Ticks, Lyme Disease, and Creation

The post "On the Origin of New Diseases" linked to an article that discussed, from a scientific and biblical perspective, how and why we are seeing new diseases. The article featured below is companion to it.

Scoffers often claim that since bad things exist today, there is no loving God and that these are evidence for evolution. Some things such as ticks, Lyme disease, and the so-called brain-eating amoeba are a challenge for creationists, we try to answer questions from our presuppositions — like our secular counterparts.

Female black-legged tick, CDC / Jim Gathany
(Usage does not imply endorsement of site contents)

Yes, many things are bad today, but that does not necessarily mean God created them the way they are now. (Darwinists evosplain such things with the vacuous "It evolved" non-answer.) Like everything else, ticks have mutations. Comparing them to mites, ticks may have originally been plant eaters and decomposers in the original very-good creation. They have a positive regulatory function in ecosystems today and are a food source for many animals.

Unfortunately, many carry harmful microorganisms. The deer tick that transmits Lyme and other diseases is extremely small. That makes them more difficult to find, and the symptoms of Lyme and the Wuhan virus have many characteristics in common.

Ticks are notorious for their capability of transmitting diseases that have debilitated humanity for thousands of years. They can confer lifelong chronic ailments via pathogenic bacterial species that they harbor inside themselves. These parasitic tick species, namely the Ixodes scapularis tick is responsible for hundreds of thousands of Lyme disease infections each year. This profound tick continues to produce the highest rate of zoonotic disease in the United States each year. Many may ask why these tick species are so infectious when ticks were originally designed by a benevolent God. Why would a good Creator choose to design a creature ultimately capable of such considerable virulence? What accounts for the continued resurgence of Lyme disease? There are many contributing factors that help to resolve this complex question, such as its relative displacement and the many compounding mutations on the species itself that attributes to its overall pathogenicity that in turn may violate its original design. One of the primary goals of this article is to elaborate on the early ancestry of these ticks that eventually gave way to the development of critically invasive infections such as Lyme disease.

Yes, it's a bit technical, but I got something out of that. You can too, if you want to read the rest at "The Origin of Ticks and the Genesis and Emergence of Lyme Disease".