A Rough World
There is no disputing the ingeniousness of God's created evolutionary process. But chance and survival of the fittest is clearly saturated with too much sadness, at least as far as I feel that emotion. There is more sadness than happiness in this world, more stress than contentment, more injustice than justice, more poverty than wealth, more difficult deaths than easy deaths, and more selfishness than sharing. It begs the question as to why God would include so much of all the aforementioned in the evolutionary process.
I doubt anyone appreciates his good fortune more than I, and yet it is all tempered by my acute awareness of how much misfortune abounds. There was a time when a nation went to war everyone had to sacrifice and share the burden. Not really true anymore. We are involved in two wars and going through a recession which we may or may not recover from, and I would be hard put to identify any sacrifices I have had to make personally. Marriages seem to increasingly collapse like dominoes, millions have no health insurance, millions of children are stuck in essentially nonfunctional schools, terrorism is being fueled by overpopulation, religious fervor, and a global economy in which the absence of global minimum wages is rapidly turning every country into some sort of third world nation with absurd wealth for a few and dire poverty for the many. We may well be now entering one of those evolutionary correction stages in which the evolutionary cards get reshuffled, mass extinction occurs, and climate changes create a brand new chapter of evolution.
I don't even know how to understand what seems cruelty in other species. I know pain is more acute for humans than other animals in that it takes considerable intelligence to feel pain like humans do. Yet whenever I see a helpless animal struggle I feel immeasurable sadness for some time. Simple little events of misfortune to animals puts me in a melancholic mood. The other day, driving en route to a trail head in the Arboretum for my daily trek, I spotted this lone young deer grazing off under a tree. Young deer are not loners. They need companionship, especially their mother for a year. Later on, having located some of the few deer hiding out in the Arboretum, I watched them feed on some food someone left out for them in a field. It was the same as when I used to feed certain deers a few years back in a forest preserve. Same, meaning that the young deer were not permitted near the feast. A mother doe will chase and clobber even her own offspring if they try to get some of the goodies. When I used to feed deer cut up apples in the winter months the older deer would never let the young deer get any apples unless the young deer would take the risk of coming within a couple of feet of me. The older deer wouldn't come that close and that is the only way the young deer could get any apple. At any rate, while watching the deer feed (they are used to me and kind of ignore me as long as I stay on the arboretum path. Come off the path and they scatter) suddenly I see this young deer trotting down the path towards me. I am pretty sure it is the young deer I saw earlier all by him/her self. He/she clearly got separated from his/her mother or the mother had been killed some way. Spotting these other deer, the young deer was trotting to be with them, completely oblivious of me and trotted right by me on the path with a look of desperation all over his/her face. It was one scared, unhappy deer. I was hoping maybe it's mother was one of those grazing. But no, none of the deer showed an inkling of friendliness toward the young deer. They didn't seriously chase it unless it tried to get very close, just shunned it. The does meandered off in one direction with their young ones and chased the young deer away when it tried to follow. Dejected, the young deer forlornly followed, at a distance, three or four bucks which headed in a different direction. I hate scenes like that. Maybe it eventually re-hooked up with it's mother or just managed to get accepted in some group of deer. Maybe it makes no difference. Near the end of the winter, when the does are getting ready to give birth to new fawns, they chase away last year's young and the rejected offspring wander alone confused and dejected for weeks until they reform in groups with other rejected yearlings. The point is that evolution is rough.
Why is everything so rough in this God created evolutionary process? Why didn't God create a perfect world with the absence of all this misfortune dispersed throughout the animal kingdom? I suppose in a perfect world we would never die and always be healthy and everyone would be singing "zippy do da dey" all day. everyday, forever. This, I admit, is an entirely self serving vision. CHANGE is the engine that drives evolution. CHANGE is driven by SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. Evolutionary progress depends on these two factors. Progress has resulted in a human species which has the capability of controlling their own destiny to a substantial degree. For example, we don't have to overpopulate the earth, but we aren't smart enough yet not to. We could make the playing fields more level for more people, and sometimes we do, but just as often we don't. We ourselves have the potential ability to generate more freedom and more justice for more people, and this requires use of our innate ability to understand ethics (the Golden Rule). Humans have elected to do some good things and some bad things. Each day we have the opportunity to be selfish, to be charitable, to be creative, to be destructive, to create happiness, to create unhappiness. The lost young deer has little control over it's own destiny. Humans have more control but for many humans to have freedom and justice in life DEPENDS ON the charitableness of others. Human ethics, an evolutionary developed trait, requires that the less fortunate be helped by the more fortunate. That is to say, humans can offset CHANCE to some degree, and to the extent humans do this, the less fortunate (the less fit) can still be given the chance to enjoy life. But this requires that the more fortunate understand when their own enough is enough, when enough really is as good as a feast. To give a specific example: a child may have the misfortune to be born in some sort of ghetto with no, or deficient, parents; have little chance for a good education; or to get adequate health care BUT other humans have the ability to correct all of this and have the ethical obligation to do so. Unfortunately, the human species is still in the early stages of our evolutionary developed ethics. Until this evolutionary development is better perfected, misery for many will continue to abound.
For the most part we are so obsessed with developing a personal relationship, a special relationship, with God that we cannot see the forest of the sake of the trees. Intelligent maturity enables us to understand that the world is not going to revolve around any of us as individuals, that we are not going to control God's evolutionary process via prayer, that the laws of evolution apply to all living creatures, that the diversity of life on our planet is the real beauty, and for any of us to get carried away with our own individual role in this process is just a little silly and irrational. We don't really know that God has a favorite species let alone have created us in His image. This would be like saying to one of us, which is your favorite pet, your dog or your cat or your hamster? Would any of us really communicate to our dog that they have dominion over the cat and hamster and can do as they want with them? Of course not, if our dog attacks the cat we are displeased. If the cat eats the hamster we are displeased. So why is it that we imagine God has given us dominion over other species and the earth's natural resources to do as we want, at any given moment, for our own selfish needs of the moment?
If we, as individuals, were all that important in the total scheme of things then CHANCE and SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST would not be the means to drive evolution. The Universe would have been created as a final perfect product with each of us protected from harm by God. BUT, it was not created this way with any of us having a special protected relationship with God. Indeed there is no evidence of any ending in this evolutionary process. This God created process of evolution has been around for many millions of years. Species come and go---climate changes, and with the climate changes have come altered ways in which life is maintained on this planet. It seems, in my mind, that Tragedy is the Mother of Change. Without tragedy there is no change; without change there is no evolution, for CHANGE is the MOTHER of EVOLUTIONARY ADVANCEMENT. What this evolutionary process gives to all living species is a chance, and the same for individual members of a species. Individuals are given a chance, and that chance comes with no guarantee, no opportunity for an individual to recruit protection from God against His own evolutionary laws. Does God ever intervene with his own evolutionary laws? Perhaps, but there is certainly no evidence this is done very often. Humans, however, are in a very unique situation in evolutionary history: we do have the ability, through an innate understanding of the Golden Rule, to minimize tragedy for the less fit, the less lucky, and extend liberty and justice to others. Is there a reward for those humans who apply the Golden Rule in their lives? The immediate reward is a more contented life. I have never really known those who spend much time applying the Golden Rule to be among the discontented in life. In the the long run, is there an afterlife reward for those who have followed the Golden Rule? We can no more answer that question than we can explain how God came to exist or how, for that matter, why we cannot comprehend the essence of life itself. But that's ok. We have been given a chance to have some successes in life (unearned for the most part) and a duty to give back any individual economic success to those in society with the greatest needs.
P.S. The saga of the lost young deer above had a bad ending. Today when I went to the Arboretum for my walk and rendezvous with the deer I was told the East side of the Arboretum was closed. Closed, I was told, because workers were busy with a project. It was 5PM, not a time when workers would still be working. A security guard guarded the road which led into the East side of the Arboretum. I sensed what was going on. "I guess this must be deer elimination day" I said to the guard. He confirmed that it was and remarked he heard two shots a couple of minutes ago. This was the second and probably final day to eliminate all 9 of the deer in the Arboretum. The mother of that young deer was no doubt the victim of the first day. Of course deer can't be allowed to wander around the arboretum and munch on rare bushes and trees. Yet for days I will feel sad for my arboretum 'friends'. I have always gotten far more pleasure in getting deer to trust me than to hunt them them down and shoot them. This is more challenging and difficult. I also know how deer die in the absence of humans shooting them. This is even less pleasant. They get old and sick or slow, a coyote or other animal brings them down and tears them apart for food, or they get hit by an automobile, or they die from a disease/old age. Like the title here says, "Life is Rough". There is a price to pay for evolutionary progress for all species. I think most anyone would wish that young deer could have been saved from it's destiny. It was not a good week for the young creature. We cannot prevent all tragedies, but the most fortunate amongst us can use our good economic fortune to alleviate the misfortune of others through our charity and politics. These others include all humans, other species, and our natural resources.
