Malevolent Design
The Death of a Loving God

Biological

I’ll now take the time to describe my absolute favorite example of malevolence.  Nothing I’ve seen compares to the sheer gruesome nature of this parasite!  It is the human botfly, Dermatobia hominis, which also attacks other primates.  It gets it eggs to us in an ingenious manner.  The female will capture a muscoid fly or mosquito, deposit its eggs on its underside and release it.  The released insect now becomes a vector for transmission.  The mosquito then searches out a nearby human, lands and drinks fresh, warm blood – just as it usually does.  The eggs, sensing the heat given off by human skin, hatch and burrow their way inside.  The larva is highly adapted to life within another animal. It breathes through a kind of natural snorkel that sticks up out of the warble, or red, swollen wound in which it lives.  Its removal is made difficult by rows of rings of hooked spines that face upward.  Though unsubstantiated, it has been proposed that the larva actually produces an antibiotic, as cases of infection are relatively rare – until amateur attempts are made to remove it, that is.  Attempts to pull out the organisms by the untrained usually fail as they snap the tail off, leaving the rest of the body to putrefy inside its host.  Eight weeks of incubation within its host and it is ready to drop out and start its life cycle anew. 

            Can you honestly examine this insect and see love?  Can you look at the wriggling, white mass inside the swollen, bloody wound and see the smiling face of Jesus looking back at you?  How about Allah or Brahma?  I surely can’t.  As an Atheist, I see no gods or goddesses.  I see pure, godless nature.  It is the highest form of arrogance to think that anything was made for us and makes for quite a strange dilemma when you apply this odd philosophy to organisms already listed.  Malaria was specifically tailored for us?  Praise the designer!  Mosquitoes were painstakingly drawn out and created to be able to track us down and inject us with pathogens which, themselves, were also made especially for us?  The deity loves us!  Sharks, with their thousands of razor sharp teeth, flexible skeleton, sense of smell for blood and electrical sensitivity were engineered with a warm smile just for those humans that might venture into the water?  Praise the mother!  Human botflies were programmed to only target primates and to catch biting insects to deliver their eggs to our warm skin for incubation?  The larva, with their upward rows of hooked spines and snorkel appendage, were lovingly designed for those of us living in tropical areas?  All bow down to our glorious sky father!  For he surely must love us with the bounty he has bestowed on us! 

            No, it just doesn’t make sense that a loving anything would produce what we find in the vast biodiversity found on this planet.  At any second there is a war for survival going on.  Something is suffering, something is dying and something is being eaten while still alive.  It is nothing like the candy coated medicine you’re fed in the very unrealistic religious indoctrination you find delivered to our young people.  They avert their eyes from what I speak about and turn, instead, to instances where they see beauty like a rain forest or a snow capped mountain range or a night sky, all natural occurrences which require no deities to explain them, and yet this is exactly what is invoked.  “It’s just so beautiful,” they say, “that there has to be a creator.”  This is only because they aren’t looking at the whole picture.  Just as the fundamentalist mindset is quick to censor any little thing they might find offensive to their precious imaginary friends, they tend to censor out the bad, leaving only a small window from which they can see only that which pleases.  I’ll get into this further in the next chapter. 

They use other examples where they see love, usually much of what is involved in reproduction as in a nest of baby birds, a litter of lion cubs or a human pregnancy.  “Making love” is, of course, seen as beautiful example of what the deity has given us to make us happy.  But there is a dark side to each and every example. In all these instances the presence of MD can be vividly illustrated.  In the case of baby birds, well it’s not as benevolent as one might think.  There is fierce competition between a bird’s young and death of the weaker sibling(s) is often involved.  There is no “brotherly love” to be found here.  When it comes time to learn how to fly, well that’s more death.  Every spring you’ll find dead babies under trees.   

Species, such as the cuckoo, are what is termed a brood parasite. She will fly over to a reed warbler’s nest, after watching their behavior so she can time it just right, push one egg out and lay one of her own in its place.  It usually hatches before the other eggs and systematically pushes them all out, where they fall to their death.  If it hatches after the others, it will push the hatchlings out the same way.  What’s strange is that the parent bird doesn’t seem to realize that this bird is not its young -- even though it is three times as large as the bird feeding it!  

 In 1987, Stephen Emlen, a Cornell ornithologist, witnessed infanticide in a Panamanian bird known as the jacana in which the usual sex roles are switched.  The males are the ones that sit on the eggs and care for the young.  Females, on the other hand, are the hunters and are very promiscuous, mating with many males in their travels.  He had this to say about what he saw: 

I shot a female one night, and the next morning was just awesome. By first light a new female was already on the turf. I saw terrible things--pecking and picking up and throwing down chicks until they were dead. Within hours she was soliciting the male, and he was mounting her the same day. The next night I shot the other female, then came out the next morning and saw the whole thing again. 6 

 These examples are not isolated events in nature, either.  It “has been reported among mice and ground squirrels, bears and deer, prairie dogs and foxes, fish and dwarf mongooses and wasps and bumblebees and dung beetles.” Lion cubs are in constant danger of infanticide and their plight is one of the most extensively documented: 

Infanticide is a common practice in most mammals.  Male lions use infanticide to get rid of offspring in a newly acquired pride that are not genetically related to the male coalition.  Solitary males are also capable of killing the offspring of an encountered pride (Packer 1983).  Female lions have also been observed to kill cubs from a rival pride, but they would never kill cubs from their own pride.  The dead offspring are sometimes consumed as an energy source and other times they are simply just eradicated for the sake of it.  Older cubs and sub-adults have a better chance of being able to escape incoming infanticidal males than younger cubs (Urban 2002).

Infanticide is very advantageous to incoming males in that they are getting rid of offspring that do not carry their genes (Packer 1983).  The other advantage of killing the offspring of the former owners of the pride is that a female will quickly enter estrous following the infanticidal event.  As a result, the incoming males are then capable of copulating very soon after overtaking the pride (Viljoen 2003).  However, following the takeover it usually takes a lioness 6-9 estrous cycles in order to become impregnated again.  Packer hypothesizes that this duration of time is caused by the female adapting to the new male’s sperm rather than the female being infertile (Packer 1983). 7 

Primates, such as ourselves, are not immune.  Hanuman langurs of India, red howlers of Venezuela, gorillas of Rwanda, blue monkeys of Uganda, lemurs of Madagascar and the Thomas langur of Sumatra have all been observed committing infanticide.  Humans have had a long history of the practice as was concluded by Laila Williamson, an anthropologist of the American Museum of Natural History, in 1978:

Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunters and gatherers to high civilization, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule.

There is ample historical evidence to document the incredible propensity of parents to murder their children under an assortment of stressful situations. In nineteenth century England, for example, infanticide was so rampant throughout the country that a debate over how to correct the problem was carried out in both the lay and medical press. An editorial in the respected medical journal Lancet noted that "to the shame of civilization it must be avowed that not a State has yet advanced to the degree of progress under which child-murder may be said to be a very uncommon crime.”

Infanticide has pervaded almost every society of mankind from the Golden Age of Greece to the splendor of the Persian Empire. While there are many diverse reasons for this wanton destruction, two of the most statistically important are poverty and population control. Since prehistoric times, the supply of food has been a constant check on human population growth. One way to control the lethal effects of starvation was to restrict the number of children allowed to survive to adulthood. Darwin believed that infanticide, "especially of female infants," was the most important restraint on the proliferation of early man. 8

Even in modern times we still see human mothers abandoning their babies to die – just as Roman mothers did thousands of years ago, in a practice known as “exposure,” where the fate of the baby was left up to the gods.  Abandonment has become an often enough occurrence that lawmakers felt the need to enact new “safe surrender” or “infant abandonment” legislation to combat it.  Texas was the first in 1999 and numerous other states have since followed suit. 

These laws deal with mothers consciously getting rid of their own infants, but little can be done to stop a spontaneous abortion, or a miscarriage.  The odds only get worse as a woman gets older.  In women ages 15 to 35, the incidence of miscarriage is between 10% and 12%. In women ages 35 to 39, the incidence of miscarriage is 18%. In women ages 40 to 44, the incidence of miscarriage is 33%. In women ages 45-plus, the incidence of miscarriage is greater than 50%.

What can the explanation be, from the theistic point of view, for these types of natural abortions?  Could it be as simple, as is the case with “creation,” as “god did it?”   I’ve actually witnessed this one personally.   I know of a girl who was pregnant whose mother desperately, and quite sadistically, wanted this pregnancy to end.  So she did what any “god fearing” Christian would do, she prayed for the termination of the pregnancy!  When she did suffer a miscarriage, her mother was overjoyed.  We were sickened.  Like I said previously, some people already believe in an evil god, they just don’t realize it.  It just goes to show how plastic the god program really is, yet another topic to be discussed later.

There are many more things, too numerous to detail here, that can go horribly wrong with a pregnancy, one of the most graphic being the long-time circus freak show attraction, the conjoined twins.  These occur at a rate of one in every 40,000 births and are a result of one fertilized egg only partially dividing into two.  The survival rate is very low, as they comprise only one in every 200,000 live births.  40 to 6o percent are stillborn, while 35 percent survive only one day after birth.  There are many ways which these twins can be joined, but there are a few major groups which are further subdivided into specific categories.  The first is Terata Catadidyma, which refers to twins joined at the lower half of their body.  This group includes Pyopagus (joined at the rump), Ischiopagus (joined sacrum to sacrum), Dicephalus (one body with two separate heads) and Diprosopus (single body and head with two faces).  The second is Terata Anadidyma, which refers to to twins with one single upper body with a double lower half or twins who are connected by a single body part. This group includes Cephalopagus (connected at the head), Syncephalus (connected in the facial region), Cephalothoracopagus (connected in the facial region and at the thorax), Dipygus (one upper body with two lower bodies).  The third is Terata Anacatadidyma, which refers to twins who are joined at the midsection.  This group includes Thoracopagus (joined at the chest and may share a single heart), Omphalopagus (joined at the abdomen) and Rachipagus (joined back to back).  There is a fourth group, and this is the most disturbing to look at.  These are the parasitic conjoined twins (also known as asymmetrical or unequal).  This is where one of the twins is smaller and malformed, sometimes drastically so. 

Recently, a two year old girl in India named Lackshmi Tatma, who was named after the Hindu goddess of wealth and beauty and considered a goddess in her village of Bihar, was separated successfully from her parasitic twin (Ischiopagus) that was malformed and born without a head.  It took a team of 30 doctors 27 hours working in shifts!  Praise be to science!

Sometimes, in a very rare occurrence, a baby is born with nothing more than a parasitic head born fused to the top of its own.  These are known as craniopagus or cephalopagus.  In 2004, an infant girl who was born in the Dominican Republic, Rebecca Martinez, bled to death after doctors tried to remove her parasitic twin.  Her father, Franklin Martinez, had this to say about her death, "We knew this was a very risky surgery, and now we accept what God has decided."  What's interesting about his view is that he didn't seem to consider that, if there be a god, he decided that she should be deformed long before her birth. 

These deformities, in all their shocking grandeur, would all just be the product of his “loving” hands.  The Bible is very clear about this.  In Jeremiah 1:5 it says "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee..."  If you knew someone, in this case before they even had a body, would you insert them into a defective machine?  If your friend was buying a car, you knew he would drive for the rest of his life, would you sell him a vehicle that was more fit for the junkyard than the road?  If you had even an ounce of morality you would do no such thing.  A moral person would feel bad just thinking about doing something so despicable!  Psalm 139: 13-14 says:

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.  I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

Wonderfully made?  Is having a parasitic head, attached to your own, being wonderfully made?  Is having four legs?  Is having two heads?  How about an extra arm growing out of your back? After viewing but a few horrific pictures of conjoined and parasitic twins, far from feeling like praising, I felt sick to my stomach.  What kind of depraved monster would intentionally deform babies?!