How a Creationist Thinks About Cancer

The Garden of Eden. A detail from Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights." Wikimedia Commons. In my previous post, on the inevitability of cancer in a world dominated by entropy, I described how the cells in a body are constantly dividing, copying with each division every letter and punctuation mark of their genetic information. “Only a creationist could believe that errors do not happen along the way,” I wrote. Mistakes that slip through the cell’s elaborate proofreading mechanism accumulate, and in the right combination these changes -- mutations -- can lead to cancer. Something seemed a little fishy to me about the first part of that sentence, and a reader pointed out my mistake. Though creationists do not believe in evolution, they do believe in genetic mutations. While they play no part in the origin and development of the species -- these were laid out in advance by God ...