We have almost certainly never anticipated that we would witness, in our lifetimes, a phenomenon as powerful, disturbing, and world shifting as the plague of Covid 19.
This pandemic the is not only claiming the lives of countless loved ones every day across the globe, but it has – in one fell swoop – brought to their knees all the major economies of the world. It has brought our lives to a standstill. Indeed, never before this have we witnessed a more potent demonstration of man’s helplessness before his All-powerful Maker.
One microscopic entity has unleashed a wave of terror and destruction that has lead to people becoming confined in their homes with all the the different aspects of our lives which we take for granted from going to school and work, to seeing family members, or shaking others hands, and watching football or cricket – all the events which define the pattern of modern life we all live by – have come to a shuddering halt.
One would have thought that a phenomenon as unusual as this one would have compelled even the most die-hard non believer in God to reconsider their most cherished beliefs in the face of this blantant display of Divine Might.
However it is perplexing to note that despite witnessing our science driven and technologically advanced world crumble before our eyes, some so-called intellectuals actually claim the current crisis strengthens, rather than weakens the argument for the non- existence of God.
One such individual, a Pakistani scientist by the name of Dr Parvez Hoodbhoy has published a recent article which can be seen here, that claims that the deadly coronavirus pandemic somehow undermines theological perspectives and provides some kind of strong proof in favour of Darwinian evolution. This article will seek to analyse the main points of his argument and show the fatal logical flaws that underpin it.
On the Origins of the Viruses…
Dr Hoodbhoy writes:
…every hope for dealing with today’s rogue virus rests squarely upon Darwin’s 200-year-old discovery of the principle of natural selection.
In a nutshell: natural selection says that life on Earth didn’t come pre-purposed and pre-formed, as tradition insists. Instead, it holds that, whether for man or microbe, only those forms of life best adapted to a specific environment survive while all others die away. Most crucially, evolution maintains that new kinds of life and new molecules randomly appear. A few — like coronavirus — will chance upon some suitable animal or human cell and thrive.
Not convinced? Then get yourself some slides and a powerful microscope — actually, a million-dollar electron microscope would work best. Then wait and watch as cells reproduce. You will soon see some that are imperfect copies. While most bad ones die away, a few survive and then proliferate…Without Darwinian selection one can’t even begin to understand microbial-host interaction, the evolution of pathogens, or start developing drug and vaccines. So go ahead and blame Darwin for inventing the notion that only the fittest survive. But then also punish Newton because apples insist on falling downward rather than rising upward.
Dr Hoodbhoy is a serious scientist. One might have expected something less polemical and more factual from him.
What did Darwin actually know about viruses? From Hoodbhoy’s impassioned argument one would have assumed that he was somehow initimately involved in the discovery of such entities. In point of fact, he did not even know of their existence or make any predictions about them:
When Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species went to press in 1859, viruses had yet to be discovered – it would be another 40 years after publication before the ‘concept of viruses’ was proposed, and a century later before breakthroughs in viral research would provide a clear understanding of their genetic make-up, how they replicate and how they cause disease
(https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/what-darwin-didnt-know-viruses-and-evolution)
Charles Darwin’s theory of descent from a common ancestors focused purely on explaining how the diversity of different life forms may have developed on this planet. Viruses cannot exist without a host organism, and so do not form part of Darwin’s evolutionary tree of life. (see https://www.virology.ws/2009/03/19/viruses-and-the-tree-of-life/). Given the fact that Mr Darwin never wrote a single sentence about viruses in his entire career, it boggles the mind that his writings are here being presented as crucial to developing vaccines!
Is it true we cannot understand anything about viruses without Darwin? Not according to a number of eminent biologists, who instead argue that the behaviour of microorganisms such as viruses challenge rather than confirm, many aspects of the Darwinian paradigm:
… the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, genomics, especially comparative genomics of microbes, shattered each of these key tenets of (neo)Darwinism. We are now fully aware that many of the most important genomic changes are by no account miniscule; that the mutational process is far from being completely random; that evolution of complexity via routes distinct from natural selection is possible; and that pervasive horizontal gene transfer makes the original concept of the Tree of Life largely obsolete. Perhaps even more remarkably, the study of genome evolution, in particular in microbes, has brought to fore completely novel aspects of the evolutionary process of which Darwin and the architects of the Modern Synthesis were utterly unaware. Conceivably, the foremost of these phenomena is the unending arms race between cellular life forms and genomic parasites such as viruses and mobile elements that shapes the genomes of both the hosts and the parasites.
(Raoult, 2010a; Koonin, 2011).
I think this reference is sufficient to show the hyperbole evident in Dr Hoodbhoy’s claims about the solution to coronavirus depending upon Darwin’s theory.
Natural processes and Viruses
The good doctor then proceeds to argue that plagues and natural calamities are not caused, but entirely ‘natural’ and governments are wisely pursuing scientific solutions to the virus epidemic and not religious ones:
On our side of the border we have yet to order a shipload of Ajwa-Khajoor (dates from Ajwa in Saudi Arabia) touted as cure for all diseases by Maulana Tariq Jameel, Pakistan’s most popular preacher and a staunch Imran Khan ally. Nor is the government arranging sacrifices of a million kala bakras or mass importing olive oil and kalonji.
Instead, the mood is sober and reflective in all power centres. Last Saturday, Pope Francis held a dramatic, solitary prayer service at the Vatican. Speaking to an eerily empty square, he urged the world to see the Covid-19 pandemic as a test of solidarity. Three hundred years ago, the Church finally gave up attributing plagues and natural catastrophes to divine punishment.
Professor Hoodbhoy here implies that the fact that we can understand scientific explanations for why viruses occur, and seek scientific solutions to the problem, somehow demonstrates that the virus itself cannot be divinely caused. The mistake here is that he seems to wrongly impute causality to natural processes, that do not have the power to act of their own volition.
To paraphrase from C.S Lewis, if two balls on a snooker table on a ship, in a storm, move according to the laws of motion that does not in any way imply that they are moved by the laws of motion. The laws of nature do not ever cause events. They simply describe how events are caused once they are triggered by other events.
So, for instance, the balls on the table were moved by the ship lurching due to strong winds, but what caused the strong winds? We can keep going back the whole chain of causality, but will never discover what instigated the chain to exist in the first place. The only answer for why ‘natural’ events ever happening, is ‘supernatural’ i.e. the processes we know as nature are ‘fed’ into nature by a Conscious being of unfathomable power who uses the chain of cause and effect to make things happen, which could never happen otherwise , except by his will and power.
In the case of coronavirus the existence of a given virus, the mutations it takes, it’s transmission, and how it affects any individual patient are not determined by the genius of Darwin, but by the purpose and free will of its Creator. The apparent ‘randomness’ of any given virus mutating is nothing but an illusion.
Biology can describe what happens when a mutation occurs, however this is simply a description of a natural event not an explanation for why it happens. At the level of particles, the virus is the same as every other material object and there is nothing intrinsic to those particles that would make it a deadly virus of itself . Honest reflection suggests there simply isn’t any alternative explanation to how natural processes actually are triggered.
The only answer is God and his ‘amr or command, sets the chain of events into being that determine the course of every, single event in nature. As C.S Lewis notes:
“The dazzlingly obvious conclusion now arose in my mind: in the whole history of the universe the laws of Nature have never produced a single event. They are the pattern to which every event must conform, provided only that it can be induced to happen. But how do you get it to do that? How do you get a move on? The laws of Nature can give you no help there. All events obey them, just as all operations with money obey the laws of arithmetic. … Up till now I had had a vague idea that the laws of Nature could make things happen. I now see that this was exactly like thinking that you could increase your income by doing sums about it. The laws are the pattern to which events conform: the source of events must be sought elsewhere”.
Having established that it is impossible for a natural calamity or plague to occur, except by God instigating every event in the chain of cause of effect, the question now arises about whether it is absurd to pray and worship to ward off the misfortune? Clearly if God has created the virus and inflicted it, he is fully able to dispose of it.
Moreover, our scientific endeavours to cure this disease will never be successful unless he chooses to allow them to succeed.
Thus prayer, atonement and worship alongside using scientific means, are rational things to do, in view of the understanding that the virus is totally controlled by God and is only as destructive as it is, because he has willed it to be so.
The Professor has a point in arguing that some traditional religious cures are clearly inappropriate. However, black seed, olive oil and honey have a wide variety of potentially therapeutic applications and are often used to good affect in complementary medicine and there is no reason why they cannnot be tried alongside conventional scientific means and as well as prayer in an attempt to alleviate the effects of this disaster.
To conclude, it is the Divine ONE not Darwin, to whom we will owe the debt of gratitude once we are rid of this plague.