Sanford’s premise is that some virus, created perfect and terrible in its virulence, is unleashed upon the world to cause indiscriminant misery and loss, before it yields to the accumulation of deleterious mutation and attenuates.
What sort of a sadistic, sociopathic (g)od would design such a torment and take relish in a lethal harvest of human life without respect to deserving or consequence? In my wife’s ancestry, one family lost 3 sons in one week in 1918.
If Sanford and his followers insist that God created all of nature in such exquisite detail, then Sanford and his followers can deal with the morality of that assertion. I have asked this question concerning God’s agency on several occasions where design, intricate but cruel, is held to be evidence of a designer, and none of the defenders of special creation has ever addressed the moral dimension. I started a specific thread concerning design and the problem of evil, and so far no actual proponents of design have touched it.
https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/id-who-is-the-designer-behind-the-curtain/
So here it is: the moral conflict of immediate design and special creation with the orthodox view of the goodness of God is in itself grounds to invalidate the entire proposal on the basis of self-contradiction.