this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Stephen Fry was once asked what he would say if, after death, he found himself trying to justify himself to God in front of the Pearly Gates. His response:
"Bone cancer, in babies? Seriously?"
The full response is worth reading:
You have to give the Irish journalist credit for his good humor.
I do? He rolls his eyes right in his guest’s face!
Sure, like an old Southern lady proclaiming, "Lordy, I have a case of the vapors!"
He's just hamming it up for the camera in response to Fry's (intentionally inflammatory) rhetoric.
That is the most generous reading I’ve ever seen anyone give anything.
That is a great clip. His answer is relentless and is an example for us all.
This is addressed by Mr Fry’s remarks, which you should watch in full. He either says that god doesn’t exist or he’s a complete maniac. Atheism is actually the generous, optimistic interpretation.
If I would describe a paradise for humans I would set up a system where your suffer is short and smal but just enough to value the things you will be given. Once you reach a point where you don't feel joy anymore because you have everything. Everything is taken from you and can again enjoy building up your achievements
As a parent, I scratch my head at this. We don’t pepper in abuse with parental love so that they’ll appreciate it. You just give and you give and you give. You lose sleep trying to figure out how you’re going to keep them perfectly safe and completely happy. God’s a shite dad.
Always relevant
The simple answer is that "God", if it exists, can't be viewed through human lenses. Maybe to God, evil doesn't exist at all.
https://alanwatts.org/transcripts/image-of-man/?highlight=The%20dream
The Egg
By: Andy Weir http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
You were on your way home when you died.
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
And that’s when you met me.
“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”
“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.
“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”
“Yup,” I said.
“I… I died?”
“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.
You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”
“More or less,” I said.
“Are you god?” You asked.
“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”
“My kids… my wife,” you said.
“What about them?”
“Will they be all right?”
“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”
You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”
“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”
“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”
“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”
“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”
You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”
“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”
“So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.”
“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.”
I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.
“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”
“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”
“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”
“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?”
“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.”
“Where you come from?” You said.
“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.”
“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.”
“So what’s the point of it all?”
“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”
“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.
I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”
“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”
“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”
“Just me? What about everyone else?”
“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.”
You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”
“All you. Different incarnations of you.”
“Wait. I’m everyone!?”
“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.
“I’m every human being who ever lived?”
“Or who will ever live, yes.”
“I’m Abraham Lincoln?”
“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.
“I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.
“And you’re the millions he killed.”
“I’m Jesus?”
“And you’re everyone who followed him.”
You fell silent.
“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”
You thought for a long time.
“Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?”
“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.”
“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?”
“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”
“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…”
“An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.”
And I sent you on your way.
Not opening in Liftoff.
Loads fine in Eternity.
Ironic.
Same in Thunder
Loads fine in Jerboa
It’s actually not from Epicurus, the origin is probably Sextus Empiricus.
Just addressing a common misconception, not that it changes the validity of the quote.
The only reasonably justification would for God to say: "I don't have the ability to meddle. I'm not omnipotent. I did create your part of the multiverse. I can only set the laws of physics and initial conditions. Here's how that works....Let me explain why you are here....something something multi dimensions...some creatures brains evolved quantum something something....which is what is commonly thought of as a soul..."
So we’re some jackass’s experiment.
The “god is a jackass” theorem. I like it.
There was actually a sect of Christianity that effectively argued for that kind of God.
They were quite influenced by Epicurean philosophy and naturalism though they disagreed with the Epicurean surety of death, arguing instead that while there was an original world of matter with original humans that developed spontaneously, that these original humans brought forth the creator of a copy of that original cosmos - not of matter, but of light. And that for the copies of humanity in that light-copy the finality of death was not inescapable.
But effectively, the world being a copy of one developed by naturalism for the explicit purpose of providing an afterlife largely skirts the moral quandaries. If the copy didn't have children with bone cancer then it means whitewashing the copy such that only the naturally privileged are entitled to salvation, while those originally getting dealt a bad hand are erased from representation.
And actually their explanations literally did relate to the quantized aspects of matter (embracing Epicureanism meant embracing not just natural selection but also atomism, such that they were discussing indivisible points making up all things and being the originating cause of existence).
You even got statements like this:
You don't typically expect to see Jesus weighing in on naturalism as the greater wonder in contrast to the possibility of intelligent design.
Though if you really dig into it and notice that Lucretius 50 years before Jesus was even born was not only describing survival of the fittest and the emergence of modern life as the end result of indivisible seeds scattered randomly, but even described failed biological reproduction as "seed falling by the wayside of a path," the guy killed in Judea for talking about how only the seeds which survived to reproduce multiplied and the ones that fell by the wayside of a path did not begins to take on a different context, as does the oddity of that being one of the few public sayings in the Synoptics that the church felt was necessary to claim had a "secret explanation" given to only their leadership.
(In this sect's surviving text that parable comes immediately after a saying about how no matter if man ate lion or lion ate man that the lion becoming man was an inevitable result and how the human being is like a large fish selected from a bunch of small fish.)
Epicurus had great instincts. He was pretty damn close to things modern science has discovered. As you mentioned, he was an atomist. He also said you can generally trust your senses, but they can be wrong and deceive you at times. His ethics of moderation and valuing relationships is spot on when it comes to life satisfaction.
It's interesting you mentioned naturalism in the evolutionary sense. Have you read Darwin's book? Darwin's ideas aren't entirely original, he himself pretty much says that, but his data collection and observations were something that hadn't been done on that level yet.
Epicurus was great. It's a shame he's not more widely taught. People come up learning Aristotle and thinking the Greeks had their heads up their asses, but don't end up learning about the guy discussing light as quantized particles moving very quickly two millennia before Einstein wins a Nobel for experimentally proving that behavior, or writes about natural selection nearly two millennia before Darwin.
And yes, Darwin was actually familiar with the same book through his peers (though he claimed to have never read it). But you see rather remarkable level of detail for a lot of the core concepts:
You can sometimes see a criticism of the first passage claiming that Leucretius saw those intermediate mutations as all existing all at once at the start, but that interpretation really seems to be putting too much weight on "in the beginning" and ignoring things like:
And it's been pretty wild seeing a Christian sect quoting from a book that contains such an on point description of naturalism as we see it today.
For example, another parallel is the Epicurean attitudes about avoiding false negatives. They were adamant not to prematurely discard explanations for why something occurred, but rather to keep them around concurrently (it's a large part of why they got so much right). Which is a bit similar to the discussion of leaving seeds alone when you don't know which is wheat and which is weeds as eventually it will become clear and you can harvest the one and discard the other. An even more interesting saying in the context of a sect's claiming the mustard seed was about an indivisible point as if from nothing or that the sower parable was about seeds scattered upon the world "through which the whole cosmical system is completed."
I would actually respect this god. Not worship, but respect.
Even laws of physics are bound by logic...logic supercedes even me...so a lot of my adjustments were to things like the gravitational constant and force magnitudes
From the perspective of the simulation hypothesis, it's possible that we exist not to exalt the programmer but to play out a given scenario that has no consideration of our well-being.
Modern experimental paleontology will sometimes use computer simulations (simple ones compared to the one we might be in) to try to better examine behaviors and evolutionary development. In some of them, prey objects can detect and try to evade, fight or escape predators aware of the conflict of interest between themselves and their hunter. So we already have simulations in which both the coder and the observing party (not always the same group) do not have an interest in the well being of any given internal entity. It's not that they're evil, just that they're here to see how it plays out, ultimately to get it to match what appears in the geological record, which means they have a model. Still, it sucks to be a virtual life form in this world that is very much made not to be paradise for us, and will be halted and shut down as soon as the end users have the data they need.
Cosmic horror often examines the possibilities of a world created, but to which we are incidental or destined to an unhappy fate before we are consumed or discarded. The religions that are popular today are because we are opposed to such possibilities, not because benevolent deities are more likely than malevolent ones.
But that is also a cosmic horror of its own, that we naked apes are going to be limited by a general tendency to deny data-driven models if their implications are too unpleasant. Even if Great Cthulhu or Sithrak, The Blind Sufferer, or even Azathoth, The Nuclear Chaos were the true architects of this world, humans would still look for a judge/redeemer like Jesus to follow, and the ministries would exploit that. We are only the bare minimum of socially evolved to develop agriculture, and industry.
"And on the 8th day, He started to get bored, so He put a swimming pool, waited for some of His creations to get in, then removed the ladder. For the lulz" — possibly...
The philosopher and science fiction author Olaf Stapledon envisioned a god that was a creature creating universe after universe in order to make a mate. The mate had to be as aware as it is, so the whole universe has to be sentient. Our universe is just one in a long line of such universes and it isn't the first or the last.
I don't know if he actually believed it (it's the denouement of his novel The Star Maker), but the idea is intriguing.