A Darwin quote for Darwin Day

For Darwin Day, I thought I'd (re)post one of my favorite Darwin quotes. Here it is:

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. -- From a letter to Asa Gray, 22 May 1860

The Ichneumonidae is a family of wasps. A very big family. It is, in fact, one of the largest families in the largest class of animals, the insects. There are over 60,000 species of ichneumonid wasps, each one, according to creationists, specially designed by God. My question for them is the same as Charles Darwin's: Why? Why would a beneficent and omnipotent God do such a thing?

To understand the question, it is necessary to know a bit about the ichneumonids. First of all, most are parasitoids, which means that their larvae develop inside the body of a living host, which they slowly eat alive. Eventually, when the wasp larvae pupate, they erupt out of the body of the host that they have gradually consumed, tormented, and destroyed as larvae.

It is easy to see how such a thing could exist from an evolutionary standpoint. The body of a caterpillar is good food for larvae. It's not surprising that some organisms have evolved to take advantage of it. But what kind of a God would purposefully design it to be that way?

I have heard five different answers:

1. God originally made everything good; there was no suffering or death until the fall of Adam. Then all hell broke loose. Animals immediately began to kill and eat each other, and predators, parasites, parasitoids, and pathogens roamed the earth. (Creation Ministries)

2. God made things nasty right from the start just to show us how important we are to him. He knew that Adam would sin, so he made nature cruel to show us the serious nature of sin. (Dembski's Defective Design Inference)

3. God made everything good and then Satan messed everything up. (Gregory Boyd's Cosmic Warfare Theodicy)

4. God likes it just fine the way it is. He created it that way for is own pleasure. He likes to watch things suffer. (David Snoke)

5. God couldn't help it and had nothing to do with it. He would have liked to create a kind and peaceful world, but he had to let things play out according to the laws of nature, over which he had no control. So the ichneumonid wasps just evolved, along with everything else, over millions of years while God sadly watched from a distance, unable to affect the outcome. (Ken Miller)

For each of these answers, though, I have a question.

1. How did things change so quickly? Were the 60,000 ichneumonid species specially created by God the moment Adam sinned? Or did God magically turn 60,000 butterfly species into parasitic wasps? Or did they all evolve (super)naturally in a few thousand years?

2. How do the ichneumonids teach us about sin? Until about the time of Darwin no one (except God) even knew they existed? Yet God created them just for us, just to teach us a lesson?

3. So Satan created the Ichneumonids? Along with scorpions, spiders, snakes, and sharks? He must have been a busy guy!

4. How could a kind and loving God create things just to watch them suffer?

5. A God who can't create or control anything isn't a God at all.

Here are some cool videos about the Ichneumonids.

The first one is from David Attenborough's marvelous "Life in the Undergrowth."

And here's one showing a Ichneumonid wasp (Megarhyssa sp.) drilling through the bark of an oak tree to deposit an egg in the tunnel of the siricid wood wasp, whose larva the Maegarhyssa lava will eat alive from the inside in the traditional Ichneumonid fashion (just like God intended it to be).

Happy Darwin Day!

To celebrate Charles Darwin's 203rd birthday, I attended Darwin on the Palouse on Thursday at Washington State University and at the University of Idaho on Friday. It was sponsored by the Palouse Coalition of Reason, and featured presentations by Daniel Dennett, PZ Myers, Fred Edwords, and Jen McCreight. It was as close to heaven as I'll ever come.

I don't have time to report on the presentations, but since they were videotaped, I'll post a link to them when they become available.

Still, I feel like I ought to say a few words in honor of Darwin on his birthday. Or better yet, I'll let him speak for himself.

Here's a quote from the introduction to The Descent of Man.

It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

14 March 2012 Update: Here's the Daniel Dennett talk.

A Damnable Doctrine

Hell is the core of Christianity; it is what Jesus came to save us from. We all deserve to go there, and there is only one way to escape: believe the right things. (Just what those things are depends on who you talk to.) And if for whatever (and however good a) reason you should die without that belief, you will be tormented forever in Hell by the God who loves you. It is as simple, cruel and absurd as that.

Here is what Charles Darwin said about it in his autobiography:

I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

It was Hell that did me in as a Christian. I, like Darwin, couldn't believe that my family and friends and billions of other nonbelievers (and religiously incorrect believers) would be tormented forever in Hell for their honest disbelief. It amazes me that anyone could.

Hell is indeed a damnable doctrine. Darwin, as usual, had it exactly right.

David Attenborough on Genesis

The influence of the book of Genesis, which says that the Lord God said to go forth and multiply to Adam and Eve, and that the natural world is there for you to dominate, you have dominion over the animals and plants of the world. And that basic notion, that the world is there for us and that if it doesn't serve our proposes, it is dispensable, that has produced the devastation of vast areas of the world's surface... That is why we are in the situation that we're in. (3:28 - 4:27)

Of course this verse (Genesis 1:28) is marked green in the world's most dishonest book: The Green Bible.