Episode 171: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Theodicy? (The Book of Job)

I have a great life, but it's not a perfect life. But it's good. My shit's like an above ground pool. You ever seen one of them?

The great and boss has spoken. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Who are you? Who are you? A very bad man.

I'm a very good man. Good man.

They think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to that man. Anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man.

I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to very bad wizards. I'm Tamelr Summers from the University of Houston. Dave, today is my birthday. What did you get me for a present?

Shit. How did I not know that it was your birthday, man? Happy birthday.

You didn't know?

I didn't. I guess I'm not on Facebook. It's amazing how outsourcing birthdays to Facebook has just ruined my ability to so is this the big 50?

No, it is not. I am in my 40s.

Well, I got you something secret that I can't discuss.

You did my birthday, but you still got me.

Yeah, well, I was saving it. Let's just say that it vibrates. It's large.

Paul Bloom.

No. Happy birthday. Let's have this episode be in the spirit of celebration and a cheerful spirit while we discuss the problem of evil and the Odyssey.

Yeah. So today we're going to celebrate. We're going to talk about the Book of Job in the second segment and a long promised episode, one that a lot of listeners have been urging us to get to. And then in the first segment, I don't know exactly, it seems like a good coupling with the Book of Job, but I can't articulate why exactly, but it is a manifesto of transhumanism by one of the transhumanist, I guess, founders, Zoltan Istvan. Zoltan Istvan. He was a former presidential candidate in 2016

I voted for him. I remember now. Just kidding. I did not vote.

And it's also kind of a screed against environmentalism, which I think a lot of people would take more issue with. I was more offended by the kind of philosophical naivete that underlies this.

Oh, interesting. Not the actual empirical stuff. There's some philosophy here that bothers you.

There is, and it's something we've seen before, like more sophisticated versions of it than this. But there is kind of underlying this piece, and it's called Environmentalists Are Wrong. Nature Isn't Sacred and we should replace it. And then it just shows this kind of terrifying picture of, like, a skyline full of buildings with their lights on.

I know normally it wouldn't be like it's just like a cityscape, but the way that it's like the photo has been edited, it just makes it look like an endless sea of skyscraper windows.

The whole thing is very it's some sort of combination of antinatalism, which I assume you like about it, and Brave New World, or some maybe slightly darker vision of utopia.

Wait, I don't think it's antinatalist. One of the central things that he starts off with is that transhumanists want to live forever, which is like as opposite as you can get.

Well, yes, but it's antinatalist in that it thinks life as we currently have it based in biology and biological human nature is full of suffering and evil and Mother Earth is a hostile place. I'm quoting, life is vicious. It makes me think of pet dogs and cats and how it's reported that they sometimes start eating their owner after they've died. Can we quickly just get to the because it's very early in the piece. Many transhumanists want to change all this. They want to rid their worlds of biology. They favor concrete, steel, and code, where once biological evolution was necessary to create primates, and then modern humans, conscious and directed evolution has replaced it. Planet Earth doesn't need iniquitous natural selection, it needs premeditated moral algorithms conceived by logic that do the most good for the largest number of people. This is something that an AI will probably be better at than humans in less than two decades time.

Okay, when I read that I'm not convinced this isn't just a troll and that he's giving transhumanism a bad name.

Well, no, Jeffrey Epstein gave transhumanism.

That's actually how it came across your desk.

Right? I subscribed to this thing called the browser, which gives articles and after Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, before his, quote unquote suicide, it came out that he was this transhumanist. He was very inspired by this. He wanted to spread his seed and his DNA in some new Mexican compound or something and wanted to get his head frozen and all the things that but yeah, then this guy was embarrassed by the fact that Jeffrey Epstein he thought it was terrible press.

And it's unclear what Jeffrey Epstein fucking a lot of women to have his baby is adding to the transhumanist cause.

You don't think that's a necessary step to our digital utopia?

Is he, like, genetically combining them with little robots? At least they're just Jeffrey Epstein kids. So can I just read really quickly the definition? Because I had to go look up the Wikipedia definition of transhumanism. So transhumanism is an international philosophical movement that advocates for the transformation of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellect and physiology. And this is actually such a long Wikipedia article compared to what I think the actual influence of these people is that you can just tell that it's a bunch of nerds. Yeah, but that sentence that advocating for the transformation of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to enhance human intellect and physiology. That alone I don't object to very much. It's the ridiculous things that this guy starts saying that border on eugenics and shit.

So to be charitable, before we start, and I think you're going to have a higher opinion of this there is a lot of suffering in the Earth. There's nothing. And I think he definitely straw man's environmentalists. I don't think they see nature as sacred in the way that he seems to attribute to them, but something that would improve the well being of sentient creatures would be one that at the very least would be worth taking seriously as absolutely.

And I will say at least I have come across environmentalists who seem to view it as sacred. Nature is sacred in everything but the religious sense, and even sort of unable to defend why, say, environments should not be changed, for instance, or why human beings being in the environment and changing it is wrong. So I'll give them that. I think I would give them that.

Yeah, there are extremists of all kinds.

And I live in Ithaca, New York, where I'm probably more likely to encounter people here actually recycle. Isn't that crazy?

We recycle fucking wax. That doesn't do shit, though. I think that's something that everybody seems to agree upon, like that recycling is actually kind of a wash in terms of the Earth, but yet we still do it anyway. That said, the hubris of this is kind of like flabbergasting. It's just astonishing. So there's two questions, right? There's the empirical question of whether this technological new age that is run by these people in the trans, whether they could possibly accomplish what this guy seems to think that they could accomplish. That's number one. I would be very skeptical of that, but I suppose that's open for debate.

It's a ridiculous optimism,