Did God make the Coronavirus? Three questions to consider

As Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man) said to the alien invaders near the beginning of Marvel’s “Avengers: Infinity War,” “The earth is closed today!” The world continues to respond to the current novel coronavirus pandemic by closing everything from churches, to restaurants, to movie theaters and many other public spaces in order to limit person-to-person interaction. While my own family practiced “social distancing” this past Sunday by watching a livestream of our pastor, we reflected on current events and the changes we are all making. We talked about having peace in the midst of trouble and the fact that God is still in control. Then my oldest son made an interesting comment. He said, “God made the coronavirus.”

This makes perfect sense to 9-, 6- and 3-year-old boys, my sons’ ages, who have a simple belief that God made everything. The coronavirus is a thing. Therefore, God must have made the coronavirus, right? Well, the answer is both yes and no. There are at least three things to consider when wrestling with this question.

As we have argued in many places like Southern Evangelical Seminary’s e-book, Why Trust the God of the Bible?, nothing at all would exist apart from the creative and sustaining power of God. Indeed, God at this moment holds in being the novel coronavirus, along with everything else that exists. Were this not the case, nothing at all other than God would “be.”

That is not to say, however, that everything that exists here and now is a special creation of God out of nothing. A piece of blue chalk causes a blue line on the chalkboard, but the chalk could do nothing apart from the hand holding it. The chalk is only an instrumental cause. In a similar fashion, God acts through secondary, or instrumental, causes in this world. As Thomas Aquinas puts it:

Assuming the novel coronavirus is a naturally occurring virus, God created the original virus(es) and animal kingdom that eventually provided the needed conditions for the novel coronavirus to emerge. Much like tornados, hurricanes, lightning and even other disease-causing agents, the novel coronavirus is a byproduct of the good world God created. How can this virus be part of a good world?

In the creation account of Genesis, we read that God called everything He made “good.” Does that include things like viruses? Classically speaking, good is a matter of actuality or being. Something is good to the extent that it exists as the kind of thing it ought to be according to its nature. Understood in this way, everything that exists is good in one respect just by virtue of the fact that it exists. Things are good instances of their kinds when they exist and fulfill the ends toward which their natures are directed. Even a virus, by virtue of existing, is good. Moreover, a virus that finds a host and replicates itself is a good virus. That is, it is fulfilling the end toward which it is directed. Notice that “good” means more than just “morally good.” (Moral goodness is a subset of good as such and is not our current topic).

Evil, on the other hand, is to be understood as a privation. That is, it is the lack of some good that should be in a particular thing given that thing’s nature. Evil can also result from something being added to another thing that ought not be part of that thing. For instance, pencils are good and eyes are good, but a pencil in my eye would result in the evil of the loss of sight — sight being the end toward which an eye is directed.

Hence, evil is ultimately parasitic on good. Evil is a lack of being rather than something that itself has being. To again quote Aquinas, “No being can be spoken of as evil, formally as being, but only so far as it lacks being. Thus a man is said to be evil, because he lacks some virtue; and an eye is said to be evil, because it lacks the power to see well.”

There is nothing intrinsically evil about a virus per se. We only call it evil when it infects us and causes a privation (i.e. a lack of health) in our being. This is what Aquinas calls “evil suffered.” But why would God create things like viruses in the first place that cause “evil suffered”?

Before addressing that issue, we must consider the first point above. We know from the existence of any part of physical reality that God is Pure Being itself. Recall that good is ultimately a matter of existence. God is Existence itself and causes the existence of all other things. Therefore, God is not a good thing among others but is Goodness itself and the Source of the goodness of all other things.

Given this, it also follows that God’s intellect and will are one and the same with His divine essence. As the source of both the essences (or natures) and existence of all created things, God can only ever create what is good (since evil is a lack of good and not a thing to be created) and will what is good for His creation.

How could it be good for God to create viruses that make people sick? Science is giving us some clues as to the usefulness of viruses on a variety of fronts. But ultimately, we just do not always know. We do know, however, that God exists as Goodness itself, even a virus could not exist without God’s sustaining power, and we can trust that He will bring about good even from the worst evil. God does not will evil for its own sake, but He does permit certain evils to occur. As Aquinas says:

Thus, the Apostle Paul can confidently say that all things work together for good for those that love God and are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28).

Could God make a world with no evil suffered? It seems He could. But He has not done so. Given our material world of interacting things, lions will eat gazelles, worms will eat apples and people will get sick from viruses. The Garden of Eden and the supernaturally graced state of pre-fall Adam and Eve being exceptions.

The novel coronavirus may mean the earth is closed today, and probably tomorrow as well, but that does not mean our minds and hearts need to be. I will end with these words from philosopher Brian Davies: “According to Aquinas, evil suffered occurs only insofar as there is a concomitant good in the light of which it can be explained. It is, he thinks, due to something that by being good in its way, causes something else to be bad in its way.”

As we face the evil suffered from the novel coronavirus, may we lean into God, Pure Goodness itself, and ask Him to help us be good in the human way by seeking Him first and loving our neighbors as ourselves during their time of need. Let us also remember that God demonstrated His amazing Goodness by dying in our place and ultimately removing the barrier of sin that separates us from Him. That is the greatest good for which we could hope, brought forth from the greatest evil ever perpetrated. For that we shall praise Him!

Yes, God created Corona Viruses just like He created mosquitoes. He created everything, therefore the question is not "Did He", but "Why?"

Part of the Answer is multiple purposes, often built for multiple environments.

In the Garden of Eden before the Fall of man, all things were made perfectly and in harmony. Man was meant to live forever. For all we know, the corona virus may have been to keep bats healthy for all we know.

When the Fall of man occurred, the creation was cursed. Sin entered Man and the result was eventual death for all his posterity.

The other purpose that God had designed in the creatures now worked under the cursed environment. The SARS Virus, found recently in bats, it is believed, were eaten by the Chinese (possibly raw) in contradiction to God's word (Leviticus) and killed thousands. Could the corona virus be doing the same thing. It is very likely.

We all live in a cursed environment and under the Curse of Death because of Adam and Eve's disobedience to God. And due to that is all the sicknesses and death the world has ever seen.

But there is a cure for the Curse, it is the Lord Jesus Christ. All who believe upon His death for our sins, will live again WITHOUT THE CURSE, WITHOUT SICKNESS OR DEATH for ETERNITY. In a new Body that cannot be touched by the Corona virus or any such thing.

Many believe we shall SEE THE EARTH WITHOUT THE CURSE when CHRIST RETURNS TO EARTH. "For Behold, I make all things new" He says. For the RESURRECTED WILL SEE IT AS JOB SAYS: "I will see my redeemer with my own eyes and not that as of another".

For Now, the Curse of Sin and Death, the viruses, the germs, death etc. etc. all are operating under the Cursed Environment. And we all live by the Grace of God day by day in this cursed world.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." (The Lord Jesus Christ around 30AD: Gospel of John Chapter 3) You SHALL BE SAVED FROM THE CURSE and the Cursed Environment.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/03/creation-fall-and-coronavirus

CREATION, FALL AND CORONOVIRUS

Can we think now about anything other than pandemic graphs, empty shelves, school closures, postponed events, and our global state of emergency? While some remain at various stages of denial, and others have high fevers of existential panic, most of us are at home trying to figure out how we can homeschool our kids, do our jobs, avoid contagion, and endure an uncertain sentence of an unexpected internment.

In many conversations we hear that we are in “uncharted water.” This is true in the sense that most of us have never experienced this sort of disorienting disruption to everyday life. We can read the histories of the 1918 or 1957 pandemics, but they don’t touch our experience. We’ve been knocked off the tracks of our daily habits, and we’re all unsettled. Everything that seemed solid suddenly seems shaky. The only thing certain now is that we must talk about the Coronavirus.

Strangely, this has all fallen upon us in the time of Lent—a kind of wilderness in the Church, likened to the forty days and forty nights of Christ’s desert temptations and to Israel’s own exilic wilderness. Many churches were closed on Sunday. Masses were celebrated without the faithful. Saint Peter’s Square is empty. Christians everywhere find themselves not only social-distancing, but also at a distance from sacred worship and sacramental communion. In some ways, Christians this Lent are like Israel in Babylonian exile, bereft of land and temple. So I have tried to escape the Coronavirus a little by retreating into the meaning of ancient Israel’s exile.

In his famous homilies on creation and the Fall, In the Beginning, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger writes that Israel was long “preoccupied with the sufferings or hopes of its own history,” but it was not until their Babylonian exile that creation became crystallized as a dominant theme. Like many Christians today, the ancient Israelites in Babylon were overwhelmed with an almost ineluctable fear that all the boundaries had been shifted, that the center no longer held, that there was no ground beneath their feet, nor sacred canopy above their heads—they were exiled in the fear that all their vulnerabilities would gradually be overrun. As Ratzinger notes, it was something “incomprehensible.”

It’s out of this exilic despair that the prophets showed Israel that their God was not like other gods, “he was the God who held sway over every land and people.” He was the God who made not only the land beneath their feet, but everything seen and unseen. God made everything in heaven and on earth. God was the solid ground beneath them, as well as their shelter.

But this redolent and true faith remained enclosed, as it were, within the gates of Babylon. Babylon had its own creation liturgies in the Enuma Elish, which depicted the world emerging out of a struggle between opposing powers. Marduk, the god of light, appeared in the beginning to split a primordial dragon to divide heaven and earth, and fashioned human beings out of the dragon’s blood. As Ratzinger observes, “At the very origin of the world lurks something sinister, and in the deepest part of humankind there lies something rebellious, demonic, and evil. In this view of things only a dictator, the king of Babylon . . . can repress the demonic and restore the world to order.”

The Babylonian exile is thus a theological enclosure for Israel’s faith, and it is also a temptation in the wilderness. Yet Israel’s faith confronted these pagan myths. The world arose not out of chaos and conflict. Rather, it “arose from God’s Reason and reposes on God’s Word.” Thus Ratzinger calls Israel’s creation account the decisive “enlightenment.”

Israel’s enlightenment also contrasts with our modern Enlightenment, which typically sees evil and suffering as proof that we cannot depend upon God. The secularist mocks prayer as irrational, irrelevant, ineffectual, and ultimately irresponsible. Yet implicit in their mockery is another kind of faith—a Babylonian faith.

The secular account of creation is also an enclosure for us Christians and Jews. It is not quite the same as the Babylonian account, but it bears certain similarities. It sees the world as tending toward entropy, and so every crisis is a kind of total loss from which we will never recover. In the “immanent frame” of the secular enclosure, the center is never holding because there is no Logos holding the whole cosmos together. The world is directionless, and it is up to us to make the world, to sustain the world, to keep it alive against the sinister entropy lurking within. Everything is “managed” by chance and charts, and none of it can account for the reasonableness of creation, nor can it even take into account Israel’s claim that, to borrow from Ratzinger again, “creation is oriented to the sabbath.”

So it is no surprise that in a secular age, we constantly feel exhausted and vulnerable—without land or temple. We feel the panic of this pandemic within a Babylonian kind of enclosure. Yet the Christian must bear witness to a different faith. Our account of creation is the same as that of ancient Israel in exile. As St. Augustine taught, God created and sustains the world through his eternal Word. Immeasurably different from the Babylonian faith, creation is not chaotic and capricious, but has measure, order, and weight—creation is reasonable, it has purpose. And suffering has purpose, too.

This last claim is the one that the immanent frame of the secular age most fervently rejects. The Babylonian enclosure teaches the world that evil and suffering makes our faith in God void, since a God who cannot stop suffering is no God at all. Only “science” can help. But such a faith is patently empty and lost. It leaves people without hope or purpose, without land and temple.

As St. Augustine teaches us, God is not the cause of any evil; evil is nothing but the privation of the good. God has made the world “very good.” Yet due to our primal Fall, God does permit suffering—not as a limit upon himself, as the secularist faith would insist—but precisely to reveal his love and respect for his creature as a cause in his own image. Just as God can bring the most superabundant good out of evil, through Jesus Christ, so has he made us capable of drawing good out of the temporal evils by his grace.

Thus Israel’s faith in creation, which is also the Church’s faith, carries with it a doctrine of providence. God has created the world, and he governs the world. This is the faith that breaks through Babylonian darkness and the fear of apocalypse. The Christian faces suffering differently because we see the Creator and creation through the Word made flesh, through Christ Crucified, through the hope of the Risen Lord who is our way and our end.

I am reminded of the elderly St. Monica, who made a long and dangerous journey from North Africa to Milan in order to join her son, who had just become Imperial Rhetor in that capital city. The journey was so dangerous that even the sailors in command were frightened and uncertain that they would make it into port. Augustine tells us that while it is usually the experienced navigators who comfort and reassure the frightened passengers in mortal danger, it was his vulnerable mother who “kept up the spirits of the sailors,” and promised “that they would come safely to port.” Such is the witness of saints in times of trial. Be not enclosed by the faith of Babylon. Be like St. Monica.

C. C. Pecknold is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at The Catholic University of America.

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