insist that if the bible-god exists, he is, without a doubt, bi-polar.  He can immediately turn from being compassionate to being heartlessly sadistic very quickly, and for reasons that cause even today's Christians a certain bit of unease.

The problem Miller doesn't deal with is that skeptics who bemoan the divine atrocities of the bible are indeed legitimately refuting the idiot-fundie notion that God "cares" about living things.  That might not be enough to justify saying such god doesn't exist, but the contention that this god is bi-polar is well founded.

For now, point by point analysis of these types of articles witten by "apologists" is hardly "necessary" for the atheist to be "reasonable" in their rejection of the bible and theism, as there are very powerful atheist arguments that aren't disturbed by trifles about whether god can be loving to create carnivores:

1 - God is an incoherent concept.
2 - Some gospel data, which has better claim to historical truth than most other data, justify saying Jesus died and never came back to life.
3 - Bible inerrancy is false doctrine, thus, I do not use it as a hermeneutic.  I will not give up a contextually and grammatically justified interpretation of a bible verse merely beause it would contradict reality or some other part of the bible.
4 - There are powerful biblical arguements against classical theism, hence, Miller's controlling presupposition (i.e., forever looking for just anything anywhere that might possibly protect bible inerrancy from falsification) is not anything remotely obligatory on the skeptic.
5 - Contrary to popular opinion, reasonableness isn't dependent upon actual accuracy.  Therefore, even if somebody finds Miller's trifles more convincing than my rebuttals, that hardly demonstrates that I'm "unreasonable".   Which then means the atheist can still be reasonable, within normative definitions of the word, to reject theism and Christianity.

I'm fair and consistent in this too:  I believe Christianity is "false", but I don't say the vast majority of Christians are "unreasonable", because reasonableness doesn't necessarily hinge upon accuracy.  I usually reserve the accusation of unreasonableness for special cases where certain Christians act in shocking defiance of common sense.  For example, James Patrick Holding is unreasonable, with his intentionally committing the sins of slander and gossip for more than 20 years, as abundantly documented at this blog. 

So this precise question of whether god is evil for creating carnivores, might be fun to toss around on a boring rainy day, but is ultimately about as relevant as whether somebody's interpretation of a passage in the Book of Mormon was "correct".  It isn't like a person's giving the "incorrect" answer to such a question puts them in any danger.  The vast bulk of Miller's arguments in his numerous articles are, like the bast bulk of all apologetics arguments produced by Christians, nothing more than trifles, or what court judges refer to as "purely academic" questions (i.e., questions whose correct resolution changes precisely nothing in the real world).

Miller continues:

Let me start the analysis of this by citing some different wordings/aspects of this problem (not all with theological conclusions in them):

    First, a juicy one from John Stuart Mill:

"If there are any marks of all special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals" (J.S. Mill, 1874).

And as we'll see, since the old-earth creationists have more biblical justification than young-earth creationism, that ends up requiring that God positively willed from eternity that some animals inflict horrific suffering on others.  The popular fundie Christian notion that the molars of the vegetarian tigers in the Garden of Eden suddenly morphed into fangs after sin entered the world, and degraded their brain cells sufficiently so that they started seeing other animals as food, is not biblical.  Hence, carnivores did not start existing after sin entered the world, the bible teaches they existed by God's positive decree from the beginning.

Hence, causing this god to be reasonably categorized as on the level of a 4 year old toddler who like to inflict cruelty on small animals.  If God is omnipotent, he could have achieved the goal the carnivores ostensibly fulfill, in other ways.  Just like if you are short of rent money, you can probably come up with the money in ways other than by robbing a bank.

    Then, a quote from a popular book on predation:

"Most animals are either eaten or eat other animals. Plants, too, are often consumed by animals. Consequently the chances of being devoured, or of eating some other organism in order to survive, are exceedingly high." [NS:PAP:3]

    Then, a quote from a deep-thinking, good-hearted seeker friend of mine:

"Let's face it: our life cannot exist without the *agonising* death of another breathing, feeling entity. The second law of thermodynamics is just another one, *demonstrating* (as the theories of self-organising energy fail to do) that deterioration is inherent in this universe.

"Charles Darwin wrote about the Ichneumon spider and the nightmarish sort of manner in which its very existence depends on the impregnation of its paralysed victims with its eggs so the hatchlings can have fresh, *live* meat when they hatch (kinda like the Aliens movie). Dawkins, Pinker, and pretty much the ridiculously vast majority of the scientific community keep offering demonstrable evidence of how God cannot fit in a universe where an ichneumon may be so "designed."

And if the source-book for this deity sometimes says he has compassion and other times expresses his sadism toward others, we are perfectly reasonable to say such contradictory properties mean this particular type of god doesn't exist, or is at least bi-polar.

    Lastly, a heartfelt question from a Christian:

"I think some people, Christians or not, will think this question is a little on the soft side. Never the less, in my attempt to reconcile myself to the concept of a merciful loving God in the face of tragedy and pain, I am left with some very unanswered questions. So, here goes

"How should we deal with animal suffering? Not just the idea of, for example, willful human torture of an animal. I am thinking of the whole animal kingdom suffering. Perhaps it is ruefully ironic that only a conscious mind could truly appreciate the suffering of an animal. I pray that animals are not conscious of their pain. They certainly respond to what looks like pain. Am I empathizing with the animal's pain because part of my fallen nature is in a way, animal?

"In the past I tried to take a very mechanistic approach. Animals were beautifully created machines. A pain impulse would simply go to the brain as any other external signal. The brain would route the signal to provide the appropriate response, etc.

"I cannot make myself believe this. I have a dog now, which has changed things. I do not have children, but I imagine the experience would further change my views. I feel a horror for the future death of my dog.

Nature is often called "red in tooth and claw" and the quotes above point out the emotional difficulty this creates for humans. We seen the vivid cases of a lion biting the neck of a Thompson gazelle, or the Ichneumon spider example given above (which is technically incorrect--the Ichneumon is an insect order of wasps, not spiders), or the diagrams of big-bigger-biggest fish eating one another in a food chain lesson. We see chimpanzees (often portrayed as emotionally deep) tear the arm out of its socket of a captured bonobo money (and then eat it with the bonobo screaming there) [PH:GN:84]. We see killer whales, playing with their seal pup food, throwing it back and forth like a beach ball (while the terrified pup is still alive) [NS:DNNHE:xii]. We know that foxes will chase and capture the same shrew, just to let it go and repeat the process [CS:AM:60], and we use the 'cat playing with the mouse' image as a metaphor.

And we also know how tight of a grip bible inerrancy can have on the mind of its devoted disciples.

The quotes above intimate that this situation is radically inconsistent with the existence of the Christian God.

Not really, the "Christian" god as defined in the bible is bi-polar.  But the "Christian" god believed in by most Christians today is little more than a compassionate Santa.  I'm more interested in showing the problems with the biblical data.  The question of why most Christians have a higher moral view of God than the bible teaches, is not very important to me.

There are many, many issues involved in this question, so let me begin by listing some of these:

    Question One: To what extent is the existing predatory situation created by God, and to what extent does God 'endorse' it now? (In other words, has it always been like this, or to what extent is this the result of the Fall or of the Flood?)

    This question will require some basic study of what the biblical data is, and what range of options might exist for how we 'fit' predation into our view of creation, providence, etc. So the data for this will be primarily biblical.

 Jesus made clear that God is the one who feeds the birds:

 26 "Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? (Matt. 6:26 NAU)

So when we see a hawk, which is a "bird of the air",  sadistically tormenting a cuckoo bird that is still alive in the effort to eat (video here, warning: graphic, not intended for children), Jesus thinks this is what the "heavenly father" intended.

    Question Two: How extensive is 'painful predation'? (In other words, DO all things REALLY live only at the expense of agonizing death by those lower on the food chain?)

 Dismissed.  No, obviously, not all food is acquired by lesser animals in a brutal fashion.

    This question will be answered by biological data. We will need to survey the food chain, and ask questions of scope of predation (as opposed to the other possible ecosystem relationships, such as parasitism or commensalism) as well as to what extent each of the creatures involved in a prey-predator relationship actually "feel agony" in a meaningful sense.

No, if your god is omnipotent, he could have created life forms that don't need to inflict misery on others.  he could cause grass to grow by creative decree, cause all life forms to eat this grass, and there you go, no "need" for god to "sustain" the food chain in ways that make predatory behavior sound "necessary".

    Question Three: Where exactly in the act of predation is the theological/moral problem?

The general consensus of modern humanity, including most Christians, that "love" is not sufficiently broad as to be part of anything that displays a level of cruelty that appears arbitrary.  Therefore, the more the bible says god is "loving", the more the existence of carnivores refutes that doctrine.  That is, reality requires either that the bible is wrong and this contradictory loving/sadistic god doesn't exist for the same reason anything else with contradictory properties cannot exist, or, the bible errs in ascribing infinite love to this god.  Sure, we can always trifle that an infinite intelligence might have higher mysterious reasons, in conformity to "love", for allowing sadism in nature, but then again, the bible doesn't consistently support classical theism, the bible god often makes mistakes, and the "anthropomorphism" excuse to get away from these passages, are never grounded in their grammar, immediate context, larger context, cultural context, or genre.  

Is there a moral problem with carrion beetles that eat the dead carcass of an animal (who obviously doesn't feel any pain)?

No, because it is be the admission of most other Christians that infliction of unnecessary pain is the opposite of love. Your trifle that maybe god wished to create a greater good by wanting carnivores to inflict misery on other animals, is easy to dismiss:  under your own classical theism, your god was not required by circumstances to use that method to achieve this unproven higher mysterious good.  If your god could maintain humans with nothing more than manna for 40 years in the wilderness (Exodus 16:35, Numbers 11:4-7), he could also just as magically supply food to all life forms, so that life can sustain itself without there needing to be any food chain involving bacteria or carnivores.

To what extent is there a problem with a gazelle having to avoid a predator every day (or every week) for decades--does this somehow cause "painful stress" for the gazelle that is radically worse (and to the point of "cruel, immoral suffering") than that of having to make a living every day by humans?

To what extent is there a problem with YOU having to avoid a predator every day?  Would you say there was a "problem" if every day you went outside your house, you couldn't stay alive unless you ran faster than the other humans chasing you with intent to kill you?   Live like that for a while, and I'm not so sure you'd continue thinking as highly about god as you currently do.

Is it in the "destructive" experience of the prey (perhaps painful)

What do you mean "perhaps"?  Gee, when the gazelle is screaming as it is being eaten alive, maybe we'd have to debate whether the gazelle was experiencing pain?

as it is being killed by the predator, implying that prey animals that feel no pain (such as zooplankton) as they are eaten are not "included" in this problem?

I'm not seeing the angle, Miller:  gazelles obviously do feel pain, and as an creationist, you are forced to credit their innate desire to avoid the predator to god, who surely is the only reasonable explanation for the gazelle's "intelligence"...right?

Is it in the fact that something dies at the mouth of another, instead of living forever, or only dying "of old age, in its sleep." Does dying of starvation (because some other animal group ate all the grass) count as predation?

 No, but I notice that you are avoiding the real issue by pretending you need to devote time to other questions that allow you to walk away from the problem at hand:  carnivores inflict sadistic misery on other animals, a reality inconsistent with any rational definition of "love".

Does dying of disease (because some very small life-forms attacked it) count?

Irrelevant.

    This, strangely enough, is a philosophical and theological question. How would we decide that it was wrong for a cockroach to die (instead of live forever)?

You'd stay more on track if you confined you analysis to the sadism in the animal world that you yourself mentioned earlier in this article (stuff like "We see chimpanzees (often portrayed as emotionally deep) tear the arm out of its socket of a captured bonobo money (and then eat it with the bonobo screaming there)"

You start losing the debate the more the life forms approach the level of human and are still subject to carnivores.

How would we decide that it was wrong for a cockroach to die suddenly by ingestion by a bird (instead of suddenly by an end-of-life(?) failure of some internal biological function, such as the heart)?

Easy: unless you simply play with words as expediency dictates, birds eating cockroaches "alive" doesn't sound very "loving", even granting that the cockroach is a mere insect with far less self-awareness or pain-receptors than humans have.  So the more you credit such unloving circle of life to your god, the more justified we are to say he is either unloving, or his ideas of love are completely opposite to most of his own people understand "love" to be.  Do I eat hamburger?  yes.  Does that mean I think I can reconcile cattle-slaughter with "love"?  No.  I happily admit not everything about me is "loving".  Your god doesn't have that excuse, unless you become an open-theist.

How would we decide that the suffering of a zebra for 3-5 minutes at the fangs of a cheetah morally "outweighed" the previous 20 years of growing, reproducing, not being eaten or mauled by a predator (being mauling by a predator generally reduced mobility and results in capture quickly thereafter), and community life for some 20+ years?

Easy, under your own creationism, you are forced to blame god solely for the zebra's desire to struggle against the cheetah and attempt escape.  Why does your god want the zebra to struggle against the cheetah, if your god intended for the cheetah to get food that way?

What, is your god like a child with toy soldiers, deliberately setting up circumstances intended to cause life forms to clash and inflict misery on each other?       

Is it "wrong" for my white blood cells to attack and devour bacteria that is harmful to me?

Only if you think the killed bacteria were able to experience as much pain and conscious suffering as the zebra does in the mouth of a cheetah.

    About all we can do with this question is expose the value assumptions that are inherent in the question, and how they are being "used" by the objection.

Then you didn't do a very good job of it.  bonobos that scream while their arms are ripped off by chimpanzees obviously reveal a far bigger contradiction between god's "love" and nature, than what you might find when bacteria are killed by white blood cells.

And once again, there would be no "need" for your god to create such a sadistically interdependent food chain, if the bible is correct in saying he could create ex nihilo and feed humans for 40 years solely on manna.  Under those assumptions, God's choice to feed carnivores by giving them the instinct to hurt other animals is about as arbitrary as the child who throws 15 different insects into a small jar just to watch them tear each other apart.  You don't want to say your god takes pleasure in sadistic shows, but that's your problem.  When you are capable of earning money to pay the rent, but you instead choose to solve the rent problem by robbing a bank, nobody really gives a shit as you testify in court about how your killing of the bank teller achieved the higher good of causing her immediate family to grow closer to Jesus.  Your higher mysterious goals do not transform an evil act into a good act.  Therefore, that also holds in the case of your god's actions in causing suffering.  It doesn't matter if he has higher mysterious reasons for doing this.  The fact that he could achieve his same goals without needing to employ such sadistic measures, shows him to be unloving by any reasonable definition.

I think this is the part where you suddenly discover how biblical open-theism is.

We might also be able to subject these assumptions to some more rigorous philosophical analysis, by examining implications of those assumptions.

Something you'd never do if you came home and found out Rover ate the cat.

    Question Four: How exactly would the predatory situation count as evidence against the Christian God, given the actual details of the food chain/web interrelationships?

Already explained that:  the more you identify the Christian god as the god of "classical theism" (i.e., your god is all-powerful, etc) the more your god could have caused life on earth to sustain itself by means other than carnivorous.  Sort of like if you have a decent education and could easily get a job to pay the bills, the jury will not listen very long as you try to explain how the larger good achieved when you murdered the bank teller (her family grieved and started going to church more) overrides the smaller good you'd have achieved by simply earning your own money.  Where you could have achieved your purpose without inflicting misery, your choice to inflict misery anyway reasonably demonstrates apathy and sadism.  Since the classical-theist god hardly "needed" to create carnivores merely for living things to stay alive, his choice to achieve that system by more sadistic means, demonstrates his apathy and sadism.

    Here we are in another philosophical arena--this is NOT a biological issue!-- and we will have to examine (1) the general evidentialist argument from evil, (2) how the biologists mentioned in the quotes (e.g., Dawkins) are using biological data in philosophical arguments to reach theological conclusions (and how trustworthy such an approach might be); and (3) what alternative scenarios for biodiversity (e.g., all creatures use photosynthesis instead of biomass consumption, all carnivores are scavengers) might be feasible and/or "more moral".

How moral was God's limiting people to eating manna for 40 years?  How moral was it for god to cause grass to grow without the aid of carnivores? How moral was it for god to limit the diet of cattle to grass?

And you wish to pretend that god "needed" carnivores"?  Sure, maybe like a kidnapper "needs" victims.

    Question Five: Are there elements in the existing predatory and/or larger ecological situation that might support the Christian claim that "God is good to all He has made"?

Only if you could, in good conscience, say "God is good to all He had made" to the bonobo while its arms are being ripped off by the chimpanzee.  And yes, I'm thinking bible inerrancy has its grip on your mind that tightly.  

Bible inerrancy caused Hank Hanegraaff (Bible Answerman of CRI) to foolishly argue in the 90's that conscious eternal torment in basically literal hell fire is "loving" of god, so there really aren't any meaningful controls here on the depths to which you are capable of sinking, where you feel doing so will rescue bible inerrancy.  Never mind that Hank eventually found fundie-evangelicalism to be bullshit and joined the Greek Orthodox church.  We have to wonder whether the passing of time will also similarly alert him to the unbiblical and sadistic nature of fire-torture.

    Here we are in another philosophical arena. Can the data of predation as it exists today be interpreted in such a way as to support the proposition that "God arranges matters such as to minimize pain in the life of non-human creatures, in the context of His overall purposes and designs?" (or similar propositions).

No.  As explained previously, the fact that God limited Israel to manna for 40 years proves that he not only can, but sometimes even does, think just magically creating food out of thin air is a legitimate way to solve the food problem, in which case he could have caused all creatures to be limited to eating such ex nihilo food, and we wouldn't be having this debate today.

Or, God have been satisfied with limiting life forms to the immaterial realm, mooting their need to eat, which means all the misery inherent in the physical food chain is avoided.

 You admit in one of your pushbacks:

Without trying to decide this issue here, let me simply point out that Dr. Ross' argument only actually applies to consumption of meat, not to the killing of it. In other words, all carnivores could have been scavengers and only eaten meat dead of 'natural causes'--predation itself is not required to solve the 'energy problem' for active creatures.

 Precisely.  God could have made any life system he wished, including one that involved no carnivore activity. Once again, if you could have solved the rent problem by getting a job, but no, you instead chose to solve it by robbing a bank and killing one of the tellers, nobody will listen to you as you insist that the greater good of the teller's family growing closer to Jesus through their grief, outweighed your evil in murdering her.

Us atheists don't listen to such excuses, even when they are applied to "god".

We would have to conclude that a very basic (low-carnivory, low dietary restrictions, "CNS non-violent") food-chain was created by God, but that the eco-dynamics of the system were substantially modified at/after the Fall and the Flood. 

 That's irrelevant, life didn't suck after the Fall merely because of the Fall, as if the original sin automatically degraded nature.  Life sucked thereafter because God chose to curse the creation:

 14 The LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you will go, And dust you will eat All the days of your life;
 15 And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel."
 16 To the woman He said, "I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you."
 17 Then to Adam He said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat from it'; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life.
 18 "Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field;
 19 By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return."
 20 Now the man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all the living. (Gen. 3:14-20 NAU)

 Miller continues:

Nevertheless, the modifications allowed to be introduced were calculated, designed, and are regulated in order to preserve bio-diversity and life on the earth, and still achieve overall "more good than bad" in the system. 

 You've never shown that the current system produces more good than bad.  In fact your own bible characterizes the entire world as evil (1st John 5:19), and that the world does little more than give its creatures a reason to groan (Romans 8:22).

Thus the predator-prey relationships (broadly considered) that we see today will have more elements that are "positive" (e.g., defensive modifications, poisons that eliminate feeling/pain as they kill, underdeveloped nervous systems of the largest number of prey) than elements that are "negative" (e.g., violent death involving actual suffering for long periods of time in higher mammals). 

 And since god's merely producing manna by magic and limiting all life forms to eating this would completely eliminate any "need" for carnivores, your god's refusal to do it that way was arbitrary:  he created the carnivore system because he enjoys watching life forms endure horrific misery, not because he couldn't think of a better plan.  

We are also told that God is only 'tolerating' and 'regulating' this situation at the present,

 Implying everything that is implied when a parent doesn't endorse, but only "tolerates" and "regulates" the times in which the babysitter is allowed to sexually molest the child. Yet the more "holy" you pretend god is, the less likely such a fantastical being would "tolerate" or "regulate" anything unholy.  Sort of like the more homophobic the neighbor is, the less likely they would "tolerate" or "regulate" gay men acting gay within their own house.  It just goes without saying.

 and that His purpose in history of rich bio-diversity, in community balance, in loving affirmation, and in the harmony of peace and companionship will eventually be achieved. 

 The hope of the hopeless. 

And then the "lion will lay down with the lamb."

Not sure whether I'll bother to answer Miller's "pushback" commentary, since my arguments against his main points here are powerful and not disturbed by the pushbacks.  The observation that God can approve of a feeding system for life that involves no pain (i.e., creating manna ex nihilo), does a pretty powerful job of demonstrating the evil of a god who chooses to create a painful circle of life anyway.  Trifles about "god's ways are mysterious" are never accepted by Christians when such trifle is is used by 'heretics', so fairness dictates that Christians likewise be prohibited from hiding behind this excuse.