COVID-19 Origins Controversy Applies to Larger Intelligent Design Debate

 I’ve never read a better report than the one from the “Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” for explaining why the COVID-19 virus is most probably the result of an unintentional release from the Wuhan Weapons Lab’s gain-of-function research. It is a long report, and I won’t go into all the details here, but I do want to explore the consequences of this controversy as it applies to the creationism vs. naturalism debate. Unlike most, I don’t describe the debate in creation-evolution terms for reasons that I explore here. Naturalism is the real opposite of creationism, but I find that naturalists hide behind evolution to obscure just how unreasonable their claims really are. Almost all Christians believe that some amount of evolution occurred, the real question is whether it is reasonable or not to believe that nature alone is responsible for all of the variation in all life forms throughout earth’s history.

It is true that much of the science media and political establishment was trying to push the narrative that the virus was the product of nature alone, and that is part of the reason why the controversy has simmered so long. But the article takes some time to explain just how and why that occurred. There is much I could say about that too, and it goes to the heart of the valid part of the skepticism that many Christians have toward the science/political/media establishment. But that’s in the piece and it is not what I want to focus on today. The other reason the controversy has gone on so long is more interesting to me. It is that it is legitimately difficult to tell whether significant changes in organisms are the result of nature or the intervention of an intelligent designer. In this case a scientist name Shi and her associates.

Here it is over a year later, and we still don’t know. The virus underwent a huge leap in the ability to infect humans, and it seemed to come out of nowhere. How did it originate? The change happened right in front of us. We have studied the virus intensely over this period with considerable resources. That includes the origins question. And the fact is that even though we have collected a lot of very specific evidence and people have strong opinions, we just don’t know.

 I submit to you that science is simply not that good at detecting whether or not a virus, or a life form, has been engineered by an Intelligent Designer or whether it is the product of natural forces alone. The money-quote from the article is this, “For instance, any result of a gain-of-function experiment could be explained as one that evolution would have arrived at in time. “

There you have it. Proponents of what amounts to the Design Hypothesis for this virus have been pointing out features of the virus that are unlikely to have occurred by natural processes. Advocates for what amounts to the naturalistic explanation counter that viruses naturally do lots of strange things and argue that these findings could be the result of a few unlikely events, by chance, coming together.

This is like much of the ID-Naturalism debate. It is a microcosm of that debate. I am extremely convinced by the evidence in that report, some of which I already knew, that the virus was engineered. The Chinese may even have proof of that in their possession but they are acting as guilty as sin and keeping a lid on a lot of the data. Absent a confession, those who wish to cling to the hypothesis of natural origin will always be able to hide in the improbable because any gain-of-function can be explained as one that evolution would have arrived at in time.

That question of time is a critical one. The strongest evidence against a natural origin in that article comparing the amount of change which occurred and noting the time it took for it to occur- the rapidity of the change violated the norms of viral evolution. In other words, a naturalistic explanation has a rate problem. The same is true in the broader creationism debate. In the Cambrian Explosion dozens of new Phyla show up in what is, compared to the norms of biological evolution, a fantastically short period of time for that amount of change to occur. Those new phyla go on for tens of millions of years spinning off very few species, until all at once, they all start doing so in the Ordovician. There are numerous anomalies like this (though none on such a scale as the Cambrian) throughout earth’s history. Evolution, as defined by "change", mostly happens in relatively short and dramatic bursts between long periods of near-stasis. Naturalists like to use a waive of the hand to say that nature did it all. It just did it in some time periods apparently thousands or even millions of times faster than in others! All those “gain-of-function” events can be explained away simply by applying copious amounts of credulity in inverse proportion to the rate of change.

While such dismissals may satisfy them, it doesn’t change the underlying issue: Their faith that nature alone is sufficient isn’t science. It isn’t verifiable by present scientific capabilities. It would be orders of magnitude harder than figuring out if the Wuhan virus was engineered and absent a confession from the Chinese, we may never know that for certain. Conversely, there is nothing “unscientific” about looking at these periods when change seems to occur with astonishing rapidity relative to the norm and conclude that nature wasn’t in the driver’s seat. 

When science very poor at answering a question, there is no “scientific” or “non-scientific” answer. There are only answers which limit themselves to philosophical naturalism, the belief that there is no supernatural and that therefore all effects must have a natural cause, or those which are open to theistic possibilities. On such questions, that science uses a method of operation that only considers natural causes doesn’t make an answer which relies on naturalism as a philosophical premise any more “scientific” than the opposite conclusion.

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