DID GOD CREATE COCKROACHES?

Yes, cockroaches are the flavour of the season (yuck), thanks to the intemperate remarks of the CJI, Hon’ble Sri Surya Kumar, and the satirical movement of Abhijeet Dipke, then ensconced in the USA. To his credit he returned to India to face the music at the risk of being arrested.

We need to get a few things straight before delving further into the cockroaches. The CJI used the term to describe people who were minding other people’s business while not doing anything constructive themselves. This got blown out of proportion that he was calling all unemployed youth cockroaches. This is an unfair and incorrect conclusion. I am neither defending nor justifying the CJI’s remarks that I reiterate were inappropriate, coming as it did from a person of his constitutional stature.

Dipke capitalized on the word cockroach for all unemployed youth. He could never have imagined that his Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) would fire the imagination of young and old in India. It was like a spark in a bundle of dried grass, spreading as in the fallen pine needles in the sub-Himalayan foothills. They cause ravaging forest fires, especially in the Kumaon hills.

There was another 30-year old who quit his job to work for the aam Janata, incurring the wrath of the powers that be. He dared to say “I have come to cast fire on the earth. How I wish it were already enkindled” (Lk 12:49).   

I did a little research on cockroaches. They belong to the zoological order of Blattodea/ Blattaria. There are 4600 species of which 30 associate with human habitat. This species is 320 million years old belonging to the late Jurassic era. It is omnivorous and is resilient enough to withstand a nuclear holocaust.

But why on earth did this God above create these pests down here? I am unaware of anything good that this species has done over the last 320 million years to merit being called one of God’s creation! Did God err in creating them?

Searching for answers I went back to the allegorical account of creation as found in the Book of Genesis. It states that God created “every creature that crawls along the earth in its own species. God saw that it was good” (Gen 1:25). I assume that cockroaches were included.

Was the CJI then paying a compliment by calling interfering young people cockroaches? By establishing the CJP did Dipke also elevate his 20 million digital followers onto a higher plane? These are simplistic questions to whet your appetite.

If everything that God made was good, then how could cockroaches, mosquitoes and venomous snakes be evil? There are anomalies in the Genesis account itself. We read that “God created man in the image and likeness of himself” (Gen 1:27). So everything was hunky dory. What about the two special trees “the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:9). This is the first indication of the presence of evil in God’s “good” creation.

In 1980 I made my first 30-day Ignatian retreat guided by Fr Dan Rice SJ in his ashram in Sokho, Bihar. I was asked to meditate in silence and solitude for a full day on the fall of the angels. The next day I was asked to meditate on the fall of our first parents – Adam and Eve. One could ask, what was there to meditate upon for two days when there is skeletal information in the Bible itself. I assure you, it was a revelation.

There is much significance in the two trees – one giving the knowledge of good and evil. I equate this with the infusion of spiritual faculties in Homo Sapiens; the beginning of morality, the understanding of good and evil. God now presses the panic button because man has “become like one of us, in knowing good from evil” (Gen 3:22). God then applies the brakes. “He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and pick from the tree of life too, and eat and live forever” (Gen 3:23). Why did God take this pre-emptive step? Because Adam and Eve were in a “fallen state” which could not be perpetuated.

The above is a literal reading of Genesis and my interpretation of those events. Now I will take the biblical scholar’s approach. But before that I want to draw some lessons from Creation and the Fall. Though on the one hand it states that all is good, on the other it admits to the presence of evil. This seems self-contradictory. This is how the official catechism of the Catholic Church throws light on this conundrum: “God permits evil in order to draw forth some greater good” (CCC412).

Let me put it in layman’s language. There can be no day without a night, no peak without a valley, no rose without a thorn. It is only in its absence that we appreciate the good. Let us take a lesson from science as well. White is not a colour. It is the fusion of all the colours of the rainbow. And black? It is the absence of all colours. So too we may conclude that evil is the absence of good. Cockroaches would fall in that category.

What of the biblical account of creation itself? Biblical scholars tell us that the first eleven chapters of Genesis, up to the Tower of Babel, are primordial history. They were written in a pictorial way suited to the mentality of unsophisticated people. They are based on the myths of other existing civilizations. The first historical character in the Bible is Abraham who appears in chapter 12.

The Pentateuch, the first 5 books of the Bible that begin with Genesis, “is an amalgam of four documents issuing from different sources and times, but all much later than Moses” (circa 1350 BC). Some parts were written in the 10^th century BC and some even later, probably during the reign of King Solomon (970-931 BC).

The question now arises, how much credence should the “sophisticated thinking” people of today give to the Genesis account of creation? I have a simple answer. The Bible teaches us WHY God created, while science teaches us HOW God created. Faith and science are complementary, like two sides of the same coin.

Some of the important take aways from the Genesis account are: There is a Creator; the sun, moon and stars are part of its creation not divine beings in themselves; men and women are created equal; humans have a divine spark or spiritual faculties that distinguish them from other creatures; they are the only creatures with a moral code. These are valuable messages in themselves.

What of science? True, the Church felt threatened and denied Galileo’s theory of the earth rotating around the sun. This was due to its ignorance and arrogance. Centuries later it apologized to Galileo. Initially it also denied Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (1871) that included the African origin of the human race. Here again the Church now accepts the Big Bang theory of creation 10 billion years ago and the gradual evolution of the cosmos – gas, liquid, solid matter according to the Atomic Table, and the evolution of inanimate and animate life.

The Evolution Theory itself admits to Missing Links, inexplicable gaps between the stages of evolution. The Church calls this “divine intervention”. Here too there is no contradiction. After all there is no scientific evidence to show a stone becoming a tree, a plant becoming a fish, or a chimpanzee becoming a human being. Even cockroaches haven’t mutated from what they were 320 million years ago.

I shall now share some observations from the book “Early Indians” by Tony Joseph. It traces the evolution of Homo Sapiens (HS) from a scientific anthropological point of view. HS evolved from a single black woman in East Africa. Women carry the mitochondrial DNA that can determine our ancestry. All non-African HS today carry about 2% Neanderthal genes in their DNA. Neanderthals became extinct in Europe 40,000 years ago. Interestingly, chimpanzees share 96% DNA with HS. Now come the punch lines.

The emergence of HS was not a single dramatic episode (this contradicts the Genesis account). No human community is of exceptional status relative to others. None are children of God or a chosen people, unless all are. History begins with writing. That began circa 3200 BC in the Early Bronze Age in Iran and Warka.

Hence in all humility we must admit that the Genesis account of creation cannot be taken literally, but as a moral or spiritual lesson that inspires us. I have another niggling question.

The Fall of Adam is described as Original Sin. However, if as anthropologists claim, evolution was not a dramatic singular act then there could also not be a singular original sin or dramatic appearance of morality. That being so, we cannot take the Fall story literally.

The Catechism also humbly admits that “the transmission of Original Sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand … it is a sin “contracted” and not “committed”, a state and not an act” (CCC 404). This balanced view will pass muster by both anthropologists and moralists. This is so different from the black spot on a white soul as taught by over enthusiastic catechism teachers!

Finally, God did create both HS and cockroaches. However, even good things can sour, like milk left out overnight. This should end the debate about good and evil and who created cockroaches.

Back to the modern species. They are social parasites. St Paul identifies them as “Now we hear that there are some of you who are living lives without any discipline, doing no work themselves but interfering with other people’s” (2 Thes 3:11). We need to call out these cockroaches in both Church and society. Sloth and idleness are sins “contracted” not “committed”.

At Mass we parrot off the Confiteor asking forgiveness for what we have done and what we have failed to do. Unfortunately, we tend to focus on the acts of commission and not of omission that could be far more consequential. 

Whether or not we agree with the CJI’s definition of cockroaches, or join the CJP, let us not become cockroaches ourselves and examine our consciences asking ourselves what “we have failed to do” to make this world a better place.