Would a loving God create Tarantula Wasps?

Tom Smith (with relevant video):

These creatures sting spiders, paralyze them, carry off the still living bodies, lay an egg on them, which hatches into a larvae, which then eats the paralyzed spider alive, avoiding key body systems so as to make sure it stays alive until the last possible moment.  You really have to hope spiders have no awareness, or else that they are reincarnated Nazis or something.  As I have said before, Darwin apparently found the existence of God and parasitoid wasps incompatible.  An alternative that worries me sometimes is that God did create parasitoid wasps and thinks they're really cool.

It's not clear to me why the existence of parasites poses a novel problem. To the contrary, the questions Tom poses strike me as being wrapped up in the broader problem of theodicy. Indeed, all three of the main monotheistic religions have struggled with the paradox of a good God and an evil world.

To be sure, there's an argument that animal suffering is a particularly serious theological problem. In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis contended that "The problem of animal suffering is appalling; not because the animals are so numerous. . . but because the Christian explanation of human pain cannot be extended to animal pain. So far as we know beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue: therefore they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it." Lewis went on to develop a complex and nuanced theology of animal pain, which is well treated in this article.

At the end of the day, however, it matters not which form of evil you chose to focus on. The problem of pain is either an obstacle to faith or not. Much has been written to try to explain why one should come down on one side or the other of that fence. But if you were to read just one thing on theodicy, might I suggest The Problem of Pain?

Comments

[Stephan Rogers]

One of Stephen J. Gould's greatest essays treats this topic: www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_nonmoral.html

[le sacre]

For the lazy and skeptical among us, it would be helpful when referencing others' arguments if you could give us at least just a tiny bit of the gist of their contents. Yeah, I know... I'm really lazy. But so many blogs, so little time!

[albert grabb]

I have always understood physical pain to be a biological requirement and it's existence never posed a a real theological challenge to me. What eventually brought me to atheism was mental illness. A loving god would not allow suffering through the randomness of neuronal migration during development.

[William Godsoe]

I agree that parasitism is intimately linked to the problem of theodicy. However parasitism by wasps provides a specific and unusually clear problem, at least for God as a designer because these animals engage in suffering that seems unnecessary and easy to fix.

The spider wasp in the video (family Pompilidae) has stung and an paralyzed the spider. It will bury the spider underground lay a single egg on its prey. The sting of some spider wasps species is so powerful that its prey dies, or at least remains unconscious. In other cases the spider wakes up and has to endure a wasp larvae devouring it flesh from the inside out while it is alive and confined it is crypt below ground. Howard Ensign Evans has a number of books that cover the amazing details of waps natural history (eg. Wasp Farm : A Scientist's Vivid Account of the Remarkable Lives of Wasps)

I am happy to concede that some suffering is necessary, for example predation of some species (spiders) by others (wasps). In what sense though can we call the actions the best design. Some predators kill spiders quickly (eg. mice, birds) some wasps paralyze spiders and so presumably mitigate their suffering.

If on the other hand we believe that there is a far-sighted designer at work we have to ask why he allowed suffering that seems trivially easy to eliminate (i.e. why not replace parasitic wasps with predators).