Links for Today (September 20, 2016)

By Beth Snodderly

Malaria and Genetic Engineering

“New gene-editing technology gives scientists the ability to wipe out the carriers of malaria and the Zika virus. But should they use it?” Ralph Winter used to talk about gene splicing and changing tigers to be non-carnivorous, but I don't think he thought through the implications of genetic engineering the way this article does.

The New Testament and the Warfare Worldview

Greg Boyd talks about the theme of “God striving to establish his sovereign will (his Kingdom) on earth over and against forces that oppose him. … Contrary to any view that suggests disease somehow serves a divine purpose, Jesus never treated such phenomenon as anything other than the work of the enemy.”

Cruelty in the Name of Jesus?

Roger Olson reports on a new book, Is Modern Unbelief Rooted in Christianity? that claims “modern unbelief was brought about not by modern science or irreligious philosophy [‘the Enlightenment’] but by the cruel depictions of God, and resulting cruel treatments of sincere people who simply disagreed with them, by Luther, Calvin, and other magisterial reformers and their followers. And it was brought about, at least in its beginnings, by Christian shaped (or at least Jesus-shaped) consciences reacting against those cruelties.” Read more about the crucial difference it makes to faithfully or unfaithfully represent God’s character to the world.

Beth Snodderly is the RWI's Theologian in Residence and Chair of the Board.

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