Sociobiologists have been criticized for suggesting explanations of behaviors that cannot be proven, and these ill-received hypotheses have been called "just so stories."  Every new idea starts out as a hypothesis, and deciding if it can be tested occurs later.  It is important to base the hypothesis on a structure of acccepted beliefs, which for me would require that the hypothesis be consistent with the reductionist perspective.  To merely state that "angels did it," for example, is an abdication of intellectual responsibility.  The "angels did it" explanations are the real "just so stories."

Voltaire had fun recalling for his readers some classic "just so stories" concerning the origin of evil on earth.  Scholars admonish us to not make fun of them, which is easy from our modern perspective, with the idea that a thing concieved in innocence should be shielded from harsh judgement.  Sorry, but I can't reserve such kindness for frankly silly non-explanations.  Their childishness is so obvious, and the intolerance of their adherents for reasonable alternative viewpoints was so extreme, that these primitive "just so stories" deserve the ridicule that is even easier to heap upon them today han during Voltaire's day.

Here is Voltaire's brief summary of ancient stories that endeavor to account for the existence of evil in what therefore must be a flawed world.  It appeared as part of an essay "Well, Everything is Well," an entry in Voltaire's Dictionaire Philosophique (1764), a collection of miscellaneous thoughts.

After the Platonists, Basilides pretended in the first centuries of the church that God had allotted the making of our world to his latest angels and that they, not being very skillful, made things as we see them.  This theological fable crumbles to dust before the terrible objection that it is not in the nature of an omnipotent, omniscient Deity to have a world built by architects who don't know their trade.

Simon, who felt the force of this objection, tried to forestall it by saying that the angel who supervised the workshop is damned for botchmg his work; but burning that angel does us no good.

The Greek story about Pandora meets the objection no better.  The box in which all the evils are hidden, and at the bottom of which rests hope, is a charming allegory; hut this Pandora was made by Vulcan only to be revenged on Prometheus, who bad formed a man from clay.

The Indians have not succeeded either.  God, having created man, gave him a drug to keep him healthy forever; the man loaded the drug on his donkey, the donkey got thirsty, the serpent told him of a spring, and while he was drinking, the serpent took the drug for himself.

The Syrians imagined that when man and woman were created in the fourth heaven, they decided to eat a cake instead of the ambrosia which was their natural diet.  The ambrosia they could exhale through their pores; but after eating the cake, they had to go to the toilet.  Man and woman together asked an angel where were the facilities.  "Look ye," says the angel, "see that little planet down there, no bigger than a minute, some sixty million leagues from here? That's the privy for the whole universe; now get there right away."  So they went, and were left there; and that's why, ever since, our world has been what it is.

While some of the silliest of these just so stories now reside in history's dustbin, other remnants remain. It is important for every thinking, discerning person to be wary of explanations with ancient origins.  So much has been discovered, and an elaborate architecture of theoretical relationships now connects a broader than ever body of observations, that it behooves us to eschew primitive residues as we invent our own new additions to a more enlightened belief system.

This site opened:  May 19, 1999.   Last Update: May 19, 1999