It seems your sensing an emotion that isn't there.
I'm going off two things you said here. "However, a creator of any such cruel process would very much be evil, imo". You firstly called the process itself cruel in that statement. Secondarily to that, you describe that anyone that would create that process would be evil. My choice in words describing this as a "disdain" of the whole thing doesn't seem far off. If I called someone's actions cruel and they who did them evil, I'd say that conveys disdain from me towards all of it. Even if you exclude God from it, you are calling evolution itself "cruel". That's not a happy word.
I would call the creator of evolution evil, but that's as far as I care to go.
And he would be evil because you consider evolution to be "cruel". And that is my entire point here. I don't consider evolution to be cruel. Do you consider the birth process of a child from the mother to be a cruel evil? If so, that puts you into the camp of those who wrote the Bible who said, "To the woman he said, "I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children." They mythologized this by saying the process of life is now a "curse" upon us because we sinned against God.
They share a certain view that life is "fallen", in a state of sin because they view life as "cruel". To me, what I hear you doing is very much a continuation of the same point of view, starting with the premise that these things are "bad" or "cruel" as you view them rather than good. They dealt with it by saying it's because humans sinned against God. You deal with it by saying God either doesn't exist or is evil. To me that's just flipsides of the same coin with neither recognizing that evolution, or life itself, is not "cruel".
I wouldn't hate such a being, though I can't say I would feel respect or gratitude towards it either.
I don't know about that. If I branded someone "evil" I don't think my feelings about them could be considered indifferent or neutral.
If I were to have the power to create life, I wouldn't.
Oh dear.
Do you then see parents who bring a child into this world as doing a disservice to that child? Isn't being better than non-being? Isn't life better than death? Is life worth the struggles? You see, I think the whole thing does in fact come down to one's own emotional and spiritual response to their own existence, to their own being. I see life and the process of birthing it through evolution as beautiful, myself.
There never would have been an evolution or rainbows and campfire songs.
That's two bad. There's lots of beauty in being alive. Bumper Sticker for your car: "Start Seeing Beauty".
It's too much responsibility, too much of a pain, to deal with creating life.
Not to be too personal here, but would your parents agree with that when they brought you into the world? Wouldn't they consider that giving you life was a gift to you? I'm not so cynical to assume that parents give birth to children because they're "bored", or something like that.
I think it has more to do with love.
But, let's say I did.
For starters, I would make it easier to understand how to manipulate genes.
I would say that our ability to do this is actually outpacing our capacity to be responsible with that! When we play God when we're little more than impulsive children who think all of reality is about them and their wants and desires, then I'd say if I were God I'd make it even harder for us to figure that out! We're already destroying ourselves because as Einstein said, "
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."
I would improve the time it takes to evolve.
I'm not so sure it takes as long as you imagine. We can observe it happening within a few generations. Personally I think it "speeds up", depending on the need and the rate of change happening. But I am also extending evolution beyond just our biological evolution, but social and cultural evolution, as well as our cognitive and consciousness awareness. I think the pace of it can in fact be directly influenced by our own actions and activities.
I would make it so that genes that become useless fall away faster.
Why? When was the last time a residual tail hurt anyone?
I would make it so that germs and bacteria had a win-win relationship with life forms they survive off of.
That already does exist. There are germs that are good for us and we need them for survival, and others which harm us but are good for other life forms. Why must it be about us as humans as the center of all that is considered good? You see, that is the entire source of the problem here. An anthropocentric view of the cosmos and evolution. It's "cruel" ONLY from the perspective of one single organism, namely humans wondering why God as the Sky Parent didn't make things more in our favor. Evolution is not "cruel", unless you are trying to reconcile it with an anthropocentric worldview.
I would do a lot of things, it's not hard to come up with ways to improve evolution, especially when you're omnipotent.
One of the biggest challenges I think for people is to shift their ideas about what this God would look like, and notions of omnipotence and omniscience are really fine places to start!
Yes, notions of God as all-seeing, all-knowing Sky Parent don't work to well with reality as we understand it anymore. I see a lot, if not all of our struggle is in reimagining life and our place in it, both for religious people, and the non-religious.
