Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth, for the Coulson Center on Johnstone Street.
Well a group of scientists are, once again, predicting imminent disaster because of overpopulation. It may sound like the evil plan of a nefarious villain, a recent Daily Mail article read, but scientists now say we need to have Earth's population in order to save the planet. Researchers even offered non-coercive measures to lower the global population to 4 billion by the year 2200. And of course, that includes providing women in low-income countries with so-called family planning services. The plan, according to the Daily Mail, is similar to that of Marvel villain Thanos, who thought he could eliminate suffering by eliminating half the human race.
Rather than seeing people as incredible resources of creativity and ingenuity, Thanos and the scientists assume that more people means less food and less wealth. Like a zombie that keeps coming back no matter how many times it's killed, this kind of thinking is a rehash of the flawed work of Paul Ehrlich. His 1968 book, The Population Bomb, which predicted global starvation and utter economic collapse if the population at that time didn't stop growing, is perhaps the very best example in recent memory. that ideas have consequences and bad ideas have victims. In fact, as an obituary to Ehrlich admitted, his ideas, and I quote here, encouraged mass sterilization programs in India and the one-child policy in China and influenced how children everywhere were viewed and valued.
End quote. His predictions were, as Chuck Coulson noted all the way back in 2001, spectacularly wrong. Quote, almost none of the dire predictions associated with what Ehrlich called the population bomb came to pass. That's because the doomsayers didn't understand what it really means to be human. Ehrlich's was only the most dramatic expression of a worldview that saw reducing birth rates as the key to not only humanity's but the entire planet's fate.
In this view, people were akin to parasites. They consumed resources and gave little, if anything, back. Population had to be contained both for our sake and for the sake of the earth. End quote. In fact, since Ehrlich's ideas became mainstream, the world population has more than doubled.
From over 3.5 billion people in 1972 to an estimated 8.3 billion today. And yet, instead of mass starvations and increased conflicts over resources, crop yields have increased dramatically and global rates of undernourishment and starvation have been reduced by more than half. Humans are simply not the virus that Ehrlich, Thanos, and these scientists claim they are. Yes, we do create a mess of problems, but we are also innovators of additional resources and new solutions. That, of course, makes sense if the biblical story of reality is true and the naturalistic one is not.
If we really are made co-creators by the one who created all things, then humans are not just consumers, but producers who are tasked with cultivating the creation. In contrast, population scare warnings have very real victims, tens of millions, in fact. In just the last 50 years, 60 million Americans have been killed through abortion. And among what has driven that practice is the very fear of bringing a child into a world that's dying. In China, where the myth of the population bomb led to the horrific one-child policy, 300 million babies were slaughtered, many against the will of their mothers.
Instead of saving the planet, vain ideas of population control have left the nations of the world with a birth dearth. Russia, China, Japan are notably struggling to maintain their numbers, even as their older population phases out of the workforce, and not to mention life itself. And the very same thing is happening in the U.S.: Zombie ideas of overpopulation and human pestilence just get humanity tragically wrong. and misunderstands the created world. Had Ehrlich's claims just remained in his books, the damage would have been minimal.
But his ideas, as ideas tend to do, grew feet and walked into the real world of image bears. They wreaked havoc. And it's long past time for this zombie to just stay dead. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr.
Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources to live like a Christian today, go to breakpoint.org.
