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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (39104)	6/4/1999 6:41:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 108807

And what are you using as a comparative measure of perfection? An EXCELLENT question. What IS perfection when it comes to evaluating nature? Every time we "improve" on nature, we seem to screw it up. I will be very interested in the answers you get to this question. Humans can define perfection in items or systems we create or invent But what about natural system? On the other hand, man is natural. If you define whatever man does as being natural and therefore part of nature, then we have a real problem because I hope even you wouldn't define the current state of the politicial and economic world as perfect. (Or would you? Is having starving children in Africa and Asia, bombing in Europe, hundreds of thousands of people in tent cities, etc. perfect?) So I think in order to contend that nature is perfect, you have to define nature as nature WITHOUT man's interference. But is that fair?

To: one_less who wrote (39104)	6/4/1999 10:21:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 108807

On The Imperfection of Nature Abdul Haq, you write, re nature: With our* limited ability to investigate, discover and make sense of it, we find plenty of evidence through our somewhat flawed recording system that it is, in fact, perfect.* Who is this we? When Leibniz argued that we live in the best of all possible worlds (i.e., in the most perfect of all possible worlds), Voltaire parodied him as Dr. Pangloss in Candide, that classic picture of the imperfections of this world. I guess "we" are still divided into Leibnizians and Voltaireans. In this discussion, we started off with the "problem of evil," that is, with the question of how an all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing Creator God could create or at least allow evil. Next came the problem of evil specifically as manifested in Nature, in natural catastrophes such as hurricanes, floods, plagues, & etc. (Let's leave moral evil out of it, for the nonce!) Now, Nature may be "perfect," in the sense that it is admirably fitted to do what it is supposed to do (whatever that is), but it is not "benign." Nor, for that matter, is it consistently "malign". It is generally (IMO, of course) just neutral, amoral, which makes it hard for some of us to accept the notion that any all-powerful being alleged to have created it could at the same time be all-good. For example, anyone who would deliberately create a black widow spider, which devours its mate in the midst of the "act of love," has got to have a pretty sick imagination. <gg> Maybe this is the "perfect" way to perpetuate the black widow spider species -- but why have that species in the first place, if you have a choice as to what to create and what not to create? In other words, if you want my opinion, it is this: Nature is "perfect", in the sense that It Is What It Is -- unless you insist Nature is the handiwork of a Creator God who is at once all-powerful and all-good. That's where you run into trouble. That's when someone can legitimately say: "There had to be a better [more perfect] way." My special objection has always been to the fact that animal life can only sustain itself by devouring other forms of life. That, frankly, is gross, not to say cruel. There had to be a better way! Joan