 The problem of evil is an ancient one. I have no interest in revisiting a discussion on it. I recommend CDK007's video on the topic. In short, I will quote David Hume regarding God. Is he willing to prevent evil but not able than he is impotent? Is he able but not willing than he is malevolent? Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil? A thought occurred to me today that intelligent design creationism creates a special situation for the problem of evil. Because intelligent design presumes that an active, interventionist, intelligent agency is intervening in the development of living things, creating information, and that large-scale macro-evolution is naturally constrained. What I take that to mean is that God, whoops, the designer, is actively responsible for the existence of viral disease, bacterial disease, and others. As a virologist, I specifically want to focus on the viral diseases. Take RSV, or Respiratory Sensation Virus. It, like all viruses, is an obligate parasite. It does not have the capacity to grow on its own without causing damage to cells, co-opting their machinery and usually causing some pretty severe disease and or death. In the case of RSV, it tends to cause the death of the very young, and most especially premature babies. It's one of the reasons we keep them in aseptic incubators. Evolution says that most of the modern viruses are evolved from ancestor viruses, with an ultimate origin probably as the result of a breakaway selfish gene. Biologists note that there are viruses of bacteria, plants, algae, and humans, and that each of these viruses bears very distinctive characteristics, more in common with their hosts than with each other, suggesting a possibly multiple origin of different viruses. Classic biblical creationism says that viruses were created by man's sin in the garden. God may have allowed them to be created, but they were the direct action of man's choices. It's magical thinking, yes, but it creates no special problems beyond the standard responses about the problem of evil. We can posit a non-interventionist God who chooses not to intervene by direct action, also called primary causation. Intelligent design creationism, however, seems to me to be a special situation. By divorcing themselves from the biblical story and seeking a pseudo-scientific explanation, they've got to explain why the designer would have created the information for deadly viruses using some form of rational logic. They can no longer invoke the Genesis story to wiggle out of explaining the active role the designer must have played in the emergence of RSV, measles, and Ebola. We should also include in this discussion the favorite topic of intelligent design creationists, the bacterial flagellum. The perfect example of what they call irreducible complexity is primarily used in bacterial pathogens to transport them to where they can do the most damage. If inerohemorrhagic E. coli didn't have flagella, they wouldn't be nearly as effective at causing disease. If Vibrio parahemolyticus didn't have flagella, they would never be taken up by shellfish and make people vomit blood, or kill two people with septic wounds in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Thanks, designer, for the miracle of the flagellum, which only you could have actively created. This is different from the idea of genetic diseases like hemophilia and cystic fibrosis. We can explain those as chemical damage to the DNA of the parents or variations that arise by natural mechanisms. What I want to focus on is just the organisms whose purpose it is to cause disease, the obligate parasites. There seems to be no good answer to why a benevolent designer would choose to create the information for them, either by primary or secondary causation. At least one religious writer agrees with me, Catholic priest Edward Oakes. He opposes intelligent design creationism on religious grounds, that it becomes a materialist view of the Christian story of creation. I love the phrasing, intelligent design is either creation science on the installment plan, or deism under a stroboscope, as in a God who intervenes every once in a while. He points out that an interventionist God, who must sometimes tinker with his creation's DNA, yet fails to intervene in catastrophes like a fire in an airplane cockpit, is not a particularly benevolent one. A designer who actively creates the Marburg Philovirus but doesn't prevent it from killing children isn't one worth worshiping. Oakes writes, intelligent design makes the task of theodicy impossible. How does intelligent design proponent and mathematician theologian Bill Demski respond? In the Augustinian theodicy argument, evil exists because of the good that God can bring out of it. He states that intelligent design can be the result of secondary causation, or indirect action, as in the analogy of a computer program that spews out random characters until suddenly it produces moving poetry. No programmer needed to change the program. The poetry algorithm simply kicked in and the result was a change in form. This addresses the deism under a stroboscope argument, but completely ignores the issue of designed evil. Suppose the program in his analogy began spewing out dirty limericks, or hardcore images. What would that tell you about the programmer? That he needs the nastiness so you'll notice how sublime the poetry is? He then speaks of Kant and the artistic wisdom of the designer God versus his moral wisdom. I picture in my head an artist who paints in human blood because it really picks out the green of the landscape. Look how vivid it is. See the little corpse? How her bony arms form a triangle that points towards the puffy white clouds? It's a ghastly argument. The argument according to Kant, in order to defend God, a hypothetical defense attorney, must find a way to satisfy one of three conditions. We don't truly understand what evil is. Evil is necessary as part of a greater plan. God is not responsible for the evil in the world. If we allow interventionism and omnipotence, regardless of when or how, then three fails. I find the two remaining, either ignorance or bigger plan, arguments to be very intellectually unsatisfying. It's an argument of unknowability, a negative argument. Now suppose we play along with the ID creationist game and presume a designer other than God. Suppose an alien came to earth every few thousand years and dropped off another thousand species including bacillus anthracis and smallpox. They observe the suffering, make some notes on clipboards, and then zoom off to their life factory to make HIV. I for one would support ground to space missiles the next time the bastard showed up. Why then should we greet a God who requires three percent of the human species to die in a single year by drowning in their own fluids or coughing holes in their lungs or bleeding out their ears in order to complete his artistic vision of good and evil. Whenever you hear an intelligent design creationist begin rattling on about irreducible complexity, especially about the bacterial flagellum, remember that the design of the flagellum made it possible for a microbe to be a pathogen. The designer intervened so that we can live in a world with Ebola, Marburg, influenza, measles, herpes, HIV, viral hepatitis and RSV. I've made a career about understanding these agents but I would just as soon they had never been intelligently designed by a benevolent designer. I could have gone into something else, inventing new flavors of ice cream or long-lasting bubblegum or scratch and sniff wallpaper, anything but viruses and disease. One last thing, if you feel a sense of horror at the preventable pain and suffering of people without the means to seek medical care perhaps you might consider donating a little money to DPR Jones fundraiser for MSF or Doctors Without Borders. Take something that you spend money on now that you could afford to do without fancy coffee, a bad Hollywood movie or your intoxicant of choice and put that money towards making life a little less crappy for someone you don't know and will never meet. I've put the links below. The designer may not be intervening to save lives but that doesn't mean we can't. Thanks for watching and please donate.