“Why? Because, simply, some of these are so cleverly destructive,” he added.
“The same goes for destructive viruses, bacteria and especially parasites,” Winter continued. “These represent incredibly ingenious evil. They represent, I am thinking, the involvement of intelligence. They are not just unguided evolution or, much less, errors in creation.”
Winter had deeply contemplated the origins of diseases when he spent “every day, almost all day,” in the Intensive Care Unit beside his wife of nearly 50 years in the last month of her life.
It was during this last month as well as the five years he cared for his wife Roberta – who had multiple myeloma (bone marrow cancer) – that Winter was forced to confront the question of who was responsible for diseases.
In an article, Winter recalled watching the 9/11 terrorists on TV while at the hospital with Roberta. The terrorists on screen made him ponder about the two different kinds of terrorists that exist – big and very small. Just like the big, visible terrorists, people also need to fight against the violence caused by tiny outside invaders or “tiny global terrorists,” Winter thought.
“Does nutrition, exercise, banishing anxiety, etc. protect you or cure you of Malaria? Are our immune systems normally capable of defeating Malaria, Tuberculosis, Smallpox, Anthrax, etc?” Winter asked. “No, not normally.”
Diseases are caused by “attacking pathogens” which an immune system, no matter how healthy, cannot defeat, he concluded.
Therefore, Christians must not only pray for healing as if it is only up to God to cure diseases, Winter said. Instead, they should use scientific knowledge that God has allowed them to understand to actively work toward eradicating diseases by fighting the source of the problem.
Though Winter was very passionate regarding the issue of “intelligent evil,” his thoughts on them have largely gone unnoticed.
But those familiar with Winter’s work still hope even after his death that Winter will get people thinking about an issue that could be tackled if believers were aware of it – as he did at the 1974 Lausanne Congress for World Evangelization.
At the conference, convened by famed evangelist Billy Graham, Winter delivered a groundbreaking presentation, in which he introduced the term “hidden people groups” (later to become synonymous with unreached people groups) and used statistics to show that over two billion people still could not hear the Gospel in their own language and cultural setting.
At the time, many Christians had begun to assume that the work of missions was over as the Gospel had gone to every continent and nearly every country. But, as Winter showed in a paper circulated prior to the Lausanne conference, even if every Christian in the world shared the Gospel with their neighbors, only half the world would hear it.
“The awesome problem,” he wrote “is ... that most non-Christians in the world today are not culturally near neighbors of any Christians.”
To reach them, Winter added, will take “a special kind of ‘cross-cultural’ evangelism.”
Editorial
Diseases: creations of God or 'Intelligent Evil'?
By: Michelle A. Vu and Kenneth Chan
Monday, 29 June 2009, 16:12 (IST)
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