Disease

I've often struggled with the concept of disease and how it fits into the created world of a loving God. There is just so much of it, and it causes so much suffering - the fact that disease exists at all seems counter to what I imagine God to be. For the most part, diseases we experience are caused by other organisms - bacteria, virii, mold spores - other created organisms. So for what purpose was a thing like HIV created other than to cause suffering?

I went down many dead-end roads in my pseudo-philosophical musings on this subject, but ultimately I've come up with two, well, I can't quite call them 'answers', but two 'observations', or perhaps 'elucidations' both of which (as I typically find in my search for understanding in these matters) are concepts of perspective.

First, I said that I find disease counter to what I "imagine God to be". In Biblical terms I ought to know better and "lean not on my own understanding" but thinking as a layman I have to realize that God, by very definition, is beyond anything that I could even imagine imagining. The Infinite cannot possibly be understood, even in a small way, by the finite. If, starting from birth, I counted every second of every day until my eventually death, which by current American life expectancies would be about 2.5 billion seconds, could I say that I am familiar with, or that I have imagined even a trillionth of infinity? (or even a trillionth of a trillionth of infinity?) Humans are terrible at scale and perspective. Have a look at this beautiful picture of the Crab Nebula. If we were much closer to this do you know what it would look like? Nothing. It would look just like what you see up in the night sky from your back porch. Just a billion little twinkles of light in no discernible pattern with no pretty colors. It's just too big. Get any closer and you lose all perspective on it. God is so big that he is beyond all hope of understanding. We get a sort of general concept of Him when we stand back and let God be who He is and just accept the beauty, but zooming in on any one facet of His being makes the whole being completely invisible to us, like an ant standing at the foot of Everest - he can't see the towering majesty, just the pebble that's directly in front of him.

The second 'observation' is that we humans also have a terrible time putting ourselves in perspective. Somewhere along the road we've gotten the impression that because of the wondrous nature of our thought, our self-awareness, our place at the pinnacle of evolution that we are somehow separate from Nature. If we think about it, almost every thing we call 'progress' is just an attempt to further draw that line in the sand between us and Nature. Early man didn't like being exposed to the elements so he found a cave, eventually there was too much nature in the cave so he built a hut, fast-forward a couple of million years and now we live in air-conditioned penthouses on top of buildings that literally scrape the sky. 'Boy, that Nature sure is pretty out my window but I'm glad I'm not getting any of it on me.' Clothes are a separation from Nature, cars are a separation from Nature, phones are a separation from Nature, cameras are a separation from Nature, store bought food, cage-raised chickens, genetically engineered tomatoes, paved roads, power lines, sewers, manually stocked fish ponds, pure bred dogs, tread-mills, television, domed sports stadiums, swimming pools (especially indoor pools), refrigerators, natural-gas fireplaces made to look like wood-burning, greenhouses - the list goes on and on but all of these things are, at their core, our attempt to remove Nature from the equation that we call life. But what we refuse to accept is that we ARE a part of Nature. We are just another species of life, like dogs and cows and E-coli and poison-ivy. Now don't get me wrong, there is of course, a spiritual or super-natural part of our being, but that part of us with which we are most familiar is as natural to this world as the ginko biloba tree.

And therein lies the rub. The majority of what we experience as disease in this world is simply the product of Nature at work. You wouldn't think of a man, mauled to death by a lion while walking the plains of Africa, as 'afflicted' with a terrible, incurable disease - it's just the result of him existing in a natural world where lions eat meat, and humans are, unfortunately, mostly meat. The fact that the lion has claws and teeth which are quite harmful to humans does not mean that lions were designed for human suffering, likewise, the fact that Yersinia Pestis has been the cause of great amounts of human suffering throughout history does not mean that it was created, by God, for that purpose. It's all a matter of perspective...

God has it, and we don't.