God loves bombardier beetles

 

These were my midnight musings last night, but I didn´t have time to jot them down until now. Because I was sleeping it off, obviously! LOL.

The quip “God loves beetles” is intended as a jocular jibe against Christianity from an atheist-scientific perspective. There are currently 400,000 described species of beetles. When the quip was quipped (around 1968), I believe the number was 250,000. The point being that beetles are the single largest taxon. Therefore, God must love beetles. I mean, why did he create so many species of Coleoptera otherwise? And since Anglican clergymen would presumably find this deeply embarrassing, it´s excellent atheist rhetoric. Or something.

But is it really? Paul said that all of Nature awaits the arrival of the sons of God, and then Nature will be redeemed. So why can´t Paul´s God love Insecta? I mean, where were *you* when He created the bombardier beetle? Medieval Catholicism had a crypto-Neoplatonist tendency, in which all of reality was seen (almost panentheistically) as a gigantic chain of being. C S Lewis probably had the same perspective. I can see him laughing at the smart aleck atheists over a pint of beer at the Prancing Pony. “Yes, the beetles, well, I always wondered about that one myself”. Why can´t a god “constrained” by Neoplatonist “Forms” create a lot of beetles? But sure, I suppose it´s hard to explain why a Protestant god created 400,000 species of Coleoptera, since he seems to have an inordinate fondness for humans (or at least some of them)…

Other religions presumably have even less issues with the accursed bugs. In Islam, I presume Allah can create more or less anything at any time, just to show his omnipotence to humans as a kind of “teaching device”. And in Hinduism, Shiva creates beetles as he goes along, as part of his crazy dance, simply because he can (I suppose Kali or even Krishna could do the same!).

So what´s the problem really?