> about 'problem of evil' that believers face

The problem of evil is something anyone studying Abrahamic religion encounters. Very few of the "believers" I've met have bothered.

> Eastern philosophy states that . . .

ORLY? Which one?

> Of course above is a very brief description, there is much more to it

I should hope so!

I flagged this thing because it's going to lead to "religious battles," quite literally. And the article itself is full of nonsense. And fear of the natural world!

1) Sanatana Dharma, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism they all have the concept of karma. 2) Yes!, It has lots and lots of description and details behind karma and ourselves.

Good luck coming up with karma-points-based explanations for all the pleasure and suffering in the world. What did the caterpillar do to deserve getting paralyzed and eaten alive by wasp larvae?

Obviously they must have done something very bad in their previous life as an animal with free will! Maybe they tortured someone as a human.

I don't believe this explanation, but reincarnation usually comes along with karma in a package.

You are right caterpillar, and similar beings dont have much choice, whatever they do they are mistly dictated by nature and they have to act accordingly. That is why there is no karma for them. They cannot create any karma or 'sin' BUT they can suffer the reactions of the bad karma they have done in past life (in a species when they actually had the intelligence to differentiate between right and wrong).

A crude example: A man torturing a caterpillar for fun, may have to take birth in a life of caterpillar and endure the same pain, either by a human or different species.

Thanks for the good question, am open to more.

Karma does not require suffering from sin. Karma does not require future lives either. Karmas base is much simpler - what you do has effects. It may be good, it may not be. We don't get to know, but we hope that we do good karma and avoid bad karma.

Not sure this is the slam dunk you suggest. Isn’t this just the free will defence with extra steps? Or, perhaps, Swinburne’s argument that natural evil is a force for maturation and spiritual development.

The basic conception of the argument (“Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”) still seems valid if a God has created a karmic system.

So I don’t think this is an issue uniquely facing Western perspectives.

Personally, I don’t find the free will defence particularly convincing, either. Do we really have free will? Is free will truly necessary for education/moral goodness? And if so, is god truly capable of evil?

> The basic conception of the argument (“Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”) still seems valid if a God has created a karmic system.

The difference, as I understand it, is that the free-will argument requires the existence of a creator who is either impotent, malevolent or evil (or some combination of all three).

A karmic-based system requires no creator to exist.

1) not defending anything, just explaining what I know. 2) never heard of Swinburne. Natural evil is force for maturation and ALSO to uphold the principle of justice among all living beings. 3) No evil can harm a living being if he has not already bad stock of karma with him. And also God does not interfere with anyone's free will. If we are living with others then some laws will have to be followed.

Now you will ask that how did evil actually generate because in beginning there was no bad karma. The thing is that even the intention of harming someone and attempts can generate bad karma. Our mindset towardds others must be good.

4) Nah, in eastern philosophy even beginners know this, yeah but in east also very less people actually know about themselves!

5) Yes we have free will. If given two paths with one path we know as thousand times better than other path, Still by our free will we can choose the bad one. 6) Free will is necessary for love i.e. relationship with ourselves and God. Love is morality harming any sentinent being is not. 6) God is capable of evil but he/she(whatever) does not do it.

imagine the accounting of it. It must be truly larger than life!

The author is simply funny in his humanity.

Without an observer nothing exists. What does exist depends on the perspective of the observer.

If you were a lego structure, would it be upsetting to be made into something else?

If you are trying to make the perfect widget, what to do with the previous attempts? What if reuse would allow for faster iterations? If perfection is the goal how hard is the choice?

Old people need to make room for young ones who are always more deserving.

The way we age we are still far from perfection. Nature needs a few more rounds.

The cruel formula is how we got here. Im sure single cell organisms would have loved to be the final iteration but sadly for them that didn't happen. Our challenges are much like theirs. We also think we want a life without challenges eventho we are what we are because of them.

Nice article tho, keep trying :)

What choice did the wasp have but to infect and inflict suffering upon the caterpillar? For through that suffering a hundred new wasps are given life, whose primary goal is to find other caterpillars and continue the cycle.

The removal of this form of suffering from the existence of the caterpillar would require the extinction (and associated suffering) of every living member of that species of wasp.

How can karma be negative to the wasp that has no choice but to act in the way it does by biological necessity? More generally, how does karma reconcile with any act originating from biology?

If every creature on earth decided to inflict absolutely no harm on any other creature, then the only option would be to eliminate all life from the planet.

Karma suffers from the problem of evil just as much as western religion.

1) You are right wasp, and similar beings dont have much choice, whatever they do they are mistly dictated by nature and they have to act accordingly. That is why there is no karma for them. They cannot create any karma or 'sin' BUT they can suffer the reactions of the bad karma they have done in past life (in a species when they actually had the intelligence to differentiate between right and wrong).

A crude example: A man torturing a caterpillar for fun, may have to take birth in a life of caterpillar and endure the same pain, either by a human or different species.

Karma does not negate biology, karma is a law which acts on 'subtler' platform than gross law of biology. pleaseure and suffering decided according to law of karma is manifested by biology(through chance and probabilities)!

Thanks for such wonderful questions, am open to more.

So in the karmic worldview, creatures that have no free agency are karmically neutral? If so, how would the hypothetical soul that is born in the form of a caterpillar (or another lifeform with zero free agency) be able to ever gain karma?

Not karmically neutral. They can not produce new reactions but consume older ones.

Once its bad reactions( because of which he had to take a life form with so little consciousness ) are over it can get a new form with more intelligence.

Soul never takes a form, it is distinct from matter. Dull matter takes the form. It only 'directs' matter. After old body is destroyed it gets a new body.

I find this interesting, do you have a recommendation for further reading?

There is a monk who likes to explain eastern philosophy in a very wholesome and technical way. Book Reference: 1>. 'Demystifying Reincarnation' https://www.amazon.in/Demystifying-Reincarnation-Chaitanya-C...

2>. 'Frequently unanswered questions' https://www.amazon.in/Frequently-Unanswered-Questions-Chaita...

For a way too technical and scientific analysis of eastern philosophy check out 'Atma Paradigm' series(my respect to you if you actually complete that): 3>. https://m.youtube.com/@TheAtmaParadigm/videos

High quality articles on various controversial scenarios in terms of karma https://www.thespiritualscientist.com/?s=Karma________

The wasp can choose to start integrating non-caterpillar food sources into its diet, reducing suffering at first while it evolves the necessary digestive system, ultimately minimizing and eliminating suffering.

Wasps are somewhat doomed that they haven't made this choice before. The pit gets deeper and deeper the more you dig. The climb will be longer and harder the later you start.

If fish can learn to breathe air, walk on land, and care for their young, wasps can learn to not eat caterpillars.

The wasp hatchlings eat the caterpillar from the inside. The wasp needs the caterpillar as a vessel for its eggs.

The wasp has a choice like a tapeworm can choose to exist outside of the gut.. that is, it doesn't have any choice at all.

Incorrect. The tapeworm can choose where and how in the gut it exists. It can choose how much it leeches from its host. There are always choices to be made that direct our evolution, for you, me, the wasp, and the tapeworm.

Your attitude is fatalistic. You're saying we're all doomed to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors until we die or get lucky. That's a belief. A false one at that.

The tapeworm has no conception that it exists inside a larger creature and that its nutrition is obtained by leeching off its host.

The tapeworm has no choice because it has no ability to comprehend the context of its own existence. A lot of human beings find themselves in the same predicament through no fault of their own.

That seems so 100% wrong to me. Who are you to say what tapeworms do or don't comprehend? We don't even understand consciousness, yet here you are exclaiming that tapeworms are essentially robots fated to die of extinction.

They are not. They are conscious beings in charge of their lives and evolution like any other being is. They might have less brain cells than us, but you don't know what they are thinking.

Pretty sure they are not contemplating the problem of evil and whether they can make better moral choices. But, you know, who knows, right?

Animals do not become thinking beings, by human standards, just because we wish it to be so. I have had cats for most of my life. They are wonderful conscious and sentient beings. But they have limitations. As far as I can tell, they are a type of biological machine. They have a brain that is essentially some very advanced hardware. On that hardware is running very advanced software, that provides the cat with e.g. sensory functions, memory, processing and body control. Which means it can sense, see, feel, react and decide based on stimuli, sensory inputs, memory, programmed reactions, inherent drives, instincts etc. Does that make the cat an automaton? Maybe so, probably so. But it is an automaton, and a learning-adaptive one at that, so advanced that it is conscious and sentient. I think the cat very much feels and experiences that it is alive, feels and makes decisions.

As we observe the natural world, it seems that various types of animals have different levels of "consciousness" and "sentience". I don't think the caterpillar is very conscious and thinking, it is running a smaller program on less hardware, but I think it may be more living than biology in general gives it credit for. I think we have the same functions as described, and more. Including limitations that we don't think about most of the time. As the cat also does not. This "more" is what separates us from animals. We have the same basic system, but we also have more than this. Which, among many things, gives rise to us contemplating what consciousness and sentience is, both in ourselves and in the animal world. And makes us perceive good and evil and have morals. For the cat good and evil is irrelevant. It does not have morals. It has a nature, which is the program running for that type of animal. The nature of the cat is to kill and eat the mouse. Good and evil is not involved. The wasp lays eggs in the caterpillar. Good and evil is not involved. It is nature and it is their programming. Where we humans may be able to use our consciousnes to change our programming to some extent, the animals cannot change their programming. It evolves indirectly over time and generations.

You seem to think that evolution is both an intelligent and controllable process. It isn't.

It literally is though. Sexual selection, emphasis on selection, is conscious. You choose half the genes of your descendants. Unless there's only one mating option. You also choose where you hang, and what you eat, which drives adaptations to that environment.

You might feel like you have conscious control over the process of acting on your preferences to select the candidate for the randomish splicing of the genes of your partner's parents and your own parents.

Did you choose your preferences, though?

Yes! I've consciously decided to learn to like many things in life that I used to hate, because they are good for me. I see no reason to assume animals aren't capable of the same. It just takes time.

How does this pattern of thought not lead to eugenics?

"A set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population"?

That just describes sexual selection in general. Of course you think with your big head when choosing a mate, not the small one that's easily fooled.

You make it sound like choosing good genes for your offspring is evil or something.