Godforsaken: Bad Things Happen. Is There a God Who Cares? Yes. Here's Proof. by Dinesh D'Souza

Author:Dinesh D'Souza [D'Souza, Dinesh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Religion
ISBN: 9781414324852
Amazon: 1610450558
Barnesnoble: 1610450558
Goodreads: 18883178
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers
Published: 2012-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

The Caterpillar’s Plight

But how high is this tariff that nature imposes on life? The philosopher René Descartes confronted the challenge that the magnitude of animal suffering in the world shows God to be cruel and merciless. Descartes offered an audacious reply on behalf of God. Animals, he said, don’t hurt at all. According to Descartes, animals are different from people. Animals are a kind of machine; they are, you might say, an organic version of the car or the lawnmower. Now, if you crash a car or kick a lawnmower, it might make an unpleasant sound, but this is not because it feels pain. The sound just means the machine is broken or malfunctioning. So it is, Descartes implies, when an animal shrieks. We think that’s a cry of pain, but actually it’s just a case of machine malfunction.139 Most people today, myself included, find this argument pretty appalling. It is the kind of argument that gives theodicy a bad name.

Yet if Descartes was wrong, what can we say about how much animals suffer and feel pain? Today we know a lot more about biology than Descartes did. And we can say that complex mammals like us feel pain the most. Some creatures, a little lower down on the complexity scale, feel pain a little. And many living creatures—perhaps most of them—suffer not at all. How can they? They aren’t even conscious, nor do they have a nervous system. The paradox is that the more complex the organism—the more highly developed its consciousness—the more it suffers: that is to say, pain increases up the evolutionary scale.

Consider the humble caterpillar. Richard Dawkins is very concerned about caterpillars. He writes that “if Nature were kind, she would at least make the minor concession of anesthetizing caterpillars before they are eaten alive from within.”140 Dawkins must have been in a careless mood when he wrote this, because as a biologist he should know what his colleagues, who specialize in insects, have written about the subject. The topic is explored in an important review article, “Do Insects Feel Pain?” The authors note that insects do have a nervous system, but it’s different from the one that humans have and lacks the nociceptors—the pain receptors—that enable humans to feel pain. True, insects could have alternative mechanisms for experiencing pain, but then they show none of the symptoms that we would expect if they do.

For instance, the authors of the article point out, if you severely injure an insect or rip out its body parts, “our experience has been that insects will continue with normal activities.” The authors point to the example of a “locust which continued to feed whilst itself being eaten by a mantis; aphids continuing to feed whilst being eaten by coccinellids; a tsetse fly which flew in to feed although half-dissected; caterpillars which continue to feed whilst tachinid larvae bore into them . . . and male mantids which continue to mate as they are eaten by their partners.” Bottom line: “On balance, .

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