RELIGION has struggled with the problem of how to reconcile the concept of a benign, all powerful deity with the widespread occurrence of pain, suffering and evil in the world.
Natural theology, which flowered prominently in the 19th century, sought to illustrate the beneficent nature of God by studying features of His grand plan in the design of the natural world. This has not been a very fruitful endeavour, however.
Many mechanisms that work so efficiently in nature seem cruel and ruthless when viewed through human eyes and we cannot draw moral lessons from them. Nature is non moral I was reminded of this on reading a report of recent research on the mating activity of the Australian red back spider, where the female devours the male during sexual intercourse and the male actively encourages her to do so.
The classic example of cold blooded cruelty in nature, viewed through human eyes, is the behaviour of a group of wasps the ichneumonoidea.
This is a substantial part of the natural world, containing more species than all the vertebrates combined. These wasps live freely as adults but spend their larval lives (an immature form that later develops into a different adult form) as parasites, feeding on the bodies of other insects. The most common victims are caterpillars.
Free flying female wasps locate an appropriate host and convert it into a food factory for their young. Some types of wasp attack, the host and inject their eggs into the caterpillar's body.
When the internal eggs hatch, the ichneumon larvae begin their grisly work of excavating the living caterpillar's body. Other types of wasp lay eggs on the outside of the caterpillar but take the precaution of injecting a toxin into the caterpillar which paralyses the creature. An active caterpillar might dislodge the eggs.
When the eggs hatch, the larvae begin to eat the victim which is powerless to help itself.
The ichneumon larvae feed on their host in a very clever and specific manner. It would be counter productive to begin the feast by eating a vital organ, thereby killing the caterpillar. Much better to keep the host alive as long as possible so that the food remains fresh and nutritious, so the wasp larvae begin by eating the fat bodies and digestive organs of the caterpillar and keeping the heart and nervous system alive as long as possible.
The idea of being slowly eaten alive by an internal parasite is particularly horrible to contemplate. Indeed, this idea is, frequently used in modern science fiction horror stories, c.g. in the film Alien. Not surprisingly, the behaviour of the wasps was a source of great concern to natural theologians.
How could such a cruel natural plan be reconciled with a beneficent god? Many attempted to rationalise the matter.
Charles Darwin was also deeply troubled by the matter but was too intellectually honest to rationalise. In 1860 he wrote "I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence 0 all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent god would have designedly created the ichneumonoidea with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice."
Another example of strange and cruel insect behaviour that is more widely known than that of the wasps is the mating practice of praying mantises. Here the female has sex with the male and then eats him. A recent issue of the journal Science (January 5th, 1996) reports a similar but more bizarre practice of the Australian red back spider.
In this case, the female also eats the male during copulation, and the male enthusiastically collaborates. The male inserts his organ into the much larger female and then, without slipping out, he turns head over heels and dangles his tasty abdomen in front of her mouth. She usually tucks in right away.
Strange as this behaviour seems, it must offer an evolutionary advantage or it would not have become so firmly established. The article in Science says this odd behaviour distracts the female and allows the male to copulate longer, thereby allowing him to deposit the maximum amount of sperm and giving him a better chance of passing on his genes.
Also, a sperm filled female tends to spurn other suitors, thereby further enhancing the chances that the suicidal one will father the offspring. Even if the female does not eat the male, he doesn't live long after copulation. He only gets one shot at passing on his genes and he makes a meal of it.
The whole idea of trying to illustrate the goodness of God by pointing to the glory of natural, design was a confusion. Behaviour in the animal world was studied in an anthropocentric manner which is entirely inappropriate. Morality and cruelty are human concepts and are meaningless in the context of animal behaviour. (They do apply, of course, in the context of human/animal interactions.)
Animal behaviour has been automatically and unconsciously chosen by natural selection based solely on the criterion of fitness to pass on genetic information. Nevertheless, higher animals may have a more complex and deeper emotional life than has conventionally been thought to be the case.
Non human nature is neither moral nor corrupt, neither cruel nor kind. It is simply the result of a natural selection process. The old dilemma as to why cruelty exists in nature is not a dilemma at all, because the question is not valid it is framed in human terms. We cannot learn ethics from nature.