Logic Times

The Problem of Natural Evil, Part Two

Posted by Aslan, 06/24/05, 8:51pm. Comments (0)

While the humorous story in Part One obviously concerns itself with more than just the issue of natural evil, it begins to examine the consequences of demanding a system that compromises cause and effect. This must be explored in greater detail, and to do so, a real life example serves our purposes.

A 37 year old, healthy family man dies from a heart attack climbing the basement stairs - a classic (and recently real) example of natural evil. How could a benevolent Creator design such a system that unfairly doles out death in the prime of life? The Creator is omnipotent; surely it is not beyond His power to fashion a physical system that avoids tragedy and rampant unfairness.

Let us play the Creator. That 37-year-old man should not die at 37. How about 47? No, Aslan is 42, so 47 and 57 are out the question, too. How about 67? Seems pretty young, just two years retired and, since the Creator is doling out benevolence, 67 is out. Seventy-seven? Let's round it up to 80. We can expand our area of concern beyond just mid-life heart attacks to include early cancers, lightning strikes, snakebites, ALS and coconuts hitting unsuspecting tourists in the head. All these premature fatal events that are unrelated to issues of free will and moral evil - in fact, are just "defects" in the design of our natural system - are ruled out of order until age 80.

How then do we manage death beyond the age of 80? Do disease states rapidly begin on the 80th birthday and quickly wipe out all fledgling octogenarians? Do poisonous snakes and mosquitoes carrying the West Nile virus select only elderly targets? Do coconuts become environmentally aware, falling only after confirming that no youthful, daiquiri-toting honeymooners lie below?

Consider, too, the full range of disease and death by means and forces unrelated to man's will - it is vast indeed. All these lethal processes - some biological, some animal, some meteorological, some seismic, some clumsiness - need to be suspended until 80.

The purpose of the above stream-of-consciousness regarding micro-management of a physical system is that what appears to be the capricious horror of a malevolent Creator is, in reality, the essential by-product of a free physical system where entropy prevails.

A heart attack at age 37 exists because people deteriorate and die, and the rate of deterioration is as variable as snowflake patterns. Cancer exists because people deteriorate by many mechanisms, cellular abnormality being one of them, and to arrest deterioration is to arrest time.

But this is common sense. One might still argue that a Logan’s Run universe in some form or another would be superior to childhood leukemia and ALS. However, there is another compelling reason – a wholly spiritual reason - for the universe in which we live: Part Three - Uncertainty.

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