“Perhaps the problem of evil is a human problem, one of an egotistical mind-set, an anthropocentric bent in our thinking and perspective.”
Jacob M. Held, Stephen King and Philosophy
Most clergy I know probably don’t look for inspiration from Darwin.
But I do.
I have found Darwin’s perspective on viruses intriguing. One could argue that Darwin’s thoughts on evolution may serve to help us detach ourselves from the belief that pandemics are a punishment from God. Repeatedly, Maimonides warned us about how our species’ tendency toward anthropocentrism blinds us from recognizing our true place in God's vast cosmos, a cosmos that is endowed with a transcendental purpose.
It is significant that while Darwin respected humankind as the pinnacle of the evolutionary process, he did not think that man occupied a privileged place in the grand scheme of nature. Viruses, bacteria, and parasites will remain as competitors with the human species, probably for our evolutionary future.
Despite the biblical imperative to show dominance over creation, Darwin reminds us that nature is not necessarily willing to concede to our superior role over nature's other creatures. The microbial “survival of the fittest” in some ways resembles our own. Even bacteria experience viruses. Science shows that a single virus particle can instantly wipe out even a billion bacterial cells. As one scientist observed:
The bacteria will be succeeded by a hundred billion viruses—whose own fate is now problematical, as they exhausted their prey (within the test tube). There may, or may not, sometimes be a few bacterial survivors, mutant bacteria that now resist the mutant virus; if so, these can repopulate the test tube—until perhaps a second round, a mutant-mutant virus appears. Is there any reason to believe that such processes are unique to the test tube, that life in the large is exempt from them? Of course not. Only the time scale is certain to be different, by a factor or years, to minutes, of a million to one, the disparity of generation time of human to bacteria. The fundamental biological principles are the same. The numerical odds may be different by a factor too hard to estimate.[i]
Though vulnerable to the endless evolutionary threats to our existence, human beings are not without resources. Pandemics of the past claimed much higher casualties and deaths than the pandemics seen over the last three centuries. There can be no doubt diseases afflicted prehistorical man, much the same way it afflicts us in the 21st century. Although primitive man lacked the medical technology and evolutionary improvements of his future descendants, our ancestors lived in smaller communities; there was much less opportunity to spread a virus. But as we evolved as a species, most of humanity gave up the quiet agrarian life. As urban communities grew, towns and cities lived in huddled living quarters. When a pandemic struck, the close proximity of everyone made everyone more vulnerable. The relatively sedentary lifestyle of our Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal ancestors made them less vulnerable to the spread of contagion.
[i] See Joshua Lederberg, “Pandemic is a Natural Evolutionary Phenomenon” in Social Research, Vol. 55, No. 3, “In Time of Plague” (AUTUMN 1988), pp. 343-359, especially p. 348.