The Mind of God (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Tuesday, November 02, 2010, 14:55 (5134 days ago) @ dhw

A fascinating article in today's Guardian: Scientists have made a new discovery about viruses and antibodies. For the benefit of non-scientists like myself, I'll reproduce parts of the article that David and others will already know about, but bear with me as I have a theological point to make.-"The body tackles infections by unleashing biological foot soldiers called antibodies that stick to viruses as they circulate in the bloodstream. For the past 100 years, scientists working on immunity generally believed this made it harder for viruses to get inside healthy cells and so spread illness around the body.-But the new study has shown that [...] instead of preventing viruses from infecting cells, the antibodies follow the invader inside and co-ordinate an immune attack from within.
A virus is a microscopic bundle of genetic material that is wrapped in a protective protein coat. Viruses cannot multiply by themselves, but instead must hijack cells and replicate inside them. [...] -James's group found that in many cases, antibodies do very little to stop viruses from infecting cells. Instead the antibodies cling to the viruses when they invade cells and use the cells' own biological machinery to kill the virus.-James showed that once inside an infected cell, antibodies attract a protein called TRIM21. This in turn signals to the cell's equivalent of a waste disposal machine, a large cluster of proteins called a proteasome. When the proteasome arrives, it latches on to TRIM21 and goes to work, dismantling the virus piece by piece."-This doesn't apply to all viruses, but the discovery should bring about the development of new drugs to assist in those cases where viruses do not shed their protective coats before entering healthy cells.-I could have put this article under Ain't nature wonderful, because yet again the mind boggles at the sheer complexity of living things. But if people haven't already cottoned onto that message by now, they never will. What occurred to me as I read the article was that this was a great image for the battle between good and evil. Of course viruses would disagree, and we all know that such terms are highly subjective, but I would use the image to criticize those theologians who insist with their interpretation of life's history that man is the origin of evil. If God exists and we are to understand how his mind works (pure speculation, of course), we can hardly ignore the fact that the live forces of destruction, like the live forces of creation and of healing, existed long before man came on the scene. If it wasn't those cold-hearted killers the carnivores, it was those vicious invaders the viruses that set God's pattern for the world.