(2020-09-14, 06:10 PM)nbtruthman Wrote: The inescapable sentience of individual animals (that allows them to suffer greatly whether from natural circumstances or being raised and killed in factory farms) would be seen as the humanly appalling and deplorable result of design decisions for physical reality long ago made by very powerful and advanced spiritual beings.
Isn't this the consequentialist fallacy, where something cannot be true because the implications are terrible?
I think it is pretty clear that whoever - if anyone - designed reality they were not concerned with suffering or lacked the foresight to consider it. Evolution itself is an engine powered by countless deaths, and human suffering is hardly absent from the world.
The other option is this reality has no substantial negative effects on any consciousness that incarnates into it, but that also seems like the kind of belief one takes on to rationalize suffering. At the very least reincarnation suggests the traumas of a past life can influence the journey of the soul.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell
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