Jack Symes

But again, you probably would want to bring them back. And then when it comes to non-human animals, the same is true, right? The dog looks forward to their dinner in the evening. They look forward to the walk. They bury their bone. These are creatures with complex inner lives which see their futures or know that they will exist in the future.

I think the same is true of the creatures which are hunted or in the farms. And so... Simply painless killing might not be everything there. Removing the potential for future happiness and pleasure also seems to be morally relevant.

One of the things that... So you check the... How do you know the age of... You can see.

Their face looks different. How long does an elk live for?

Yeah. To bring this back to like, you know, that fundamental question we began with, like on the whole, is existence a good thing? Should we be happy and pleased with this world? And it seems like the perfectly good God hypothesis goes out the window or, you know, especially if we're forced to do these things, like we have to introduce predators to maintain populations and things like that.

Again, like this doesn't seem like the thing a perfectly good God would do. So if you're an atheist, why not?

But it's the process which, according to Christians, Jews and Muslims, that God created and God can do anything with the following qualifier. It has to be logically or metaphysically possible. So there are possible worlds without evolution by natural selection. Sure. Those things are entirely possible. Right. And a perfectly good God would have to bring about the best possible state of affairs.

What did they say? The optimist says this is the best possible world and the pessimist hopes it's not the case.

Yeah, I mean, there's still a sense in which they're doing good, like when a non-human animal sacrifices themselves for their young or something. There has to be something they're going towards in order for it to be good, in the same way we freely choose. And they're getting better. at being elk to avoid that. And that's what leads to their natural selection.

There's going to be a significant number of non-human animals that don't have what we call free will, which is the power and freedom to do otherwise, the power and choice to do A rather than B. There are some non-human animals that just act. The raindrop lands on the bird's beak. It just instinct, it turns, sees what's there. It doesn't think, what was that? It doesn't have this inner chat.

It doesn't choose, reflects. And there's going to be a lot of non-human animals, which that's the case for. So that sort of like character development, theodicy or defense won't work for them. Like, especially if they're... It doesn't bring about a better entity at the end of it.

But all these creatures that die painfully and miserably and don't have the opportunity to develop, like their individual lives seem like they're, again, cases of gratuitous, i.e., unnecessary evil. But the point fundamentally is this, right? God... could have made it so that these creatures that don't have free will and that can't develop their characters don't suffer.

He could have made that the case.

There's no distinction between beasts.

Yeah. Well, here's the thought, right? Which is in terms of like cashing this out in terms of problems with atheism and religious beliefs. is that when you look at the system, and you mentioned a second ago, like, maybe we don't know God's reasons and stuff like this. Well, I think in that case, I think Peterson said something along the same lines when I spoke to him.

And I think in that case, you shouldn't just bet your soul on it for his words. Or, you know, William James, the philosopher, has this example of a mountaineer who's got like this gap they need to jump over, a storm behind them. So it's reasonable for them to believe they can make the jump or the runner... who has to believe they're going to win the 100-meter race.

It's rational to believe it then, even if they lack the evidence. I think these arguments work for, like, psychological states, but you believing that God has some good reason or believing you can jump the gap doesn't make it any more reasonable that... there's a proposition which says God exists and it is true.

So I think the reasonable thing to do here is to suspend belief, is to go, here we have some really good arguments for this hypothesis, here's the evidence we have against it, but it's contentious as to whether or not we can solve this problem.

So the most reasonable thing for us to do is to embrace like some form of agnosticism where we go, how can we find ethics and meaning in a world that's seemingly godless? And that's to go back to the start of our discussion there. It's like the failure of new atheism hasn't been able to address that. are looking for meaning.

Shakespeare, it wouldn't be right for someone English to come on the podcast and talk about meaning without quoting Shakespeare, wouldn't it? So you'll have to excuse me. Shakespeare says, essentially, if there's no God, then life is like a tale told by an idiot. It signifies nothing. Isn't it amazing that guy was so good so many years ago? So the agnostic life is like this.