Do Parasites Disprove God?

Cayenne Tick photo from Pixabay

Sir David Attenborough, the beloved naturalist and documentary narrator, has said that one reason he doesn’t believe in Young-Earth Creationism is the existence of parasites (specifically, parasites that exist by living in eyeballs, making children blind). Whether Young-Earth Creationism is true or not, this strikes me as an especially interesting question for Christian scientists: do we assume that suffering caused by creatures is a result of the Fall, or is it somehow part of God’s good creation?

Animal Suffering

This is really a two-part question, I suppose. There is animal suffering - a zebra is eaten by a lion; and there is human suffering - a child goes blind because of a parasite. C. S. Lewis argued that animal suffering is actually more difficult to make sense of, because animals don’t seem to be guilty of sin, and because suffering cannot contribute to their moral improvement. Others have argued that animal suffering is not really a theological problem at all, because animals don’t experience consciousness as humans do and don’t suffer in the same way.

I tend to agree with Lewis (as I do on most things). I think both kinds of suffering, resulting from the simple survival instincts of creatures, need explaining. I believe that God created the universe and called it good, and that He is the author of all life.

The Origin of Parasites

Parasites present a special problem to those of us who believe in the goodness of creation before the Fall. Here are creatures that can only exist by bringing harm to other creatures. An eye-boring worm could not live in a world where it did not make creatures go blind. Did God create eye-boring worms before the Fall? Did Noah bring two eye-boring worms on the Ark? If not by an accident of evolution, where did these things come from?

An Evolutionary Creationist might argue that parasites are one side effect of God creating by evolutionary processes - to make a majestic giraffe by the mechanisms of evolution, some steps are to create a series of intermediary species, some of which will be cute and cuddly, and others will be parasitic worms. It might be that these parasites, even though they cause pain and harm, also result in good things that we haven’t discovered yet, and provide some kind of balance to the natural system that could not be achieved otherwise. We have to trust in the sovereignty of God on these things (even as we try to solve what mysteries we can).

A Young-Earth Creationist might argue that parasites were created after the Fall, or had a different role before the Fall, and are part of God’s judgement on His creation. This is an area where I struggle to identify with the Young-Earth argument: are we really to believe that when God created animals that harm - lions or anacondas or sharks, He expected them to eat grass and vegetables? Or did God make all creatures who feed on other creatures after He called creation good?

This line of questioning leads to some other interesting questions about what animals will be like on the New Earth after Jesus returns: Is death always bad? Are animal deaths bad? Will there be meat in God’s eternal Kingdom? If there is, will it be miraculously created by God? I can’t imagine butchering an animal in a perfect world, but a butcher probably can’t imagine being unemployed in a perfect world. There’s a lot here to chew on.

The Bigger Question

The bigger question about the evils of the world is whether a good God created it. Apologists and evangelists have been wrestling with how to respond to injustice for centuries, and while no answer is totally satisfying, there are several thoughtful responses. The ones I find most compelling are those based on free will and how creatures in the world learn to love and to choose good things (to choose good, there must be an option for bad).

Things get a lot trickier, of course, when we start talking about injustice that is not caused by free persons, such as natural disasters, sicknesses, or parasites. You could take it a step back and say that there are other free agents at play, such as angels and demons; or you could say that a broken world is a better environment for free creatures to exercise their wills to the fullest. Dr. Francis Collins makes an interesting argument that nature itself has a kind of freedom that allows for evil things to “naturally” arise. (I don’t actually understand his argument, but it is interesting.)

The point is that the question hasn’t gone unaddressed or unanswered, even if no answer puts us completely at ease. And I would argue that the Christian answers make better sense of injustice than any other worldview - especially Atheism, which is based on the idea that we are only suited for survival and shouldn’t care one bit how others get along, from an evolutionary standpoint.

The Scientific Issue

Issues about justice are philosophical, not scientific. But philosophy and science intersect at points where we ask if the universe has purpose - if it is directed toward a bigger story, and how each creature fits into that story (to the extent that we can understand). If there are parasites in God’s heavenly Kingdom, I am confident that they will not feed on children’s eyeballs, because Jesus promised that there will be no mourning or crying or pain. (To paraphrase Lewis, perhaps there is some overlap between parasites’ Heaven and humanity’s Hell.)

As for the predatory animals, how God deals with them is not part of our human story, and we are not privy to that information. We don’t even understand all of our own story, much less that of every creature on the planet.

The Conclusion

While things like parasites make me sad and angry and sometimes fearful, they don’t disprove God’s existence. I know enough about God from other sources of knowledge (the Bible, the Church, personal experience, logic and reason, and historical evidence) to believe with confidence that His character and ways are good. He has perfect answers to all of the questions that plague me. I will try my whole life to find out the answers that God already knows, because that is fun for me. But I know that I will barely scratch the surface.

Parasites are awful, but a day is coming when blindness is over and nature and mankind are restored to glory. Then we’ll have all of eternity to bask in God’s creative goodness and learn the rest of the story.