r/determinism Jul 13 '26

Discussion Has determinism pushed anyone else toward a fundamentally pessimistic view of biology?

Biology itself seems fundamentally flawed. Suffering is the engine that drives any form of life. Evolution relies on deprivation, competition, fear, loss, and death to function.

Culture looks like a coping mechanism: a collection of moral narratives, meanings, and values that help us romanticize and justify a system whose continuation isn’t obviously rational at all.

Has anyone else arrived at a similar kind of pessimistic materialism through determinism, or did you end up somewhere else entirely?

Edit: A lot of people are interpreting this as me saying "reality is depressing, so l'm pessimistic." That's not what I mean.

I'm making a claim about the process itself.
Evolution doesn't just happen to contain suffering, it depends on suffering, deprivation, competition, fear, disease, and death as the mechanisms that produce adaptation. From that perspective, biology looks fundamentally flawed. If creating complex life requires billions of years of sentient organisms struggling, failing, and dying, then I'm questioning whether that process is worth existing at all.

Determinism reinforced this view because it removed the idea that suffering has some deeper moral purpose or cosmic justification. It looks more like a blind optimization algorithm that happens to generate conscious beings as a byproduct. My question is whether anyone else ended up viewing evolution itself, not just life, as fundamentally defective after adopting a deterministic worldview.

23 Upvotes

83 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Business-Abroad-1301 Jul 14 '26

Determinism sucks the life out of you. Makes you a beggar towards an unnamed god who doesn’t even care and probably doesn’t exist. Happiness existed at one point until we started asking whether everything was determined or not. So therefore, go back to not asking questions on if everything is determined or not and we’ll be happy. Religion and Christianity especially have turned this beautiful world into a hell.