Are deformities proof against the existence of a good god? But we’re all deformed.
From my ebook The Endeavor of Life:
How do I account for the deformities in life? I choose to cover myself.
With regard to the defects in people and other living things, there’s no denying that humans live with the burden of severe cognitive or physical limitations that have been with them since birth. Such handicaps, however, are universal – within humankind and throughout all of life. All human beings are mortally dependent on others and greatly deficient in some area of cognitive or physical ability based on the optimal potential within the species. I don’t know about you, but despite all my flaws and limitations, my life is not proof that there’s no God. None of our relative impairments, no matter how well we do or don’t function, are an indicator for the value of our lives, the amount of happiness we can attain or whether or not a God exists to observe.
Judging the condition of individual lives as un-godly assumes that there are objective measures by which to determine what makes life good or what makes life normal. But quality of life is subjective and can be determined only from within each person, not by someone else’s observation. There is no other way to determine happiness except how an individual subjectively scales it from within – not how experts, scholars or people with opinions judge from without. And the fact that some people’s defects are severe and make their lives less normal than others isn’t evidence that no God exists.
For living things and how they live life, there’s no such thing as normal. There’s not a single normal human being on earth. A normal person has never lived. Find me someone you consider normal, and I’ll find a human context in which that person is strange, deformed and abnormal. If disability is your method of measure, then there are athletes and intellectuals everywhere to whom the rest of us are severely impaired by comparison. Does the dependence of disabled people show proof that no God could possibly exist? That also covers almost everyone – and certainly all small children.
We are right to use medicine to try to improve the lives of others. While there are no absolutes to normal, humans should try to correct the most severe disabilities or deformities. But we should do so with the realization that greater awareness or functionality results in greater burdens, expectations and potential moral culpabilities. Otherwise, a mentally immature life is innocent. A life unaware can’t know of a better life. A physically disabled life is far less potentially harmful to others.
Those who are disabled should be appreciated for the people they are, not what they should or could have been according to the traits of most humans. We should never fail to understand that there is nothing normal about life in the first place. We’re all born of chemical reactions that make us viable through forms and functions that are grotesque in many ways – so grotesque that we cover them up, hide them or dispense of them only in utmost privacy. It is normal to shit and piss from our fleshy privates.
Anything we might consider good, bad, flawed or appropriate in life is judged only with a sort of biological relativism. We judge what’s proper or deformed on the basis of psychological evolution and on social conditioning – not by any standards that can be objectively derived anywhere in the universe. Evolution and conditioning are the only basis with which we decide that something is wrong with a person missing digits and not wrong if he’s missing feathers or antennae. The truth is, life is life, no matter the form of the individual or the length of time each lives. Flaws are abundant throughout life, but there are no mistakes.
