Luck or Fuck

I am trying to understand Richard Dawkins. I have not so much a problem with his evolutionism or atheism (in fact I share the latter). But he seems to swing from one extreme to another.

“The total amount of suffering per year is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease… the universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

So our world does not seem a very attractive place to live in. But then he writes

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

If the world is such an unattractive place, such a slough of despond, why should we consider ourselves lucky to be thrown into it? Dawkins’ description of the world is a description of hell. Why should you and I be happy to go to hell rather than remain in a peaceful Nirvana, where even the very concept of suffering does not seem to make sense?