Darwin was a theist, although one with more doubts than faith. Suffering, especially innocent suffering, fed his doubts. A particularly cruel wasp was theologically significant to him – a wasp that paralyzes grasshoppers and caterpillars and takes them away to its nest alive but immobilized for their larvae to eat.
It is hard for the human mind to imagine anything more cruel than a predator that paralyzes its victim and then lets its children eat the victim alive. Darwin considered it inconceivable that God would design such a creature. It is easier to accept such cruelty if it is senseless rather than planned.
It is easier to believe the cosmos is senseless than to believe it is designed. It is easier to believe the cosmos is indifferent than to believe it cares.
Most people, I believe, would rather not live in a senseless universe, but in modernity that is the way many of us see the universe. It is like we are living in a place where we just don’t belong, in a place we have been brought against our will.
I do hear some people saying that the senselessness of the universe does not matter because we can make this place better, we can make our own meaning, and we can care about suffering even if the cosmos does not. But I think another voice is more convincing – the one that says, “Why bother? Just live as well as you can while life lasts.”
Maybe there is mercy in being paralyzed by the predator. Maybe the mind is paralyzed too – so that suffering is easier. Maybe hard work, watching television, playing video games, shopping and immersion in a cause like politics or religion are a kind of paralysis – they keep us from fighting back. We don’t know how to fight the cosmos anyway.
I hate the wasp that brought me here. I hate the larvae gnawing me away.
Lost Borders 
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March 29, 2008 at 11:43 am
jakeb
Wow.
The post is a rather straightforward fable, filled with the tension of (what else?) faith and doubt. It resonates on so many levels, both as a simple man, observing the heartless power of nature, and as a person of faith, who has embraced (of all things!) the power of love, active in the universe, to hell with the contradictions.
That is, that’s what the post is like…until that last sentence. Which just hit me in the gut. That’s one of the most extraordinary and emotional conclusion to a piece of writing I’ve ever read.
March 29, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Ken
I started writing this posting while thinking about Darwin and Loren Eiseley and how each man reacted to what the wasp does and how it affected each theologically, but in opposite ways. For Darwin the evolution of the wasp seemed incompatible with the idea of creation by a benevolent God. Eiseley, who studied evolution throughout his career, described how hard it is to figure out how variation and the struggle to survive could have alone created the instinctive knowledge of the wasp as to exactly where to stick the needle into the body of its prey – it requires much precision – and the instinctive knowledge of how to feed the larvae in a way that keeps the victim alive as long as possible.
Eiseley was a religious man, but not in a conventional sense. Suffering, his suffering and the suffering of all creatures, were in a sense generative of his faith. For Darwin, suffering disrupted his faith. Ironically, Darwin called himself a theist, and Eiseley did not.
I had been thinking about writing about Darwin’s and Eiseley’s reactions and how suffering leads to or away from faith. But as one thought led to another I ended up where I did. I realized that thinking about the wasp and our lives was making me feel quite upset and that emotion led me to see the world of this wasp and its victim as something like our world.
I was mainly thinking about the victim when I was writing, but since then I have also been thinking about how much we live like the wasp – about the cruelty, the highly intelligent cruelty, through which we feed ourselves and our young.
Thank you for your encouragement by your words here and for telling me how you reacted. I am glad to know.
April 2, 2008 at 9:14 pm
2reasons
For me, looking at the design of the cosmos — from quarks to galaxies — is the most compelling evidence that some kind of super-intelligent, super-powerful Being must exist. Which leaves the questions, what is this Being like and what (if anything) does it want from us? To me, I think it is not unreasonable to conclude after looking at this wasp that the Being who made it is not thoroughly good — at least, not as we understand goodness. However, many people then go on to conclude that because this Being is not good, it must not exist at all, which doesn’t really follow. As you say, “it is easier to accept such cruelty if it is senseless rather than planned.” Easier — but not necessarily correct.
But where did we get this idea of goodness that we use to find fault with the Maker? Surely it must be part of the design — something the Maker gave us Himself.
I think it is more reasonable to suppose that the One who made a universe that our minds still struggle to comprehend might be even farther beyond our comprehension. Perhaps the problem is with us and our limited understanding, rather than with God.
Thanks for your beautiful, thoughtful, and very honest post.
April 2, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Ken
Thank you 2reasons for adding your thoughts and feelings to mine.
One thing that struck me as so interesting when I was reading Loren Eiseley’s discussion of the wasp is the instinctive intelligence of the wasp that knows exactly where to stab its victim and inject its poison and of how to eat the victim while keeping it alive as long as possible. This cruelty and other examples led Darwin to have doubts about whether God exists or intervenes, but it made Eiseley think that maybe there is more to the story than natural selection. And that reminded me how suffering seems to turn some people away from God and others to God.
I find it somewhat revealing perhaps that Eiseley and Darwin, to the extent they believed God, were moved to that faith by what they beheld in the universe, in life. Their confessions are something like yours in your response here. That movement towards faith, towards God, even accepting suffering, is something like that of Job after God spoke to him from the whirlwind.
Each man had a modest opinion of his own understanding of such things, just as you have expressed here. I was surprised at first to read in Darwin’s writings something similar to the defense of God you wrote here. I shouldn’t be – the spark never completely dies and, though he was confident of his findings, Darwin never imagined that he had found the final answer to anything.
April 4, 2008 at 2:52 am
Eduard
Your writings are thought-provoking, as always. I do suggest that “cruelty” is in the eye of the beholder, though, and that it is a subjective emotion imposed upon the wasp by the writer… the wasp sees it as part of procreation, just as we humans see stripping the land and destroying animal habitat so that we can build a house for our children as not really “cruel”, but kindness for them. These are my thoughts. Thank you for always making me think about things.
ttfn,
Eduard
April 4, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Ken
Thank you Eduard.
I think all of us resist seeing cruelty in things so grand as God or nature. We defend God. We defend the wasp. We defend ourselves.
We learned from Plato the defense that what we see is not the whole truth or the right truth. That is our main line of defense: cruelty is a mere shadow.
Darwin wrote that we ought to admire such instinctive cruelty as we see in the wasp. Still, it made him shudder.