Peter Kirby

Reason is to understand the universe in which we live.

best,
Peter Kirby

AquaVita

But do you think anyone is really capable of understanding something so unwieldy?

Peter Kirby

We all learn from each other, all the time.

best,
Peter Kirby

Secular Pinoy

That quote in the OP is ascribed to JBS Haldane, though some say that it's apocryphal. I'm not sure if he's a Christian.

Heathen Dawn

Yes, it was J B S Haldane, and no, he wasn’t a Christian, he was an atheist (and a Stalinist).

ieyeasu

Peter...what's up? You seem...different as of late.

Heathen Dawn

Yes, something’s wrong. A lot of his recent posts have ended up in Elsewhere. I don’t know what it is, but he’s having a hard time.

Ojuice5001

Well, I know it's sarcasm, but the non-sarcastic interpretation is a valid way to look at it.

I would really say the ubiquity of beetles is due less to divine fiat than to the fact that one beetle doesn't consume a lot of resources. Therefore, there can be plenty of them. At the same time, if beetles are a prominent part of the world, and the gods have plans for the world, then it shouldn't be too long before they start applying their plans to beetles. If a large-scale natural event occurs, and we're speculating about why it happened, it is indeed a possiblity that its effects on humans were a by-product, and the reason the gods favored that natural event was for the sake of the beetles.

On the other hand, I think that a warm-blooded animal has a lot more metaphysical specialness than a cold-blooded one. That may or may not be true, but it makes sense that the cutoff point should be somewhere between the human-ape line and the line of life vs. non-life. So for my money, the animals to really pay attention to are rodents. They've got plenty of intelligence and will, they're all over the place, and there's a certain beauty to such a small animal having such marvelous ways of dealing with the world. They're high in quality and quantity. I think rats and squirrels are more important than beetles, and comparable to humans.

(Keep in mind, the gods I believe in are most likely local to this solar system, so no one start arguing that a universe with this low a ratio of life to non-life must be governed by gods who don't care about any form of life, be it human, mouse, or beetle.)

Corona688

Why not flies, or crickets, or some other kind of bug? They don't consume much resources either. And yet beetles are one of the most prevalent categories of insects there is.Why would gods care what beetles do or think? Why would a god care what happens to beetles? Insects aren't any less alive than we are, though. You're hitting closer to the mark than you might think - the first primate, and our direct ancestor, was something that looked more like a squirrel than an ape... still don't see what this has to do with god, though. Why SHOULD they care about beetles, even if they ARE local?