Questions for theists

[Esquilax]

Pick whichever war you want.

They will all be a tour de force in cooperating to achieve an objective - the objective of kill or be killed. In-group / Out-group hostility. Competition for scarce resources.

Yep, Esquilax, cooperation has always been a great Darwinian survival technique.

Bet you feel foolish for having asked how Darwinian survival entails suffering.

So you're just going to restate your original position again without adding any evidence, eh? That's okay, I'll straighten you out.

The problem with your thesis here, is that in the case of many recent wars, the cause hasn't been competition over resources at all: world war 2 was sparked by ideological differences, world war one by a cascading sequence of diplomatic issues. None of these were purely for survival, and one could quite comfortably argue that life would have been much better had we not fought those wars at all.

I'm not denying that, the further back we go, we can find instances of wars fought for survival; of course we can. Competition is a key piece of evolution. But we need to think: when was the last war one nation fought against another merely because not doing so would cause that society to die out? It's been a while since we've had to actually fight a real, natural, Darwinian competition for survival, and why?

Oh, that's right, it's due to cooperation. Grouping together, cooperating, has turned us into the dominant species on the planet. It scaffolded us up to a point where we no longer need to fight for survival among ourselves; our food production has drastically increased, our ability to shelter ourselves, provide for all our needs, is well within hand. Not all over the place obviously, but those places where we don't have those abilities just contrasts more keenly with those that do.

By cooperating, we've been able to remove all those needs that required conflict and death dealing in the past. That's just demonstrably true.

Who feels foolish now, Lion?