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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

Sorry for the late response! I meant to respond earlier but forgot. Big fan of the blog!

First of all, I don't have anything like certainty in bug sentience nor in theism. So even if I concluded they were incompatible with each other, I would just think that bugs were probably not sentient, but were likely enough to be sentient for the EV of tending to bugs to be very high.

Second, I think theists will need some theory on which God allows many terrible things to happen (see here for one such story https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-archon-abandonment-theodicy). But whatever your theory is of why God doesn't make the world utopia and paradise can also generalize to bugs. In short, I don't think the exact amount of evil matters much evidentially--once you realize that the world is filled with seemingly pointless evil, whatever it is that explains the presence of pointless evil should generalize.

Even if the world was pretty nice, it would still appear on its face to be 0% as good as a world God could design. Theism thus shouldn't give you a big update against the world having lots of bad stuff.

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Drew Housman's avatar

Thought provoking piece! I don't agree with BB that bug suffering is as bad as human holocausts, so I think it's important to poke and prod such a theory from all angles.

That said, while Christianity says nothing about insect suffering directly, I think there are sections of the new and old testament that can be read in a pro-animal welfare way. The writer Matthew Scully is the excellent at calling those areas out, if you want to explore his writing. There are also good posts on this topic by a Christian EA group: https://christandcounterfactuals.substack.com/p/should-christians-be-concerned-about-animal-welfare-part-1

Here are just a couple bible quotes that, if you squint, could be interpreted as meaning we should extend our care even to insects:

- In the Gospel of Mark, God says to “preach the gospel to every creature”.

- Another interesting case to consider is that of the post-flood second covenant, where we are told of “the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth."

I am no biblical scholar. Maybe I am misunderstanding. But the words are the words, and "every creature" includes the bugs!

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