Dear Lucy,
Christians are required to show compassion, but compassion can mean
instructing or requiring that humans practise family planning. I am not a
geneticist, so I am not sure cancer and drug addiction are inheritable.
Regardless, Christians are commanded to treat cancer victims and drug
addicts with love.
-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
Behalf Of Lucy Masters
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2002 10:24 AM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Darwinism/Compassion
Lucy responds:
I have never held the popular opinion that "social Darwinism" or
"survival of the fittest" was in any way cruel or inhumane. Because of
this, I have also not had philosophical difficulties accepting that God
would design a system that seemingly works this way.
Consider...in the long run, it is much more humane and compassionate to
have some humans lose their lives so that others may not only live but
may live well. In the movies this is presented as heroic, but in
biology we somehow depict the process as inhumane. So, we can take a
small population of starving people and feed them, and forty years later
we end up with millions of starving people - because they reproduced and
still live on non-arable land. Have we created a humane situation? Or,
we can extend the lives of a small population of people with an
incurable cancer, who then reproduce and create a much larger population
of people with incurable cancer. Is this a more humane situation? Or,
we can provide welfare and housing to long-term drug addicts, who then
reproduce and bring a whole family of long-term drug addicts into the
population. Is this a more humane situation?
Is long-term planning for the human race unGodly? Does God think in the
long-term or only act in immediacy?
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