Christians in the past century or more have failed utterly to face up to the biological reality:
God has created a world where family-lines of organisms are kept in good condition by Darwinian selection processes leading to death or reproductive failure of organisms with `inadequate’ traits—often caused by mutations. Complex traits, such as intelligence or height or immune system health, are the results of complex systems of genes (more than 1000 for intelligence, more than 700 for height) and can be damaged by a load of small mutations. Damage to the immune system, or bad luck with diseases when young, can damage the developments of any or all traits.
If you only accept the above claim for the sake of argument, consider the possibility that the human race in 2019 includes many who would not have survived under past conditions, most because of undesirable mutations. There are now somewhere around 7.7 or so billion human beings alive. Would that population decrease to perhaps 3 billion if we didn’t have the resources to keep alive so many with weak immune systems or low intelligence by the standards of complex, technologically advanced countries which made it possible for them to survive and perhaps live in some state of comfort? Maybe only 2 billion? Or even 1 billion?
Is this horrible, this probable great loss of life if even so little as an economic depression makes it more difficult to feed and cloth and house many who would lose their incomes, make it more difficult for hospitals to offer cancer treatment for all or even more difficult for hospitals to stay open? Perhaps by human standards, but it’s God who created this world and who still rules over it—mostly, at least to our perception, through the properties and laws of the created stuff of this Universe as well as the properties and laws of the Universe as its own self. The human species came to be by way of the sometimes nasty processes of biological evolution.
Think of parasitic wasps:
Parasitoid wasps are a large group of hymenopteran superfamilies, with all but the wood wasps (Orussoidea) being in the wasp-waisted Apocrita. As parasitoids, they lay their eggs on or in the bodies of other arthropods, sooner or later causing the death of these hosts. [See Parasitoid wasp.]
The wasp larvae live by literally sucking the juices out of the bodies of their hosts. Not so much different from some of the parasites in parts of the world which infest human beings, destroying their vision or stripping them of their energy.
Or we can consider the brutal stories told by human genes. The major groups of American Indians carry Y-chromosomes (male sex genes) from the eastward migrating Ancient Northern Eurasians (ancestors of Mongols and Siberians and others, cousins to the westward migrating Ancient Northern Eurasians who gave rise to various `Indo-European’ peoples) and maternal genes from ancestors to the modern Han Chinese. What happened to the husbands and fathers and brothers and sons of those women? A lot of Mexican men carry Y-chromosomes from European men, mostly Spanish, while most of the Mexican women carry maternal genes from native American Indian populations. Oppressed peoples sometimes carry Y-chromosomes and other genes from the conquerors and exploiters of their indigenous ancestors.
Certainly, the histories implied by many a genetic study are pretty nasty.
This `nastiness’ is not something imposed upon God’s world and a `fallen’ race by demons—`fallen angels’ or otherwise. This is part and parcel of the fundamental way in which God’s world, this thing-like phase of His Creation, operates.
Let me take up a related process: miscarriages, most of which are the weeding out of human embryos which the mother’s body detects as being unviable or perhaps just sub-optimal. Estimates of the percentage of fertilized human eggs which miscarry, including some which first reach relatively advanced stages of development, go up to 75% and would seem—by some quick checking on the Web—to be at least 50%. We human beings are forbidden to kill defenseless human beings, including most certainly embryos. God can do so.
In other words, evolutionary selection processes and some of the biological processes which have evolved are roughly describable as eugenic, often by nasty means. They are part of the world as God created it, where I use `world’ as this physical universe as seen in light of God’s moral order. The Almighty can do what we are forbidden to do.
So it is that we Christians, and others who have a strong—if often inadequate or wrongful—understanding of God’s moral order for this world, are in a difficult position. We can watch as the human race deteriorates in intelligence (probably a decline of at least 15 points in the average IQ of the people of the West from about 1850 to now), sociability, immune system health, and other important characteristics. We have likely reached a point where few, if any, peoples of the West have a large enough percentage of smart human beings to sustain advanced technologies. It is all but certain we couldn’t rebuild our advanced political communities or economic communities or scientific research communities if they continue to deteriorate. We aggravate our problems by thinking to educate the ineducable, to over-educate the somewhat educable, and to force those with greater learning and thinking capacity down to the level of the somewhat educable. Our hubristic educational and political leaders of Western countries think it more or less given that the good times will never end and also think that anything they do will work.
For discussions of this general problem of the decay of the West, see:
- Is Modern Atheism a Result of High Loads of Genetic Mutations?,
- Why Middle-class American Men Don’t Care Much If They Die., and
- Here Be Dragons.
I have posted discussions of this issue from other perspectives in past years. A search on “Barzun” or “Ortega” or “Acton”, “conspiracy” or “conspiracies” or “gangsters” is one way to find some of them—in my speculations, power-elites turned to conspiracies of a more criminal type in response to their inability to innovate, to find solutions to the developing problems of the West. The problem of a population with general declines in intelligence is greatly aggravated by the decision I noted above to treat those talented in intellectual matters as if they have no such talents or, perhaps, as if those talents develop naturally in high-IQ individuals who are bored out of their minds for years and who are kept from developing the attitudes and habits proper to the develop of—we can hope—innovative genius.
I’ll note here that there are ups and downs and the West has come back from similar periods of decay. After the collapse of Western Christendom at the end of the 13th century, following the High Middle Ages, the population of Western Christendom fell by about half—a precondition of sorts of the recovery and not something which could have been avoided.
Could we of the Modern West do something to mitigate what we will suffer and to make it more likely there will be a recovery before long? Maybe, but we, in general, aren’t even paying attention. For example, we Catholics have been trained to chant, “We believe in biological evolution; aren’t we just so-so modern?” Then we pretend that such a belief, if it were for real, would have no effect upon our understandings of human morality or human behavior in general, no effect upon our understandings of our social organizations or their shaping. Evolution is just so-so clever in shaping our eyes, but it could never shape our moral or economic or political decision-making. Those human traits are just so-so soul-like and not at all affected by our stomachs or our sex organs.
Aquinas and some other thinkers of that magnificent period called the High Middle Ages claimed that most of what we know about God, we know from His effects (results of His actions) in Creation. In recent centuries, both quantitative and qualitative knowledge of this part or phase of God’s Creation filled with thing-like being has grown to immense heights but the leaders of Christianity, ecclesiastical and scholarly alike, haven’t considered it important to do much with these Himalayas, many piles of data and some of verifiable facts and less often of facts processed into knowledge and very rarely indeed of knowledge distilled into wisdom. Those Christian leaders, as I have written before, have acted to increase the problems to come rather than mitigating them. Africa, at a level of technology manageable by the indigenous population—I write mostly of Sub-Saharan Africa, can perhaps sustain a population of 200 million; their population know is believed to be about 1.7 trillion less the population of Northern African countries. Use your imagination to think of the suffering when the developed countries suffer their own decline and can no longer `help’ the Africans. Any mitigation at this time would require very elitist, caste-based societies in which of the vast majority of individuals in the indigenous peoples would be slaves of a sort—to the indigenous elites and to others from the developed countries.
From a theological and salvational viewpoint:
It’s clear we Christians of the modern West know mostly wrong things about the God we imagine as some sort of fuzzy-wuzzy, open-handed Grandpa with brains perhaps a little addled.
We sent missionaries around the world to act on an extension of Christ’s commandment to “love our neighbors” so extreme, so extensive, so patronizing, so based upon ignorance, that we’ve helped to create a huge disaster in the making.
We of the modern West, perhaps Americans most of all, worship a God we’ve conjured up for our convenience and the true God, the God of Jesus Christ, is probably quite angry with us. I don’t know what He’ll do but the Bible and modern knowledge alike indicate we should prepare for an afterlife starting off with long and painful periods of remedial training. At best. And those in the next generations should be prepared for a time of suffering and bloody struggle and—perhaps—recovery from the disasters we’ve been creating for the past 2 centuries or so.