What Population Growth Reveals About False Ideas of Disease

By Ralph D. Winter

The human period of history is paper thin when compared to the vast expanse of the previous story of the development of life on earth. But even in the few thousands of years of the existence of homo sapiens, it would seem clear that the growth of human population is directly related to the degree of acquired human knowledge of, and intentional resistance to, microbiological pathogens. A whole flood of books have appeared in recent years commenting on the plagues of history and on the general conquest of disease through medicine. Both war and pestilence have long been noted to be an impediment to population growth. But pestilence appears to be the greater problem.

The Second World War, we understand, was the first war in history during which more people died from military action than from war-introduced disease. Progress has been slow and even today, as antibiotics seem to be running their course, it has been a story of reverses and plateaus, not just triumphs. But the calibration of our conquest simply and crassly by population growth (or non-growth) is roughly workable. The phenomenon of population growth, however, is not widely understood or easily measured.

Our current theological literature, to my knowledge, does not seriously consider disease pathogens from a theological point of view—that is, are they the work of God or Satan?

If the estimated 27 million world population in Abraham’s day 4,000 years ago had grown at the present rate of the world population, there would have been six billion people only 321 years later. Had it grown at the rate of Egypt’s current rate the six billion would have been reached in only 123 years. What actually happened was a growth so slow that 2,000 years later, at the time of Christ, world population was not six billion but only one thirtieth of that.

Again after three centuries of literacy during Roman occupation of southern England, the Roman legions were withdrawn to protect the city of Rome itself. Soon Britain lapsed back into illiteracy and into horrendous war and pestilence to the extent that its population did not increase in the slightest for the next 600 years (from 440 AD to 1066 AD).

At that point the tribal backwater that was Europe began gradually to crawl into conquest of both war and disease. The rest of the story of cascading increase in Western populations, as well as colonially affected global populations, is common knowledge. This increase, as already noted, is a rough and ready measure of the conquest of disease, a story which, as I say, is documented very clearly in a recent flood of books on plagues and the history of medicine.

Curiously, what is perhaps the most enduring characteristic in this conquest is the removal of false ideas about the nature of disease. The very discovery of unbelievably small pathogens was long in coming. Our major western theologians, whether Thomas Aquinas or John Calvin, knew absolutely nothing about the vast world of microbiology. They, in turn had been influenced by Augustine, who is credited with giving God the credit for much of what Satan does.

Thus, even our current theological literature, to my knowledge, does not seriously consider disease pathogens from a theological point of view—that is, are they the work of God or Satan? Much less does this literature ask the question, “Does God mandate us to eliminate pathogens?” 

This entry was excerpted from an essay Ralph Winter wrote in the Winter of 2003 entitled, "Where Darwin Scores Higher Than Intelligent Design." The full essay can be read here.

Photo Credit: James Cridland/Flickr

Where Intelligent Design Fails to See Intelligence

January 8, 1944- The HMCS Camrose which helped sink a German submarine in the North Atlantic during Second World War. VAC | ACC/Flickr

By Ralph D. Winter

In saying that some of our creationists are glossing over the surprisingly prominent reality of intelligent evil in nature, I don’t mean that any of these ID people really deep down are unwilling to confront the enigmatic reality of evil. I just mean that, from the current discussion as seen in their written materials, that would appear to be the case.

As a matter of fact, I myself have all my life believed in what C. S. Lewis called “that hideous strength.” Yet only recently have I begun to reflect on the possibility that this hideous and intelligent evil must not reasonably be dealt with among us any longer merely by superficial references to the philosophical concept of sin and to a fall of man. Why? Because the mere idea of sin is not personifyable. Sin as an abstraction is defined by some as the departure from what is right. In that case the concept itself does not necessarily imply the potent and powerful existence of a diabolical personality any more than would a wrong score on a third-grade arithmetic test. The key question is, “Does it make any practical difference if we conceive of ourselves, on the one hand, as tempted by freedom to sin or, on the other hand, fighting against an evil one who tempts us intelligently?”

Note, for example, the huge difference, back in the days of the Second World War, between, on the one hand, the often nearly invisible icebergs that sent many ships to the bottom of the ocean and, on the other hand, the stealthy, intelligent submarines which caused far greater damage. What if the sinking of thousands of ships had been conceived of as merely the result of inanimate forces? What if scientists had not figured out a way to bounce underwater sound off steel-hulled submarines in such a way as to distinguish the difference between an iceberg and a submarine? This technique, to be called sonar, came late in the war, and implementing it took even longer. By that time not a thousand ships had been sunk, not two thousand, but six thousand ships crossing the Atlantic, loaded with food and war material, had gone to the bottom. It may be hard to believe but the outcome of that enormous war turned on the subsequent success in fighting these intelligent submarines.

It could be alleged that I am missing a main point. A conversation I had with Philip Johnson several years ago brought this forcibly to my attention. I began by congratulating him (and Michael Behe) on the potent logic of the ID movement, but I said, “When you look at your computer screen and if it says suddenly, ‘Ha, I just wiped out your hard disk,’ you have not the slightest difficulty in concluding that you have suffered the onslaught of a computer virus concocted by an intelligent, real person. Curiously, then, when we contemplate a real biological virus, which, though only a tiny assemblage, assails the health of an enormously larger human being, why do we have trouble concluding that we are dealing with an intelligent EVIL design?”

His answer, essentially, was, “Ralph, in my writings and public appearances I can’t even mention God much less Satan. I have a very specific battle to fight, namely, to take apart the logic of unaided evolution. That is all I am trying to do.” Okay, I have respected that response. I have not pestered him further. In fact, I am not even now endeavoring to fault the ID movement and its objectives.

Rather, I would ask a larger question. There are very many people, even Bible-believing Christians (not just non-Christians), who are to this day profoundly puzzled, perplexed, and certainly confused by the extensive presence in the created world of outrageous evil, created apparently by what we believe to be a God who is both all-powerful and benevolent. In coping with this, they may frequently attribute to God what is actually the work of an evil intelligence, and thus fatalistically give not the slightest thought to fighting back.

• When my wife died in 2001 more than one person tried to console me by observing that, and I quote, “God knows what He is doing.”
• When Chuck Colson’s daughter concluded that her brain-damaged son was, and I quote, “exactly the way God wanted him to be,” the impressively intelligent and influential Colson actually applauded her conclusion.
• When Jonathan Edwards fatally contracted smallpox in his effort to try out a vaccine that might protect the Indians in Western Massachusetts, the vast majority of the hyper-calvinistically trained pastors of Massachusetts concluded that God killed him because, to quote them, “he was interfering with Divine Providence.” These pastors went on to organize an anti- vaccination society.
• Going further back in time, a Mother Superior in Spain woke up one morning and detected a small lump in her forehead. She concluded that it must be God who was doing something to her presumably to deepen her devotion and nourish her character. When it finally turned out that a worm was burrowing there, and had broken the surface so you could see exactly what it was, she concluded that it was God’s worm. When she would stoop over to pick something up, and it would occasionally fall out, she would replace it so as not to obstruct the will of God.

These are, however, only a few examples compared to the thousands of times a day among even modern Evangelicals that some blatant evil goes unattacked because it is resignedly if not fatalistically assumed to be the initiative of God. I am not so much interested in the philosophical or theological aspects of this situation as I am in the resulting passivity before eradicable evil, the practical fatalism.

I will go one step further. If we are dealing with an intelligent evil, even our thinking about that fact may likely be opposed and confused by that same evil force, that evil power, that evil personality. Is there any evidence of this additional complexity? In what form would it appear? How could we identify it? 

This entry was excerpted from an essay Ralph Winter wrote in the Winter of 2003 entitled, "Where Darwin Scores Higher Than Intelligent Design." The full essay can be read here.

Was Darwin More Concerned About God's Reputation Than We Are?

By Ralph D. Winter

According to Deborah Cadbury’s book entitled The Terrible Lizard which tells us about early dinosaur hunters, the tumble of new bones being dug up right in England soon became a significant factor in a vast and widespread shift away from what came to be called a “bondage to Moses,” that is, bondage to the Bible.

Cornelius Hunter’s book, Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil, demonstrates conclusively that even Darwin, only a little later, was still concerned about the Christian faith in that he was pained until the day he died by the intellectual task of explaining how a good and all-powerful God could have authored the cruelty which he saw so pervasively in nature, and which many of the discoveries of dinosaur bones dramatically highlighted.

Both Hunter and Cadbury show that in the 1820s Biblical perspectives were major factors filtering interpretations of the bones being discovered of earlier life forms. This was true at Oxford University, for example, which was in that era a citadel of defense of the literal text of the Bible, somewhat of a Moody Bible Institute.

Today we have the wonderful and effective work of the Evangelical pioneers in the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, a perspective portrayed magnificently in the Illustra Media video, Unlocking the Mystery of Life. But neither the writings of these pioneer ID people nor this magnificent video reflect any stated concern whatsoever for the perplexing presence of pervasive evil, suffering and cruelty throughout all of nature. Strange, because the lurid presence of evil (“Nature red in tooth and claw”) was a major factor in Darwin’s thinking and the thinking of quite a few other key people who in his day were confused about how the existence of violent forms of life could be congruent with the concept of a benevolent Creator.

Thus, it would appear that some of our present-day creationists are so eager to give God all the credit for all of creation that the virtually unavoidable presence of evil to be seen there has become strangely less important than it was in Darwin’s day and even to Darwin himself. Would it not be very ironic if the man we usually accuse of destroying faith in a Creator God were to turn out to be more interested in preserving the good reputation of that God than are we?

This entry was excerpted from an essay Ralph Winter wrote in the Winter of 2003 entitled, "Where Darwin Scores Higher Than Intelligent Design." The full essay can be read here.

Causes of Death in the USA

“The Son of God appeared for this purpose, that He might destroy the works of the devil”—our mission too?

By Ralph D. Winter, originally published on April 25, 2004

View fullsize

Click to enlarge. Row 18 indicates the reported number of deaths in the USA, per year in Column 1, and per day in Column 5. Row 16 sums up the total number of deaths in the USA per year due to the 15 causes listed in rows 1-15. Each row gives the breakdown for each of the different causes of death, Column 1 = annual total, Column 5 = daily total. Column 1 data for 2001, from the National Center for Health Statistics, 2003. Other columns and calculations, RDW, 4/25/04

How few die a natural death!

1. Note that the deaths from the causes listed in rows 1-8, Column 4, account for 75% of all deaths in the USA.
2. Note that the number of deaths in the USA from just homicide (Row 14) is only 7/10 of 1% of all deaths.
3. Note that the number of deaths from heart disease plus cancer (Column 4, Row 2) constitutes more than half (51%) of all deaths.
4. Lines 5, 11 and 14 are non-disease causes. Together they represent 4%, 1/3% and 0.7% of the total. The remaining twelve disease-related causes are still 76.4% of the total deaths. (Should that be true?)
5. If Line 17, “Other Causes,” is mostly disease, then pathogenic or germ-based disease accounts for even more than 76.4% of deaths. Yet 99% of medical/pharmaceutical funds focus on treating disease, not eradicating the pathogenic sources.

Beneath these silent statistics...

Beneath these silent statistics is a raging war of pathogenic disease against human beings. This war prematurely drags down to death in pain and suffering about four out of five people who die in the United States. Subtracting lines 5, 11, and 14, eight out of ten dies an unnatural death. This is not a pretty picture, and not something to look forward to. As someone said, I am not afraid of death, just the process of dying.

But the absolute wonder is that less than one percent of medical funds go to disease sources instead of disease treatments. There are several reasons for this.

1. Until recently many of these diseases were not understood to be the result of infections (pathogens, that is, viruses, bacteria or parasites), but because of “conditions.” Duodenal ulcers also were because of stress and spicy food, etc., not a bacterium (heliobacter pylori). Tuberculosis was assumed to be caused by sleeping in damp places, not by a pathogen. Heart disease has long been described as being caused by conditions like salt or cholesterol in the diet and as a gradual build-up of plaque in the arteries. Now it is clear that half of all who die of heart attacks don’t possess any of the alleged symptoms. Now, heart deaths are attributed to sudden “eruption” of inflammation in arterial walls (due to an infection), which suddenly blocks arteries and thus strains and damages the heart, suddenly. Strong evidence has now been acknowledged to indicate that infections underlie heart disease, cancer, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and schizophrenia, for example.
2. A second major reason is that Western theology has a blind spot stemming from the Neo-Platonism of Augustine (in the fourth century AD). Thus, we tend to look for God’s after-the-fact purposes in a tragedy. We don’t often seek to eradicate the causes—unless we think they are conditions like lack of exercise, wrong nutrition, etc. Jonathan Edwards (1740s) was accused of “interfering with Divine Providence” when he sought to employ a vaccine to defend his Indians from smallpox.
3. The simplest factor to explain is that sick people seeking healing (not causal explanations) provide the truly enormous resources of the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Over 99% of all such funds, understandably, focus on treatments not origins of disease. Yet, most government money (NIH, NCI, etc.) is also manipulated or influenced by the medical/pharmaceutical industries, so also with the research grants on which university faculties live. In other words, relatively little concern ends up for disease origins. 

Looking With Foreign Eyes On Our Own Customs

Rihanata Ouedraogo is a local mayor and Gascode peer educator. Here she leads a group discussion about female genital mutilation (FGM) in Koassinga village, Burkina Faso. Flickr/DFID - UK Department for International Development

Excerpted from Ralph Winter's Essay "Group Self Deception" 

In the case of what is called euphemistically “female circumcision” missions have made little progress. To this day it is a practice which includes 140 million women in Africa. Drastically more mutilating than male circumcision, missionary hospitals, some of them, need to devote a great deal of time to sewing up the bladders of women who have undergone what is officially called “Female genital mutilation” the reason being that sewing the vagina nearly closed anticipates bladder rupture during the birth of the first child. Without repair surgery a leaking bladder produces a constant 24/7 stench which forces hundreds of thousands of women completely out of their villages. 

The minimal progress missions have made against the practice of female genital mutilation — many do not even address the subject for fear of losing converts — is mute testimony to the awesome power of what we could call “Group Self Deception,” a type of culturally reinforced delusion. Missionaries are legitimately fearful of destructive cultural practices entering into the Christian movement, and of the puzzling power of “Group Self Deception.” 

However, we deceive ourselves if we think our own cultural tradition is devoid of “Group Self Deception.” Thus, this same legitimate fear of straying from Biblical insight has also led returned missionaries to look with foreign eyes upon some of the customs of their countries of origin. Even less likely, but nevertheless possible, is for returning missionaries to look critically upon the nature of the very religious tradition in which they were reared. This latter, very rare and difficult kind of reflection, could be called reverse contextualization or decontextualization.  

I realize that I have used a lot of my time already tiptoeing up to this subject, it is as difficult to raise issues of this kind in our culture as it is for missionaries to do so in an African society. I want to address certain major killers in the United States and much of the Westernized world which our society does little about. These are cultural traditions that are very deep and strong in the Western world, that both pervade and complicate secular society, and in so doing, also the cultural tradition of Christianity from which most of us spring.

How Should We Deal with the Phenomenon of Disease?

On the morning of his 78th birthday, Dr. Ralph Winter was in the prayer room. As he writes, the date had already been set, so to speak, for his death. But in this inspiring glimpse into his internal life we see him express only gratitude and praise to God for his years and the amount of life he still feels in him. 

"I feel I have learned the most important things of my life since I was 70! The more you know the easier it is to attach new information to what you already know." But, he laments the common experience of the religious man "that most people don't know what to do to know God better." Reflecting on Romans 1:20, “Since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen," Winter attributes this to the fact that we devoutly study the written book of God, but we have become "alienated from the Book of Creation."

"But God meant us to read both books!" Here is Winter's insightful—indeed, worshipful—reflection: