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Why would a good God create viruses?
When people learn that I’m a virologist and a Christian, they often ask, “Why would a good God create viruses?”
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In this Sept. 26, 2016 photo, Angelica Pereira holds a instant film photo of her and her daughter Luiza, who was born with microcephaly, one of many serious medical problems that can be caused by congenital Zika syndrome, in Santa Cruz do Capibaribe, Pernambuco state, Brazil. For a brief moment, mothers with 1-year-old babies with microcephaly, forgot about getting that hard-to-find drug needed to prevent their babies from having seizures or the uncomfortable stares directed at their children born with small heads because of a Zika virus infection in the womb. Instead they were just like any other moms getting the first formal photographs of their babies. AP Photo/Felipe Dana (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
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hen people learn that I’m a virologist and a Christian, they often ask, “Why would a good God create viruses?” The question and its underlying assumption that all viruses are bad reveal a lack of understanding of viruses.
Historically, viruses were identified by the diseases they caused (e.g., polio, rabies and smallpox). Although some viruses like measles and influenza cause widespread disease and mortality, they are rare (yet notable) exceptions.
The advent of metagenomics over the past 10–15 years has changed the way we understand viruses. We now realize that Earth is filled with a truly vast array and diversity of viruses that serve a beneficial role in nature.
Everywhere we find life, we find viruses in overwhelming abundance. They display incredible diversity in size, shape, genome organization and in the kinds of cells and animals they infect. A single milliliter of ocean water or a gram of soil can harbor 10–100 million virus particles or more! If we could line up all the viruses end to end, they would stretch out 42 million light-years. That’s almost 20 round-trips to the Andromeda Galaxy. Considering most viruses are one onethousandth the width of a human hair, that’s a lot of viruses.
Despite such huge numbers and diversity, all viruses share one thing in common: they cannot replicate or make more viruses on their own. They require a living cell to provide resources, machinery, and energy to produce and assemble viral components into new viruses. Viruses depend on cellular metabolic processes and enzymes for provision and production of building blocks for new viruses and on intracellular transport systems for many steps in viral replication and assembly. Without living cells, viruses would never replicate.
We have no idea where viruses originate, but because they depend on living cells to replicate, some scientists attribute their origin to escaped genes from once living cells. Somehow, they have maintained necessary components needed to replicate themselves and most likely have accrued changes and added various components over time through continued replication in a variety of organisms.
However, most viruses are unable to successfully infect a variety of cells or hosts. So this scenario is a bit problematic.
