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Is God cruel because He created animals and infants that appear to suffer for no good reason?

6/13/2011

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http://www.thinkatheistradio.com/albums/dr-bruce-hood/

What Animals Are Self-Aware? (The Mirror Test As Evidence):

There have been approximately 8.7 million different species in the history of the Earth (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/science/30species.html?_r=0) 99.9 percent of which have gone extinct, and so far only .000000103448275862068965517241379 percent of those have the capacity for some level of self-awareness.  This doesn't mean we can do anything we want to animals, but following Draper, since none of our 'standard' theodicies seem to apply to animals and infants, we wouldn't expect them to suffer as much as developed human beings on theism, but we would expect this on the hypothesis of indifference.  So, which hypothesis does the data support?  
 
Animals that have passed the mirror test include:

  • All great apes:
    • Humans – Humans tend to fail the mirror test until they are about 18 months old, or what psychoanalysts call the "mirror stage".[3][4][5]
    • Bonobos[6]
    • Chimpanzees[6][7]
    • Orangutans[8]
    • Gorillas - Initially it was thought that gorillas did not pass the test, but there are now well-documented reports of gorillas (such as Koko[9]) passing the test.
  • Bottlenose dolphins[10]
  • Orcas[11]
  • Elephants[12]
  • European Magpies[13]
Even this may not be all that significant since there may be different levels of self-awareness (5 in fact, where are that is required to pass the mirror test is level 2 awareness).  It is important to keep in mind that even though none of our standard theodicies seem to apply to animals and infants that what follows from this is not that they would have zero self-awareness, but only that they wouldn’t be AS self-aware as humans.  It would be akin to erroneously inferring that just because someone is not smart enough to get an A, that they should or are only capable of getting an F.  Interestingly, this seems to be exactly what we find:

http://psychology.emory.edu/cognition/rochat/Five%20levels%20.pdf
degrazia_selfawarenessanimals.pdf
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