Kerby Anderson

One of the slogans we often hear from radical environmentalists is that there are too many people on the planet. Once someone makes that statement, it is worth asking, what do you propose we do about it?

Usually, they suggest we reduce the population by reducing the fertility rate. Of course, that has been happening in every developed country. As I mentioned in my December commentary, one of my professors in graduate school was a co-founder of Zero Population Growth.

But there are some who want to go far beyond zero population growth or even negative population growth. Professor Peter Singer (Princeton) seriously questioned years ago whether it was even “justifiable” for the human species to continue.

More recently you have a Finnish bioethicist explaining in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics that he “would be pleased to see no one have children, because that would be a rational thing to do. Reproducing carries risks to the possible future individuals.”

I recently did an interview with Wesley J. Smith, who discovered this article and talked about the current intellectual push for human extinction. I mentioned to him a commentary I wrote 16 years ago about a professor at the University of Texas who rejected the idea that humans have value. At the end of his speech, he proclaimed, “We’re no better than bacteria!”

That is not true. The Bible teaches that human beings are created in the image of God and have dignity and value. We are commanded to be fruitful and multiply and have dominion over the creation.

All of this push for human extinction reminds me of the famous quote from G.K. Chesterton. “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”