Mr Fry and the Worm

The religious views of Stephen Fry are well known so I am as befuddled as he says he is by the shocked reaction to his recently-publicised interview with Gay Byrne on RTE. Mind you, Mr Byrne himself looks strangely shocked in the video. Perhaps he didn't really know who this Fry cove was. Asked what he would say to God at the gates of heaven, Mr Fry answered that he would confront him with the horror of earthly life which his divine fiat has caused, and refuse to enter the Empyrean on God’s terms even if he were given the chance.

“Yes, the world is splendid, but it also has in it insects,” he said, “whose whole life cycle is to burrow into the eyes of children and make them blind. They eat outwards from the eyes. Why? Why did you do that to us? You could easily have made a creation in which that didn't exist.”

I'm not sure there is such an insect, in point of fact. There is a range of ocular parasites, but they are mostly fungi or nematodes rather than insects, and don’t eat the eyes of their host. Some of them seem to infest children or young adults disproportionately, but that’s not the same as their life cycle depending on human children.

What Mr Fry probably had in mind is river-blindness, an affliction widespread in some African countries, and which, rather famously, was the reason David Attenborough gave for not believing in God. Once again, the cause of the disease is a worm rather than an insect, although insects spread it. Still, although human beings are the worm’s definitive host, it doesn't particularly afflict children, and only a minority of people who are infested end up having ocular problems, since the worms can inhabit other areas of the body too. Nor does it eat its way out through the eyes: instead, the blindness is caused by scarring to the eye tissue brought about by the body’s reaction to the bacteria released by immature worms when they die.

Mr Fry is also, I expect, half-recalling the reason that other great naturalist Charles Darwin gave for not believing in God, the ichneumon wasp. It lays its eggs in caterpillars and the larvae do, indeed, eat their way out of their hosts. Ichneumon wasps don’t bother human beings, though.

Put all these elements together and you get an insect whose life cycle depends on burrowing into children’s eyes and then eats its way out of them, which is a great rhetorical device but doesn't exist; a Gothic trope, a testament to our horror at the idea of being consumed from within. It’s a QI fact, something you think you've heard somewhere but is really invented from bits and pieces of other things which are true.

Enough fun. None of this matters very much. Any one of these horrible afflictions would be enough to accuse God, and for Creationist Christians this is a real problem. You might be tempted to lay such evils at the feet of the Devil, but traditional Christianity has always insisted that the Devil can’t actually create anything, only make up illusions and tricks; another way of absolving God is to put the horrors of life down to the Fall, the effects of human sin echoing and reverberating through the created order (perhaps this is not far off the mark: earthquakes, floods and volcanoes aside, diseases that affect humans have always, necessarily, coincided with human wickedness). Even then, God has allowed it to happen. More liberal Christians can’t hide God behind the random processes of evolution, either, because ultimately he is responsible for their specific results even if he hasn't deliberately designed them, and why he has chosen to work through such a colossally wasteful, violent mechanism is a speechless mystery. 

The only comfort is that, of course, Christians (and the ancient Jews) have always been aware of the problem. It is an unusual believer to whom these thoughts have never occurred and who has never turned over the same questions in their mind. Behind Stephen Fry and David Attenborough's blinded children lies Dostoevsky, Ivan and Alyosha’s conversation in The Brothers Karamazov:

I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don't want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. … too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.

And behind Dostoevsky lies the Book of Job, written into the very Scriptures themselves. The only answer Job gets from God to the question of why he, an innocent, has suffered, is basically ‘Look, I know what I'm doing, all right? Hush yer wheesht.’ It’s not much of answer, to be honest.

I don’t take very seriously Mr Fry’s insistence, later in the interview, that atheism is not just not believing in God, but also, assuming there is a God, rejecting him as malicious and insane: as Byron said, ‘to look the tyrant in his everlasting face, and tell him/His evil is not good’. Evolutionary biology has at least relieved us of that horror, of necessarily believing the universe to be actively malign, a place of persecution and dread; no, that’s just a pose. Nobody assuming that could survive mentally. There would be no reason for belief at all but for Christ’s cross and the empty tomb; and those of us who find ourselves Christians, working back from that point, we are committed thereby to a God who shares our suffering and redeems it, and yet also presides over it. We have to trust it makes sense somewhere, but can’t imagine how that might be.

Perhaps one day we might. One of the stories that brings me most comfort is Albert Einstein’s rueful admission that he’d come to a dead end developing a unified field theory because the maths didn't exist to enable him to do it. Criticising Christians for not being able to reconcile God and suffering is perhaps like having a go at the ancient Arab mathematicians who first conceptualised the zero for not being able to come up with differential calculus as well: we have more thinking to do yet. Perhaps a great deal.