Q & R: the loa loa eye worm

Here’s the Q:

Im currently reading your book ‘A New Kind of Christianity’ and i wondered what your thoughts were on certain anomallies that i’ve found Christians tend to explain away as being the result of ‘The Fall’.
I remember reading that one of our ‘national treasures’ here in Britain, long-time wildlife documentary presenter Sir David Attenborough, received mail from Christian critics chastising him for not crediting God with creating the animals in his programs. As a non-Christian, he said he always responds by pointing out the existance of the Loa Loa eye worm – a creature that lives solely by burrowing its way into eyeballs!
The only Christian response i’ve ever heard to try and rationalise why such a parasitic, harmful animal exists is to put it down to ‘The Fall’; i.e. nature and creation has become contaminated by the sin of man.
It seems like a cop-out answer to me, and your rejection of the Greeko-Roman narrative takes ‘The Fall’ out of the equation, so i was wondering if you had any thoughts on how the existance of such animals can sit with the idea of a loving creator God?

Here’s the R:

First, a quick word about my view of “the Fall.” My critique of a Greco-Romanization of Christian theology (in New Kind of Christianity) leaves a Greco-Romanized understanding of the Fall out of the equation … but the fall could be otherwise defined (I’m actually working on this for my next book) so that it has an essential role in the equation.
I don’t want to minimize the horror of the loa-loa eye worm or any other source of human or animal suffering … I’m not a big fan (as I explained in Naked Spirituality) of theodicies. So let me propose this analogy …
We can’t live in volcanoes because of lava. We can’t live in geysers because of heat. There are certain places where we simply can’t live, and others where, in living there, we must accept certain risks of suffering. Perhaps the “message” in some of these localized dangers is that there are limits to where we can safely settle … until we learn to either coexist or we remove or control the threat. The Guinea Worm may soon be a case in point of the latter …
Again, I’m uncomfortable dabbling in anything similar to theodicy … but perhaps this imperfect analogy offers something helpful.