There was a better way, of course, than feeding on one another, and that was the Plant Kingdom, where plants don't feed on plants but on sunlight and minerals. Parasitism, fungi, bacteria cam later, but the other kingdoms of predators (on plants and each other) really spoiled things.
But Joan, you are looking at the world with eyes from a liberated time. When Leibniz, Plato, and Anaxagoras and other perfectionists wrote they had not enjoyed the results of a scientific revolution and the full right to be an atheist.
When I was a young aspiring physical scientist I found that like Newton I didn't need the hypothesis of God to learn about the physical universe. Nor did I need metaphysics to understand physics -- all I needed was mathematics and good eyesight and an opposable thumb or two. I took in my hand a book of Leibniz's Metaphysics. I read it carefully first. I saw that this poor brilliant man was locked into the old philosophical question of perfection. He was a genius of invention -- windowless monads, perpetual spirits. But even he could not meet the test of common sense. I therefore followed Hume's advice and committed it to the flames -- and have never needed it since. I did recognize that he was struggling against the Enlightenment to save God -- who desperately needed saving. He operated at a noble and elevated level. Voltaire was unfair in his attack -- intentionally not understanding what Leibniz was saying. But this served Voltaire's critical objective of destroying the Church and Faith.
I have never cared for theological conservatives or accepted that their self-imposed missions were worthwhile. I see in the paper that half of Americans think faith is important in their lives, and a fourth of Europeans. It takes a very long time to extinquish the myths and fantasies of the past, especially when the alternative is the recognition that we live in a self-constructed human society in a universe that does care if we live or die or vanish entirely, that we are responsible for any future that we have and that there is no God to look after us or reward us for our useless individual struggles to survive and the hopeless hope that as a human species that we may prevail. |
