You could call Globe and Mail Columnist Margaret Wente that paper’s token conservative, but you would be doing a disservice. She is a provocative thinker in her own right. For Mother’s Day sh focused our Western Civilization’s abandonment of the reproductive function, in effect writing its own death warrant. Virtually every industrialized nation except the United States now has a birth rate well below replacement levels and the U.S. is only inches away from the tipping point.
The rate of immigration needed to sustain our population and our economy is arguably unsustainable culturally. We can’t bring people in from Africa, Asia or the Middle East fast enough and process and school them into proper, secularized , high-tech Canadians fast enough to sustain our economy or our rainbow mosaic of a society.
However, Western Europe’s leaders still seem to believe they can indeed absorb unlimited numbers of Muslims and turn them into perfect post-WW2 secular Europeans who keep whatever religious beliefs they have in a closet. I think Justin Trudeau and his entourage think the same.
At one remove from this is an agenda hled by many in our university and public policy elites to reduce the population sharply—down to a few billion worldwide — supported by fully robotized infrastructure.
Conservative Canadian pundit Ted Byfield used his column to applaud Wente. Some of his fans, however, got on her case for appearing to endorse evolution when she did a quick survey of reasons for having children, including serving God and perpetuating one’s genes.
So the readers’ discussion quickly moved, as web comment chains do, away from motherhood to Wente’s somewhat offhand reference to evolution and genes. Thus, Jim Mason wrote dismissively: “In fact, the ‘right’ behaviour in an evolutionary worldview is for males to impregnate as many females as possible as often as possible since evolution is simply ‘the survival of the fittest’ with the ‘fittest’ being, by definition, those that survive. Consequently, by having as many offspring as possible, a male will increase the probability of more offspring surviving and, therefore, being ‘the fittest,’ whereby, that male will be making his optimum contribution to the continuation of the species.”
But I don’t believe Jim Mason’s version of the current evolutionary take on the male imperative is correct, though it used to be. Evolutionary biologists no longer believe male promiscuity may not be as good a way to ensure the survival of one’s genes or one’s offspring as settling down with one mate and ensuring her survival and that of one’s children (and genes.). in this, they would be agreeing with God.
Of course, evolutionary theorists have no idea what really was going on a million years ago and they have no way to verify their theories. Many men have indeed behaved promiscuously. But marriage has obviously prevailed as an institutionalized behaviour while promiscuity has been condemned. Even polygamy is a form of marriage institutionalizing permanent unions.
Arguing evolution from observable human behaviour is like a parlour game, or, as some put it, a mug’s game. But, admit it, as a game, it is fun. In my view, however, Christianity has a fuller explanation for what we observe in human behaviour than do evolutionists because our explanation includes the Fall. The Fall explains why we can see how the world should work, and how humans should behave, at the same time as it is apparent that people do not behave that way.
In natural law theology, God is said to have written in human nature—in the nature of each human being—how we ought to behave. Which, being Fallen, we often ignore.
I once attended a lecture by Helen Fisher (anthropologist, author: Why We Love, about the neuroscience of romantic love). This lecture was where I learned of evolutionary thinking’s shift to seeing monogamy rather than male promiscuity, being best for survival. Evolutionary scientists who believed marriage was best were still stumped, she admitted, to explain why promiscuity and infidelity persisted; why humans were capable of being married and sincerely committed to one person while at the same time also able to fall in love with another and be sexually attracted to a third. As faithful evolutionists, they have to believe everything that lives or ever lived has an evolutionary reason to do so.
I was tempted to wave my hand and say, “Teacher, teacher, I know why these contradictions exist. It’s because of The Fall.”
I agree with Fisher, in other words, that it is hard to see an evolutionary advantage in adultery. If life, as Darwinists believe, is nothing but a dog-eat-dog struggle, then ensuring the survival of one’s mate and offspring is a full-time job.
However, if Christians are correct, life in the fallen world is often, but not necessarily and not always, dog-eat-dog. It is redeemable in a limited way by our faithful, charitable actions in imitation of Christ. And it is redeemable completely by Christ on His return.
Where the promiscuity idea came from, I believe, is the insect view of life. Some leading popular thinkers, notably Paul Ehrlich and Jared Diamond, wrote very deterministic books based on their study of insects. Ehrlich wrote the Population Bomb, wrongly predicting the world would run out of all natural resources including food, in the 1980s. Diamond explained all history in terms of geography. Britain was more successful than France because it was closer to North America, surrounded by water and rich in tin and then coal. Period. And so on. Diamond gives no importance to Protestantism, the Magna Carta, the cherished story of King Arthur, for example.
But humans, unlike insects, have free will, and can change their course. Humans can develop new ways to feed themselves, explore for more oil and iron and coal when rising prices encourage this.
An excellent but under-appreciated documentary movie called Demographic Winter showed a human geographer who commented on screen that the downturn in the industrial world’s birth rate was not affecting conservative Christians, conservative Jews, and Muslims as much as others. They all saw children—and life—as God’s great gift. Therefore these “People of the Book” would slowly take over a larger and larger share of the population by virtue of their large families.
These days Muslims and very conservative Jews are doing the best job at maintaining a commitment to big families but Evangelical Christians and a dwindling number of conservative Catholics are also having big families.
May their tribe increase. While the survival of genes is ultimately irrelevant, the survival of Christian beliefs is of the utmost importance. Mother’s Day is a perfect time to remember that traditional—and large–families are the best way to ensure our faith lives.
Vancouver Island Christian News 