Did God create the common cold?
John, I have an interesting question for a biology person like yourself. I find myself coming down with a cold, which got me thinking about some things…
I was thinking about viruses and how they are biological material, yet not being living organisms (at least not by current scientific definition),
What do you think about the origin of viruses? Were they most likely part of the curse? They are interesting little buggers…
Collin
Collin,
I really appreciate questions like yours, because they come from a mind that is asking, “does the idea of a created universe fit with what I see and know about the world?” I think there are lots of people who “believe” in God but don’t even bother to look for connections with the world we live in every day.
Pathogens (disease-causing organisms) would certainly not be an expected part of a universe created to be good and perfect. Yet we have lots of pathogens today. So, did God create them? If so, why? If not, where did they come from?
I’ll reference a great article in a moment, but first, here are a few of my thoughts. Remember, there are lots of things in our world today that are bad, but we know they were not created that way in the beginning. Every animal species is full of various genetic diseases, but all of them have appeared as a result of mutations over time. A perfect gene pool has decayed and so people today can suffer from cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, Down’s syndrome or thousands of other genetic disorders. So the creation can change and a perfect system can break and begin functioning in a way that was not the original function.
Bacteria also cause disease, but research makes clear that nearly all bacteria are at work in the world doing essential functions in the ecosystem. Life on the planet would be impossible without bacteria fixing nitrogen in the soil. Our digestive system has over 1000 species of bacteria helping us digest or food or producing vitamins. Bacteria create cheese, pickles, wine, yogurt and a host of other fermented foods. It is reasonable to think that bacteria were created with an essential, good function in every instance, but the decay produced by the fall (Romans 8:20) has broken down some of the created biological boundaries.
Viruses are much less understood than bacteria, but they also are, increasing, known to have an essential function in the living world. Here is a quote from the end of the mentioned article:
‘For sheer numbers, no other ocean beings can match viruses. Thousands, sometimes even millions of these molecular parasites inhabit every drop of surface seawater, outnumbering even bacteria by 10 to 1 … evidence that suggests that viruses are a powerful force in the sea, and one that determines how many plankton and ultimately how many fish, and even humans, an ocean ecosystem can support … viruses must have a profound influence on the entire oceanic ecosystem.
The creationist paradigm begins with a perfect world that breaks and decays. Evolution begins with nothing that moves toward more complex function through (at the biological level) mutation and selection. I have found that the idea of broken perfection fits our world much better than developing imperfection. I think those viruses that give us colds are part of that brokenness.
Here’s the article. You can find more like it by searching on “pathogens” or similar terms on creationist sites (see my resources list)
http://creation.com/did-god-make-pathogenic-viruses
