God Created Covid-19!
Talking about root causes is a deflection in the quest to understand the origins of Covid-19
And so the debate over Covid-19’s origins continues. The lab leak theory has finally become respectable, if unproven, while two new and upcoming papers in Science and Cell magazines, respectively, come down squarely on the side of a zoonotic theory again, that is, an animal origin via an intermediary animal.
First, credit to Jerry Coyne, a retired University of Chicago professor and author of a past best-selling book, “Why Evolution Is True,” who alerted me to this. Coyne produces a daily blog under the same title.
My interest here is in examining the rhetoric (the argumentation, the logic) behind the debate – lab leak or zoonotic transmission? I want to show that people who support the latter thesis may be right, but their logic is flawed. For this I need to point a finger at Peter Daszak, the British expert on disease ecology and an early proponent of the zoonotic hypothesis. He also is president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance. I saw him on TV early in the pandemic arguing that, of course, SARS CoV-2 came from nature; it was the inevitable result of man’s intrusion into, and colonization of, natural habitat, he said. The virus likely originated in bats and reached humans via an intermediary animal, not yet positively identified, he and many others have argued since.
You probably recognize the names Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance – those are the people at the center of a vitriolic debate between Anthony Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) as to whether they were involved in gain of function research, which could have led to a lab leak. I don’t want to address the gain of function issue, though. It’s the indirect invocation of a root cause by Daszak and others (as distinguished from a proximate cause) that’s the problem. Yes, SARS CoV-2 had to come from nature, somewhere, somehow. Everything alive comes from nature. Bats, the presumed first host of SARS CoV-2, come from nature. We humans crawled out of the primordial sea billions of years ago – we come from nature, too.
Theologians sometimes highlight an alternative theory for the cause of everything – it’s God, creation, the First Cause of everything. I read some theology in my youth and so discovered Michael Grant, a historian who has written about the Jews of the Roman Empire and the life of Jesus. According to Grant, or rather my interpretation of Grant, the modern Western view of God combines the ancient Hebrew tradition of a paternalistic, judgmental creator with the ancient Greek tradition of a “first cause.”
That’s it – God created SARS CoV-2!
It’s irrefutable, really. Every single thing that exists as a cause must itself must have a cause, which in turn has a cause, which will take us as far back as we can ever go – to a First Cause. Peter Daszak’s reference to man’s intrusion into nature as the root cause for zoonotic transmission of disease is worthless – it’s part of the chain of causation, but that’s all it is.
What we really want to know about Covid-19, however, is what was the last cause in the chain of causation. Arrogant and defiant assertions from people like Daszak, and perhaps the scientists in Nature and Cell, simply have not told us anything when they say it came from “nature.” What I want to know is when and where the first human was infected, and how, not hear some deflection about where it earlier came from.
CORRECTION: An early version of this post misspelled Peter Daszak's name.