"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have
designedly created the Ichneumaonidae with the express intention of their
feeding within caterpillars." 
 
     - Evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin in a letter to Asa Gray

"Here’s something to ponder long and hard. Malaria was intentionally
designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells
is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts. [A mother’s] children died
in her arms partly because an intelligent agent deliberately made malaria."  
  
     - Intelligent design pseudoscientist Michael Behe in The Edge of Evolution


If perchance an ultrapowerful creator deity exists, one way or another it
is entirely responsible for killing off some 50 billion children and 100-300
billion preborn (http://gregspaul.webs.com/Philosophy&Theology.pdf).
Consider some alternatives.

According to leading Intelligent Design creationists such as devout
Catholic microbiologist Michael Behe, because it is not possible for living
organisms to evolve via natural selection God has had to intentionally craft every
species of microbe that kills people kids included specifically to kill. And
since God carefully designed humans he deliberately failed to equip
children with the effective immune systems the little tykes need to fend off the
diseases he designed. That is outright premeditated homicide. Malaria alone
may have slaughtered 20 billion children, smallpox perhaps 10 billion. In The
Edge of Evolution Behe prattles on about how God has created a stage for the
human drama to play out upon, and that in this play bad things happen.
That’s inane, and it’s morally depraved -- if a producer put on a play that was
designed to kill off half the child actors they would be put up on charges
for homicide. Or contemplate how in Godless: The Church of Liberalism, Ann
Coulter relies on Behe to prove why Darwin was all wrong about amoral
evolution as opposed to God’s moral creation, and she is outraged at how the
god-free environmentalists have allowed millions to die from malaria because they
had a beef against DDT. This when Behe argues that God devised the malarial
killing machine that has aborted the free will of billions in the first
place! Its moral inanity of the highest order. Concocted to maximize PR
potential, the term Intelligent Design is a misnomer. It should really be labeled
Stupid Design. Or better yet Dumb Ass Design -- DAD. Really, I’m not kidding.

Many but as we shall see not all fundamentalist Biblical creationists
who go for the literal Genesis story agree with the intelligent I mean
stupid design crowd (who blasphemously accept that species descend from one
another over immense geological time) that God had to design every lethal microbe
to be lethal. But they contend that it’s not God’s fault that disease
rampages across the planet. In their opinion all was fine in the Garden of Eden
circ 4000 BCE where all organisms lived in harmony, with the big cats and
the tyrannosaurs eating vegetables, and the waiting in the wings disease
organisms doing who knows what. Humans, not God, are responsible for the
activation and spread of diseases because Adam and Eve sinned by disobeying their
creator, releasing the bacteria and viruses to afflict humanity that deserved
what it has received for its Fall from Grace that can only be redeemed
through Christ. This Looney Toons scenario is the equivalent of parents placing
an open container of gasoline in the kid’s room, plus a box of matches, and
warning the children not the play with fire. Bad results are guaranteed. Not
explained by this scenario is why the human reproductive system the perfect
God designed is so imperfect that it wastes most conceptions, and why the
immune systems he crafted for kids are so lousy. The idea that allowing the
deaths of countless billions of immature children and aborting their free will
is justified because a couple of humans slipped up is as incoherent as it
is depraved.

Many theists don’t want to have anything to do with how either DAD or
Biblical creationism makes their beloved God out to be a murderer, so they
contend that God did not design any diseases. Instead God in his perfect wisdom
allowed living things to evolve willy nilly on their own under the influence
of highly imperfect and amoral natural selection. Some organisms happened to
evolve into kid killers, and for some reason efficient immune systems did
not evolve among human juveniles, while the human reproductive scheme did not
turn out to be any great shakes either. This sloppy evolutionary version of
godly creation proposes that in trying to maximize free will the nitwit
creator incompetently minimized free will. This scenario is not necessarily
premeditated murder, but it at least is negligent homicide on a stunning scale.
Again, a careless producer that put on a play that happened to whack off
half the child actors would be charged with criminal negligence. This scenario
too is ethically depraved.

A good many Biblical creationists share the evolutionary creationist’s
aversion to a premeditatedly homicidal intelligent designer, but they also
oppose the amorality of evolution. So in their view none of the microorganisms in
the Garden of Eden had been crafted with lethal mechanisms by God. Instead,
some microbes devolved into killers after The Fall, so don’t blame the Lord
Creator. Nor did the creator outfit children with the effective microbio
defenses those who bore no responsibility for The Fall would need to survive
the diseases (a form of collective punishment of the type the commies are
into) He in His perfect knowledge knew would evolve. Adults did not get
efficient reproductive complexes to minimize noninduced abortions. This
pseudoscientific fiction manages to share some of the logic and morality defects of
both the above Genesis creationist and the evolutionary creation scenarios.

A few Abrahamist monotheists have proposed that God is Good, but He is not
sufficiently powerful to prevent bad things from happening, as per Rabbi
Kushner’s Why Bad Things Happen. This hypothesis is fatally flawed because even
we humans using some pretty simple ideas such as sanitation, vaccines and
antibiotics have saved billions of kids. A wise and caring god could have
easily provided his creations with the information needed to save billions of
kids over history. Instead, the Biblical Jesus does exactly the opposite,
deriding those who wash their hands before eating for engaging in a meaningless
ritual. In other words, the supposed Creator of the Universe shows how
little he cares about the well being of people by giving out bad sanitation
advice. Although the gospels have Christ saving a few local children, the
overall mortality rate remained at one in two. That is not love for the children,
and claiming otherwise is morally obtuse. 

The Holocaust of the Children makes it impossible to construct a
monotheistic creator of overwhelming power that is moral and does the right thing when
it comes to humanity, is it possible to devise a god that is good in a
polytheistic scenario? Assume that there are two great gods that possess roughly
equivalent powers, close enough that if they wage war upon one another the
outcome is a true toss up. Further assume that one deity is truly good, and
that the other is really bad. Finally, for some reason the outcome depends
to a major extent on which side humanity fights. In that and other
polytheistic scenarios at least one God can be good to a certain degree. But the
premise is too flawed to fly.

Why would the activity of mere mortal humans be of import in a struggle between
titans of immense power? More importantly, the better deity is obligated to let
humanity know about the practical steps they can take to save the little ones.
Failure to do so is at least ethically if not criminally negligent. I am hard pressed
to think of a religion that proposes such a duel between supernatural equals
without a certain resolution. Zoroastrianism comes fairly close, but in that canon
the outcome is predetermined in favor of the good God, so it like Abrahamism
is merely an immoral morality play staged for insufficient reason on the kid killing earth.  

The actual reason the planet has such an ugly dark side is simple enough.
There is no one in charge of the show, so lots of awful things happen.
Mindless natural evolutionary processes that do not know better are
correspondingly amoral, so tens of billions of kids die for no good reason.
In the end we cannot blame the gods for the mess, for they of course do not exist.

The apparent decline of popular creationism (Part 1 of this series) and  
(www.opednews.com/Diary/More-on-Why-Religious-Supe-by-Gregory-Paul-110906-88.html)
has an interesting convert. Michael Behe’s son, Leo Behe, has come out as an
atheist evolutionist. In part because the universe is too inefficient and
defective to take the idea that a perfect God created the mess seriously.

It is to the elder Behe’s credit that he straight out acknowledges that his
creationist beliefs require that God be the exacting designer of death
dealing organisms. At least he is not evading the dark side of his alleged
creator like most theists are wont to do. But that does not save the morality of
his creation. Note how in the beginning quotes above it is the
anti-creationist Darwin who so many believers condemn as immoral who just cannot swallow
the illogical notion that a creator that designs organisms to kill other
innocent beings can be truly good. It is the godly Christian who is fine with
the egregiously killer God.

Samuel Clemens had no patience with such nonsense.

"There were typhoid germs, and cholera germs, and hydrophobia germs, and
lockjaw germs, and black-plague germs, and some other hundreds of aristocrats,
specially precious creations, golden bearers of God’s love to man, blessed
gifts of the infatuated Father to his children."
                                                                   - Letters From the Earth