In defense of Bob Thiel's takedown of evolutionary theory, anonymous commenter on May 7, 2013 at 11:22 AM wrote, "It is easy to make scientific theories that can seem to prove evolution as near-fact based on our research. OK, take that a step further, and explain the chances of these evolved species working for, and complimenting, each other for each other's existence, as well as being the proper size, material, and with the proper tools. To me, the chances of that happening so perfectly is what needs to be looked at, not the theory of individual evolutionary theory on individual species.That's easy to accept. However, accepting the fact that they all developed perfectly to serve each other is a different avenue."
I recently wrote, just for the hell of it, a piece that satirizes the creationist idea that god built the universe specifically to house human beings. Thus it bears on the problem Thiel discusses and addresses the problem of interdependence this writer calls attention to.
Creation Science and the
Theodicy Problem
Philosophers and theologians who argue about the question
of theodicy—“How could a loving god allow evil to exist in the universe?”—often
cite malaria as a self-evident example of evil. It sickens millions of people
per year and kills hundreds of thousands, many of them innocent children.
Atheists put forth this awful toll as evidence there is no god. Believers
counter that their God works in mysterious ways and only the limitations of our
pitiful human minds prevent us from seeing the full glory of the Divine Plan,
in which we must trust that malaria plays an integral role.
Evidence suggests that the believers are right. However,
the limitations of their pitiful human minds have in fact kept them from
perceiving the full glory of God’s plan for Plasmodium falciparum, the
malaria parasite. Even the most faithful disciples of creation theory fail to
grasp the special place it occupies in the design and construction of the
universe.
Some background is in order. To many human minds the
universe appears fine-tuned for human existence. If certain fundamental
physical constants such as gravity and electromagnetism were only slightly
different from what they are, chemistry (and thus life) would be impossible.
But life obviously does exist—in fact on our planet it thrives. The earth
occupies the perfect orbit in the solar system for liquid water to abound, and
therefore it can support a rich supply of living things from which we human
beings derive food, clothing, and shelter. Believers in special creation
maintain that all these benefits showered on our kind could only have been
arranged intentionally. The faithful have named this idea the Anthropic
Principle: everything in the universe tends toward the promotion of human life.
Close examination of Plasmodium and its relation to
humanity, however, calls the Anthropic Principle seriously into question. It is
not so much the harm the organism does to human beings that tips the Creator’s
hand. It is the details of Plasmodium’s convoluted life cycle. In order
to persist in the world, the parasite morphs through several stages of
existence that require it to alternate between two hosts: the Anopheles
gambiae mosquito and Homo sapiens. Inside the mosquito, Plasmodium
gametocytes and microgametocytes join in the manner of ova and sperm and merge
to form sporozoites. Next, the mosquito must inject that form of the microbe
into a living human body, a warm, moist environment that supplies a hospitable liver
and nourishing red blood cells. Inside us the sporozoites migrate to the liver,
where they reproduce prolifically by cell division and change into merozoites,
which stream out of the liver into the bloodstream. Thousands of them at a time
burrow into corresponding thousands of red cells, where each reproduces till
the teeming offspring enlarge into trophozoites and cram their host cell to
bursting. Members of that stage bud off new merozoites, which spill back out
into the vein to burrow into still more red cells. Repeated episodes of such
assaults cause the human host to suffer waves of chills and fever, followed by
respiratory distress and impaired liver function. Some of the Plasmodium
cells transform to gametocytes and microgametocytes, to be drawn into the gut
of a feeding Anopheles so they can unite and start the cycle all over
again.
Consider how miraculous this arrangement is. Such Byzantine
intricacy could never have arisen by chance through the random operation of
natural processes. The cycle of interdependence is directed by codes programmed
into the three separate genomes of the mosquito, the one-celled parasite, and
the human being. Not only does each genome contain the millions of letters of
DNA code required to shape its own organism’s bodily growth and behavior, but
also all three conspire toward the purpose of sustaining one of them. The
mosquito’s genes shape its bowels as a surrogate womb for Plasmodium
sexual reproduction. Human genes program our bodies to produce liver cells and
red blood cells with just the right shapes and just the right nutrients for
Plasmodium cells to grow and divide. In creation science, these genomes fit the
definition of specified information. Such a vast quantity of it,
intertwined with such irreducible complexity, can lead to no conclusion other
than this: the Creator composed the codes and meticulously spelled them out by
placing each DNA letter at the exact point in the sequence where it contributes
to the end result.
That is the how. As for why the Creator intertwined
the lives of these three species in just the way He did, consider these facts. Anopheles
can live perfectly well without Plasmodium, but the reverse is not so.
The parasite cannot persist without the mosquito as its brood site and vector.
Likewise, Plasmodium requires its secondary host, Homo sapiens,
for the asexual reproduction stage of its life cycle, yet the human does not
require the parasite at all. Clearly the creator charged both hosts, the
arthropod and the vertebrate, with the mission to sacrifice their comfort and
safety to the protist.
The conclusion is clear: the Anthropic Principle is wrong.
The laws of the universe were not fine-tuned to suit human beings, except
insofar as our existence contributes to a greater good. The earth’s ecology was
not delicately balanced to make a home for you and me. No, the universe with
its untold numbers of galaxies, including our own Milky Way containing the
solar system hosting our wet rocky planet orbiting smack in the habitable zone
around its central star, was all carefully arranged to form a comfortable and
scenic habitat for the creator’s most beloved creature, Plasmodium
falciparum. He dedicated the richly nutritious host Homo sapiens and
the airborne vector Anopheles gambiae to the propagation and
spread of that ultimate jewel of His creation. That is to say, in all He did
the Creator was guided by the Plasmodic Principle.
The Plasmodic Principle completely overturns all previous
speculation about the relation of malaria to the theodicy problem. Malaria
cannot be evil, since the organism that causes it is the focus of creation. The
mosquito that transmits it cannot be evil, since its existence is necessary for
the parasite to reproduce and spread. At first human beings were not evil either.
For nearly six thousand years after the week of creation our existence was as
benign as that of mosquitoes. Near the middle of what we count as the 19th
century, however, we started dosing malaria sufferers with quinine to sicken
and kill the parasite, and in the 20th we sprayed massive quantities
of DDT to try to wipe out the mosquito. Hostilities continue to this day, with
updated strategies and materiel. In our depravity we keep devising new means to
thwart the will of the Creator by attacking His most cherished creature and the
vector required to perpetuate it. We have fallen as low as Judas. We introduced
suffering and death into the life of the very being we were placed on earth to
support. So the theodicy question now becomes, “Why does an omnipotent and
beneficent Creator allow humankind to exist?”
