As he walked through the door, his wife, Betty Bookman, greeted him with a warm, "Hello, how was work?" His two teen-aged children, Billy (16) and Barbara (14), were sitting at the table, ready to eat.
During the meal, they talked about the day's events. Billy's swim team practice that morning had gone well; he was getting so good at the sport that he'd be in the free style relay at the next meet.
Barbara's piano teacher said that she was making great progress and had encouraged her to sign up for piano camp this summer at the university. (That would mean big bucks for John, but he didn't want to put a damper on Barbara's musical talents, so he said nothing.)
Betty said that she'd had a trying day as she tried to get things ready for the all-school Thanksgiving dinner which was coming up in three weeks. Parents were complaining about all the work to get it done, but what else was new, and then Betty had gotten word that Jabez and Geraldine Stone were calling for a boycott of the meal and going before the school board to argue that it violated the First Amendment. "Jabez and Geraldine need to get a life," a weary Betty said.
It was then, after Betty had concluded her report of the trials and tribulations of the day, that John began to speak. He sat upright in his chair and got right to the point: "I don't know how to say this, but I have to say it. I don't love you any more, Betty. I don't love you, Billy, and I don't love you, Barbara."
John looked around the table and saw the stunned, hurt, and quizzical faces looking back at him. Betty had turned pale and began to breathe like the oxygen had left the room. Billy stared straight at his father with a pained look in his eyes, and John saw a tear start to form in Barbara's left eye.
Almost as one, they blurted out, "What?"
"I don't love you any more," John said, trying to hide the emotional upheaval inside.
There was what seemed a very long silence, that kind of silence where you can hear paint drying. Betty looked at John in pained disbelief; Barbara started crying; Billy slammed an open palm on the table, and said in a semi-yell, "What's going on, Dad!"
John began to explain as best he could. "You all know that for the past year I've been taking night courses at the college. There's this one course called Sociobiology, sometimes it's called "Evolutionary Ethics." It's a course that deals with the biological basis of all social behavior, including morality, and I've learned an awful lot."
"Socio-what?" Betty asked. "Like, what have you learned!" Betty demanded.
"Well," John said, "To put it as simply as I can, I've learned about something called "the reproductive imperative." That's an academic way of saying that the ultimate goal of any organism is to survive and reproduce."
"So?" Billy asked.
"So, moral systems exist because they ultimately promote human survival and reproduction," John answered, like a robot reciting words he'd been programmed to say. "This includes what we call 'love,' which really isn't 'love' at all, it's really just selfishness.
" Listen Betty, I 'love' you because 'love' is an effective means of raising effective reproducers. We're made up of genes, right? So look at it this way: our genes make our bodies do what we do to protect them, so they'll survive. Our bodies are just the engines our genes use to survive and reproduce."
John saw that his family was looking at him like he had lost his mind; he continued.
"Let me illustrate it this way. Kids, suppose I see your mother trapped in a burning building. I run into the building, into all that the intense heat and suffocating smoke and rescue her. I don't realize it, but I'm not doing that because I 'love' her; my genes are using my body as an engine to look after their own reproduction. All this 'love' stuff is just an illusion. It's not real. We're selfish animals, looking out for our own survival and reproduction. 'Love' is really selfishness at its basic level."
Betty didn't want her kids listening to all this and she wasn't going to sit there like the dutiful wife and agree with the nonsense her husband of twenty years was spewing all over the table. She was thinking, but not saying, that his education had made him into a fool.
Betty cleared her throat, pushed back the tears, and began to object. "OK, people do run into burning buildings to save their wife, their child, their brother or sister, maybe even their cousin or an uncle or aunt who are genetically connected, but people also run into burning buildings to save complete strangers, people to whom they're not genetically connected, people who'll never be able to repay them, people they've never seen before and may never see again. That's an act of empathy, compassion, courage, even love. How do you explain that?"
John thought and thought, but finally admitted he had no answer for that one. He did admit that no one has figured out how time + the impersonal + chance produced something so personal as love, empathy, and compassion. But, according to the tenets of evolutionary ethics, the reproductive imperative just has to be.
Someone had asked the question in class and Professor Goodpasture had no answer, except to say that this reproductive imperative goes along with the evolutionary theory which everybody "knows" is true. "It's a logical conclusion from evolution no one can deny," he'd said.
Enraged, Betty picked up her plate and slammed it down on the table. "Next thing I know" she said, "you'll be telling me that you didn't marry me because you loved me, but you married me because our genes thought you and I would best enable them to reproduce and survive!" She was almost screaming at this point, and she was scaring the children.
"Yes," that's exactly what I've learned in Sociobiology!" John said. Now he was getting angry to be contradicted like this in front of his own children.
Betty was starting to come apart at the seams. She'd always thought they were a Christian family, a family who loved and cared about each other. Now all this was an illusion? Now they were a family whose only purpose was to survive and reproduce their genes?
Betty was shaking now. "John," she said, "Let me ask you, suppose that I'm dead and in the ground, and the decomposers are doing their thing. What difference does it make to me whether I've reproduced or not? If it's all over, if death is the end, who cares whether or not you or I or these children have reproduced?"*
After an awkward silence, John answered, “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter at all.”
Betty continued, "Don’t you see, you were talking about how the only purpose in life is to survive and reproduce, but now you've just admitted that this purpose doesn't matter, so it's really an illusion.
"According to what you've just said, you're forcing us to live a lie–the illusion of hope and meaning. How do we go on with our lives when we realize that it really doesn’t matter what we do, that there's no point to any of it?”
John hadn't thought of all of this, and he certainly hadn't expected Betty's explosion. He was getting angrier by the second. I don't know. Professor Goodpasture told us all this and that's good enough for me. I wish it were for you. They're teaching Sociobiology all over the country, so you may as well get ready for it."
Betty was thinking that this was a good reason to stop saving for the kid's college fund, if they were going to learn such nonsense. She fired back at John something she remembered Paul's saying, "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools."
John didn't take kindly to his wife calling him a fool in front of the children. He said that he wasn't going to discuss it any longer, and that he wished Betty had more education so she could see what he was talking about. The kids noticed that their father's face was turning red. They had come to hate their dinner and didn't finish their Lotta-Burgers. They each pushed their plates back and just sat there, silently wishing this would all go away. Once again, the evolutionary theory had done its destructive work, but they were too get the full impact. They only knew their dad didn't love them any more.
John Bookman folded his napkin, stood up, went into the den, and turned on Monday Night Football. The Dallas Cowboys were about to play the team from Washington.
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*This is a good question, one asked by Dr. Raymond G. Bohlin, Research Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.
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Dr. Mike Halsey is the chancellor of Grace Biblical Seminary, a Bible teacher at the Hangar Bible Fellowship, and the author of Truthspeak, available on Amazon.com. A copy of his book, Microbes in the Bloodstream of the Church, is also available as an E-book on Amazon.com. If you would like to a receive a copy of his weekly Bible studies and other articles of biblical teaching and application, you can do so by writing sue.bove@gmail.com and requesting, "The Hangar Bible Fellowship Journal."
If you would like to contribute to his ministry according to the principle of II Corinthians 9:7, you may do so by making your check out to Hangar Bible Fellowship and mailing it to 65 Teal Ct., Locust Grove, GA 30248. All donations are tax deductible.
Come visit the Hangar some Sunday at 10 AM at the above address. You'll be glad you did.
Other recommended grace-oriented websites are:
notbyworks.org
literaltruth.org
gracebiblicalseminary.org
duluthbible.org
clarityministries.org
Also:
Biblical Ministries, Inc.
C/O Dr. Richard Grubbs
P. O. Box 64582
Lubbock, TX 79464-4582
There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius.
Read more at http://www.notable-quotes.com/h/helps_arthur.html#mpzMv1GyXYdlOVbq.99"There is
There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius.
Read more at http://www.notable-quotes.com/h/helps_arthur.html#mpzMv1GyXYdlOVbq.99
There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius.
Read more at http://www.notable-quotes.com/h/helps_arthur.html#mpzMv1GyXYdlOVbq.99
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