lt Must Be So

Richard Dawkins sounds his barbaric yawp:

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

I’ve noticed most people who make this argument are not the least bit inconvenienced by the suffering they describe. They are usually beneficiaries of it (is Dawkins a vegan so animals won’t die for his food? Does he refuse to wear leather? Is he concerned with economic injustice?). The universe is as it should be because that is what keeps Richard Dawkins comfortable.

I’m not advocating we all wear hair shirts over the sufferings of living beings, but I am saying Dawkins is making that argument. He would clothe us all in hair shirts and then say “But there’s nothing you can do about it, so tear them off!” Nature is red in tooth and claw and so should humanity be! Well, not to the extent it would inconvenience Richard Dawkins! That would be unreasonable! But trying to alleviate even a few if the sufferings of the world? Why, that’s unreasonable, too! Unless you are one of the ones suffering; then, sucks to be you!

After all, what else can the “pitiless indifference” of the universe teach us?

I happen to agree with Dawkins: the universe doesn’t give a wet snap for me. But it is neither pitiless nor indifferent: it simply is. It is the height of adolescence to imagine the universe is some kind of Uber-parent that is watching out for you. But saying that is not the same as saying things are as they ought to be, any more than being born in England in favorable circumstances means you deserve a more comfortable existence than people born in the former, and sill largely exploited, colonies of England deserve to suffer from the indifference of the English who 

made life comfortable for Dawkins. He has made that argument before, when trying to justify the gulf between Europe and non-European nations in standards of living and other accomplishments Europeans pat themselves in the back for. Can’t be helped, you see. Pitiless indifference of the universe, and all that.

Funny how that makes it so much easier to be pitiless and indifferent.

Now look at it another way. Yes, the universe doesn’t care about you; but what if it? What is the “universe “? Everything? Which is to say, to me personally, nothing. What is something to me? My family, my friends, my neighbors; fellow human beings. We can start there, and expand it as we wish.  But for now, “suffering humanity.” Should I be pitilessly indifferent? Mighty convenient for me, until I’m the one suffering. Does Dawkins want doctors and nurses caring for him in his old age just out of self-interest? Does he want to be treated with pitiless indifference when he is old and grey and full of sleep? Does he not expect other human beings to be a bit more than that?

If we only do what we think the universe would do, what credit is that to us? Are we not capable of more? And if we are, are we constrained by the concept of a pitiless, indifferent universe?

Why?

Dawkins’ point is to say there is no God and do no morality and so we shouldn’t expect kindness from strangers because that’s just the way it is, five cents please. And it’s all balderdash, this “argument.” It doesn’t even meet its own terms, because there aren’t any. It’s a young boy’s cleverness, or rather what he thinks is clever, tossed out to shock and offend but otherwise absolutely hollow and empty of reason. It’s posited purely to say: “See? Now there’s no room for God, and I’ve run rings round you logically.” But there is no logic at all, and he only runs rings 'round himself.  This is the shadow of a straw man which you have to believe in, and think others believe in, in order to begin to accept Dawkins’ argument. It is, in short, circular reasoning, where the inside tries to deny the existence of the outside by demarcating it with the line of the circle. In three dimensions it’s a bubble; and you can leave its adherents in it, until it bursts.

We will not show them the same pitiless indifference they think the universe shows, because we know (at least) that’s not all that the universe allows. As the song of my adolescence sang: “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” That’s hardly the whole story; but it’s a good starting point. And a better way to understand our place in the universe, too.