I trust that in the 15 billion year history of your cosmos
(give or take a few hundred million years), you have received
a great many letters of complaint. Through the ages, innumerable
sentient creatures on worlds unimaginably (to me anyway) different
to mine must have written to you and, I believe, complained
about basically the same issues.
There is, of course, the age-old question as to why a presumed
omnipotent creator has allowed suffering to be such a defining
feature of this cosmos. Two fellow Homo sapiens sapiens by
the name of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace recently
discovered and explained the main mechanism by which this
cosmos runs its course. We call it evolution. Charles pointed
out that the presence of terribly cruel processes in nature
presented a major stumbling block for him with regards to
believing in a beneficent and omnipotent creator. One famous
example are parasitoid wasps of the family Ichneumonidae.
These otherwise beautiful insects often deposit their fertilised
eggs inside living caterpillars. Of course, they do this in
total innocence driven by a time-honoured instinct without
any knowledge of what they actually inflict on the host animal.
Once hatched, the wasp larva immediately starts feasting on
the living tissue of the caterpillar. Charles, and I whole-heartedly
agree, had serious problems imagining that a benign creator
with, literally, all the power in the world would allow this
process to evolve. One shivers imagining the poor caterpillar
suffering horrific pain while being eaten alive from the inside
out, with no chance to do anything about it until it eventually
dies a slow, painful death.
Moving up in the evolutionary chain of the animal kingdom
here on earth, cheetahs are known to catch prey and then allow
their young to practise and develop their hunting skills on
the poor animal. The injured and probably sickingly frightened
prey, maybe a young antelope, is allowed to escape time and
again only to be continuously attacked by the clumsy cheetah
cubs. Watched over by their mother, the cubs practise bringing
down and killing prey. Necessary for their survival, no doubts,
but from a victim’s point of view this is torture at
its best! The agonising pain the injured and slowly carved
up antelope has to go through until it is eventually killed
is inconceivable. And that is supposed to be part of a great
benevolent plan of creation?
Of course, there is also the issue of human suffering, which
comes in a great many varieties. Let’s look at two examples.
First, why do you let people be born with, or later on suffer
from disabilities that prevent them from enjoying many aspects
of life one should take for granted? Secondly, why do you
allow one half of mankind to gorge itself to death on food,
while the other half does not know where to find food for
the next day? You know, we are actually aware of suffering
and we can reflect and painstakingly scrutinise it in contrast
to the other life forms sharing this planet with us. This
tops what every other creature on this planet has to go through
and is definitely a double-whammy! Anyway, I have become seriously
distracted by these issues. However much I agree with them,
this letter is actually meant to be different to the plethora
of like complaints you will have received from every corner
of the universe. I want to complain about something totally
different.
There is one issue that overrides everything else, one issue
that bothers me to the core of my being. And that is that
you have stuffed enough brains inside my skull to let me realise
that there is an awesome secret behind this cosmos. However,
I was born without any chance whatsoever to detect even an
inkling of what that secret, the ultimate truth, is all about.
This I consider an impertinence of the most serious kind!
Despite thousands of years of thinking, my species still faces
the problem a philosopher called Plato described so beautifully
in his cave allegory. We are all prisoners staring at the
wall of a cave and unable to turn our heads. Behind our backs
a fire burns, in front of which puppeteers perform with their
puppets. This casts a shadow on the wall in front of the prisoners,
which they can see and mistake for reality. Plato’s
implication is that all we can perceive are just shadows of
reality, but not the actual reality itself. No hope to turn
around and look directly. I realise that, for biological reasons,
a sensor to detect the unadulterated reality or truth will
never evolve. That will simply never be an adaptation required
for survival and, hence, natural selection will never favour
the necessary adjustments. However, understanding of reality
is an incremental process and, compared to our fellow life
forms on this planet, we have made enormous progress. There
is even every chance that in future (I am talking millions
of years here) beings will evolve on this planet that will
have hitherto unimaginable abilities to lift the veil covering
truth a little bit further. But they will also not be able
to completely remove the veil and, I bet, they will be as
disappointed and angry as I am today. In one of the major
religious books written on this planet, one of your prophets
is allowed to see the ‘promised land’ but then
has to die. He must have been so frustrated deep down and
I totally sympathise with him. To have caught a glimpse of
the ‘promised land’ due to my coincidental birth
in this age is great; however, to have no chance whatsoever
to truly understand it during my life-time makes me really
angry, just to make that point again. Maybe I will learn about
it after my death. There are plenty of people on this planet
who do believe this. I hope they are right and hope is all
that is left.
Yours sincerely
John Johnson
PS If you cannot reply within the next four to five decades,
do not bother at all.
