Did God Make Parasites? - Creation Moments

Genesis 1:31

“And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”

The veteran British broadcaster, Sir David Attenborough, is an evolutionist and an atheist. He often gets asked about the beauty of God’s creation, and this irritates him, as an unbeliever, so he has a stock reply:

“There’s a small worm called Loa Loa Filariasis. This parasite can survive in one environment exclusively – namely, underneath the skin and inside the eyes of human beings. Children and the elderly in tropical regions are the most widely affected. A painful, slow death is virtually certain.

What Attenborough is saying is that we cannot praise God for creating beautiful hummingbirds, without cursing Him for creating parasitic worms. He has a point. We should be able to account for this.”

After Adam had sinned, God said to him:

“Cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.”
(Genesis 3:17-18)

God did not create creatures to be deliberately destructive, as parasites are. He made them to be beneficial. But, just as meat-eating began after Adam’s sin, so too did parasitic behavior. The Loa loa worm brings about death, but death was not a thing before the Fall. So the suffering wrought by such worms is the result of sinful human behavior out of disobedience to God – not of the individual who has the worm, but of human beings generally.

Prayer: Thank You, Lord, that You created everything very good. We look forward to the return of our Lord Jesus Christ, knowing that with Him there will be no more curse. Amen.

Author: Paul F. Taylor

Ref: Boyd, D.W. (2017), Did God Create Parasites?, < https://answersingenesis.org/biology/microbiology/did-god-create-parasites/ >, accessed 6/26/2019. Image: Loa loa worm, Public Domain image.