Sexual immorality and the evolutionary fallacy

Here's a supposed investigative piece by John Preston in the Telegraph, presenting the case that monogamy (one man, one woman for life), is unrealistic. Much of it reads like the author had a bet with a colleague as to how many different logical fallacies he could wedge into a fixed number of words.

The main one invoked as the premise of the article is the "evolutionary fallacy", which runs like this:

• Lots of people do X
• Therefore, X is natural
• Therefore, X is right

In this case, "X" is sexual immorality. Lots of people do it, so, perhaps as a species it's what we're meant to do... right? Evolution guided us into it, didn't it?

Perhaps the author should have ventured beyond just adultery and fornication; how about paedophilia? It's been around for thousands of years, so perhaps as a species we're just not meant to not molest children? Perhaps evolution never intended us to avoid burglary, rape, pillage and sticking needles in the eyes of investigative journalists?

Preston never discusses how we can know if something is moral or not. When he uses the word "moral" and purports to discuss morality, he simply discusses the results. He appears to know no difference between ethics and pragmatics or hedonism: what is good to Preston is what makes people feel good. The underlying assumption just appears to be, that if men are unfaithful, then unfaithfulness is good. Behold the cultural fruits of Darwinism!

The main character in Preston's article is a promiscuous homosexual called Dan Savage, who is presented to us as "America's leading relationships journalist" (as appointed by people who agree with him, presumably). The reality of Savage's life is clear from his words: he's doing wrong, he knows he's doing wrong, but he enjoys the wrong... and so he has come up with a "clever"-sounding theory to justify it. i.e. like every other fallen human being, he's been working hard to come up with reasons for why his wrong behaviour is OK. The upshot is that he believes everyone ought to behave like a promiscuous homosexual or at least be relaxed about it; that would (he thinks) make Savage feel a lot better about his life. That's the predictable way of sin too; we try to surround ourselves with people who've plunged into the same sins, and that assuages our guilt by deadening our consciences to it. Their comradeship in iniquity helps us feel less bad about our personal iniquity.

So, John Preston responds by writing a long-winded article toying with Savage's self-justifications as if they were very clever. It would have been wiser and more to the point to just ask, "Dan, why not repent?"

When Savage tells people his ideas, he recounts, they respond with disgust and horror. Instead of asking himself it there's something horrifically disgusting about his lifestyle, Savage assumes that people must feel very insecure about the rightfulness of faithfulness in marriage. They protest too much, he intones! I wonder why he thinks people are revolted by paedophilia or rape? Is that also the response of people who are not yet morally grown up and who still believe in Santa Claus? Is all moral disgust a sign of insecurity? Is there nothing in the world that is actually morally revolting?

See again the ways of sin: people keep telling Savage that his life is morally disgusting, but this persuades Savage to see himself as a moral superior. He's been able to rise above that "childish" sense of horror at a vile lifestyle.

Preston attempts some discussion of the origins of the idea of monogamy. He says that history is not on monogamy's side. In the Preston universe, history apparently begins somewhere in the 18th century, and all before that is the swirling mists of the beginning of time. Apparently monogamy only originated in the 1700s, and before that everybody thought it a completely stupid idea. The Preston education appears to have lacked some key points about the philosophical origins and development of European civilisations. Christianity, Judaism and the Bible do not appear once during this discussion; in the Preston investigation of why people believe in monogamy, they are not worth a mention. But the Inuit people do appear, and they're promoted as potential guides for us. Why? Who knows? Are they divine, or the gold standard of right living? How would we know?

Preston does interview a few people on the other side of the discussion, who point out that outside of the make-believe world of the rest of the article, infidelity brings ruin and misery to people's lives, and it was at least a good thing that the article finished with a man's confession that ending his first marriage was the worst mistake he ever made.

How does a promiscuous homosexual get to be presented as an authority on the subject of the goodness of life-long monogamy? How would he know? We might as well ask him if it's fun being an owl's left foot, what it's like to run marathons inside 5 minutes, or what Esther Rantzen had for breakfast this morning. He has no way of knowing what he's talking about.

Uh-oh. The over-population fanatics are on the march.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/17/population-control-beckham-family

Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton, says: "In 1930, just one or two generations ago, the world's population stood at around two billion. Today it is around seven billion, and by 2050 it is projected to rise by a third to 9 billion."

What neither the article, nor Lucas, commented on was - would they rather live in 1930, or today?

Today? Thought so. Why is that? Because human ingenuity has come up with so many ways of making life better with 7 billion people than it was with 2 billion. Just like the Bible would lead us to expect - because the world's not an out-of-control juggernaut, but full of God-implanted potential that God-given human ingenuity can develop.

Sadly most Green Party-types are also atheists, so for them, their basic solution to the problem isn't more honesty and hard work with faith in God, but suggestions of eugenics, and demonising the Beckhams who have (perish the thought!) four children. Hmmm.

Research generally shows that the average UK shopper throws away around a third of all the food he buys. And he doesn't need to eat quite as much as he does eat to be healthy. So, on the food front, with no changes in the UK whatsoever except only buying what we need to eat, we could support around 100 million people as opposed to the 60 million people presently living there. i.e. With more people, we could simply put the food in their mouths instead of in the bin. It's a similar story across developed countries. (And in developing countries, the story is to do with corruption, and the gospel producing the "Protestant work ethic" which got the developed countries to where they are now). The solutions are mostly at hand; demonising the Beckhams for having all of four kids is not necessary.

Doomsday Fever

In the Daily Mail this week, Christopher Booker has an article with some insightful observations on the modern phenomena of mass panic. It is quite interesting to survey a list such as this:

• HIV
  
• BSE / CSV ("mad cow disease")
• The Y2K / "Millennium" bug
• The salmonella scare
• SARS / bird flu
• Carcinogens in food
• Asbestos poisoning
  
• DDT
• This last year - swine flu

Of course, each of these is/was a real problem, and there have been real fatalities. The point is, though, that in each case the presentation from government and media was in terms of a very high probability (certainty?) of immense number of deaths - pandemics to rival the bubonic plagues that killed 1/3 of Europe, etc. - unless urgent and wide-ranging, expensive action was taken. The current one is global warming; again we're urged that unless we act in a big way right now, then apocalyptic doom may no longer be possible to prevent. This observation on its own, of course, does not prove one way or the other that global warming is no more of a real problem likely to kill more than a few dozen people (as the cold snap in Britain has in the last fortnight) than mad cow disease - but it certainly ought to give us pause for thought and mean that we should require a higher standard of proof than simply "the experts and the governments agree".

What's also remarkable about that list above is that they've all come up in quite a small amount of time - within the last decade or two. Have I missed any? That's an awful lot of doom - amazing we've managed to avoid not just one or two of them, but the whole lot!

Meanwhile, all kinds of real disasters that have decimated the West - the massive rise in family breakdown, sexualisation of childhood, pornification of mainstream media, progressive mortgaging of our children's futures to pay for present over-spending, the collapse of community life, the plummeting standards of state education - have all gone on at a pace observed often with just a sad resignation or futile grumbling. None of these though has been an immanent doomsday scenario, but rather the slow but sure undermining of foundations one brick at a time.

I remember when a child watching the news. I didn't really understand the disease of HIV; but it seemed pretty certain from the tombstone graphic and the grave tones that accompanied every story, that pretty much most of the world would be dead of it by the time I was an adult. HIV is a significant problem in my adopted country of Kenya; but it's not apocalyptic doom, and it's an extremely easy disease to avoid. That's why it's a significant problem in Kenya - sadly adultery and fornication aren't things that a good number of people people have sufficient desire to avoid.

My point though is not just this armchair commentary. It's to ask why the Western public and media evidently feel such a deep resonance for scenarios of immanent apocalyptic doom?

I think that a Christian answer to this question would need to mention at least two key factors. We need to go a lot deeper than just the simplistic "people are sheep, not as clever as me" kind of response. I haven't particularly noticed that the communities who pride themselves on being rationalists and skeptics have been particularly immune to these things - in fact, it seems to have been as our governments have gone more secular and left-ward that these things have increased.

At the root of it (this is the first key) is man's alienation from God. Try as we might - iPhones, career paths, the X-Factor, fantastic hobbies and adventures etc. - nothing can stub out the basic sense of unease which is in every human being. The fear of death, the Bible says, holds all of mankind in bondage - though it manifests itself in very different ways. Man cannot escape the basic sense that all is not very well - and in fact that something very massive is quite wrong. But because until he is born again he has no will or desire to confront the basic problem - personal sin - or to seek out the God who is his true need, the real solution to this sense cannot be found. And so it must manifest itself elsewhere in life. Man has a residual knowledge that something is very wrong - but if he won't admit what it really is, this knowledge will have to poison his rationality in all kinds of other areas instead. If you won't fear God, you'll have to fear an awful lot of other things.

The other key factor in my opinion more specifically that there is a residual cultural awareness of sudden apocalyptic doom. This is because in fact sudden and global apocalyptic doom is a real phenomena. It's just that it's not going to come from swine flu - it's going to come when God suddenly intervenes to judge the world on the Last Day. This event was made known to man from the very moment he fell. In history, its prime warning was in Noah's Flood. The Bible itself (2 Peter 3) anticipates men scoffing and trying as much as they can to forget this immense event - but it cannot be done.

Once, God destroyed the whole world in a sudden deluge that came with no announcement other than the ignored and rejected preaching of godly Noah. Peter tells us that the same will be so on the day that Jesus is revealed in fire. Sudden global doom will always be a belief that keeps surfacing in the culture. Rejecting Christianity, the West is doomed to worry itself silly over a succession of non-dooms (serious as each danger might be in its own right).

In other words, man does not have a choice - he must, somewhere in his belief system, believe in apocalyptic world-wide doom. The only choice is which he's going to believe in - the real thing, or an endless succession of impostors. It's wired into our make-up and into our history - it's real. We can't get away from it because we can't get away from ourselves. Let he who has ears to hear, hear!