Sunday, January 16, 2005

Does God suck?

I notice that the post-Tsunami argument about God's benevolence continues to drag on in the letters columns of the newspapers- perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the vanishingly small percentage of the population who will have read my post on the subject.

If you balk at subatomic particles that are moral agents, I have thought of an intermediate case. It is unsatisfactory as a general argument, because it does not apply to planet-killing events like giant asteroids and gamma-ray bursts, but will do nicely for common or garden variety natural disasters. Maybe, if our ancestors had made all the optimal moral choices on our way here, we would have handy Web-Slinger-style super senses that would let us know when disasters were coming and let us get out of the way...

(Perhaps the only thing in favour of this bit of special pleading is that it is better than the "God works in mysterious ways" cop-out...)

3 comments:

Marco Parigi said...

There's no such thing as gravity - the whole world sucks. Which would explain the sucking sound of the water:-)

Dave said...

So Doc, let me understand: it is essentially your assertion that the ills of the world can largely be tracked back to some protozoic ancestor getting a critical fumble on a Luck roll?

Hmm, yeah, actually, I *do* buy that slightly more than the Mysterious Ways Postulatate.

Dr Clam said...

According to my dimly channeled race memory it all started when a proterozoic ancestor decided to burn the dungeon map, pissing off the other players...