Coronavirus and the Problem of Evil

My professional training is in philosophy, which means for me almost all problems ultimately lead back to what philosophers call the problem of evil: how do we reconcile the existence of evil in the world with a good and loving God? For some problems, the route to evil is fairly circuitous—like why we can’t get stoplights to control traffic better (I confess, some of my evilest thoughts come sitting at a red light when there is no traffic at all from the other direction). But for the coronavirus pandemic, it doesn’t take long for serious questions about evil and suffering to arise.

When evil happens to us personally or to those we love (as it likely will before this pandemic is over), the most pressing question might be something like, “Why isn’t God protecting us from this evil that is amongst us?!” That is usually more like an existential cry of the heart than a philosophical puzzle to be solved. In the midst of suffering for most people, it usually doesn’t help to do philosophy. But most of us aren’t in that situation yet, and in the midst of our isolation (and absence of sports on TV) we might have the mental leisure to consider the deeper, more theoretical question that nags in such times: Why would God create a world like this, where this coronavirus can wreak such havoc on our daily lives, and even kill people by hijacking their respiratory systems?

It doesn’t bother me too much, at least on the philosophical level, that people can do evil things. That’s a direct consequence of free will. And I think it’s a defensible position to say that the world is a better place because there are humans with free will, even though they sometimes use it for evil purposes. (Again, that is shallow comfort when humans choose to do some evil to you personally, but at least at the theoretical level, it makes some sense to me.) Removing humans’ capacity for evil would also rid the world of tremendous good and beauty and love.

The coronavirus is different, though. The free will defense doesn’t work for viruses. They aren’t intentional agents that make decisions or have moral responsibility. They just do what they are programmed to do. So why in the world would God create these things and program them to devastate like this?!

We humans (or at least quite a few of us) seem programmed to ask such questions, and this isn’t called a problem for nothing. There are no easy answers, and any direction we go with this problem, there will be unsatisfactory consequences to confront. But I think it is worthwhile and even important to try to say something about why things are the way they are and why God might have set things up this way.

Viruses don’t leave traditional fossils behind because there is nothing to calcify, but increasingly they are being discovered frozen in ice that goes back at least 30,000 years ago—well before the traditional setting of Adam and Eve in the Bible (though there are other proposals for a historical Adam and Eve). And viruses do leave “fossils” in the DNA of other organisms, from which their history can be reconstructed. A few years ago a research group published a paper showing the history of one group of viruses back to around 30 million years ago, which predates any reasonable proposal for the entrance of human sin into the world. And even further, everything we understand about life implies that viruses have been around about as long as life itself. We can confidently say that life as we know it would not exist without viruses.

That is the point I’m working up to.

As a comparison, think about earthquakes. These are the result of tectonic activity, without which the planet would probably be totally covered by water or totally covered by land—neither of which would allow for the kind of life we see now. So we might wonder why God created the Earth with earthquakes, and the answer is: removing the possibility of earthquakes from our planet takes away other aspects of the world we couldn’t live without.

The same goes for dynamic weather systems, which are so crucial for life. Yes, they sometimes give rise to tornadoes and hurricanes, but this is a side effect of a necessary condition for life to flourish.

So too, we can understand the existence of viruses along these lines. The population of viruses on Earth is estimated to be 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s a really big number (10³¹)—ten billion times more stars than there are in the universe! What are they all doing? The vast, vast majority of them are not infecting humans, but rather they are infecting bacteria and keeping them in check (this point was first made to me by Praveen Sethupathy on our podcast episode on coronavirus).

There are about the same number of bacteria on Earth as there are viruses. In our bodies alone, each of us has about 100,000,000,000,000 individual bacteria. That’s about ten times more bacterial cells than human cells in our bodies! They provide all kinds of useful functions for us, particularly for our immune system and in digestion. It’s safe to say that life as we know it wouldn’t work without them. But they have a tendency to take over, if left unchecked.

For example, E. coli bacteria reproduce every 20 minutes under ideal conditions. So if you start with one bacterium, in 20 minutes there will be two, and in forty minutes there will be four, and at one hour there will be eight. If that went on unchecked, by the end of one twenty-four hour day, the population would double 72 times, which is close to 5 x 10²¹, and if you let that go on for a year, it’s a number so big I’m pretty sure that is more bacteria than the mass of the Earth (someone check me on that).

So, it is very good that the overwhelming majority of viruses on Earth are infecting bacteria and slowing down their reproduction. And in order to keep doing that effectively, viruses have to keep mutating. So every once in a while, a virus will appear that can infect and do harm to humans. Taking away that possibility, though, would make it impossible for us to live.

Just like earthquakes and tornadoes, viruses sometimes cause harm, suffering, and death. But without them, we cannot conceive of how life would be possible.

An Eternal Perspective

Does that solve the problem of evil? Probably not. We might ask how eternal life will work: will heaven have tornadoes and earthquakes and viruses? I wouldn’t think so. But maybe the eternal perspective raises another aspect of this response to the problem of natural evils.