Let 'em die! Let 'em all die!! the mad scientist chortles

Thanks to Mark Cadwallader of Creation Moments for alerting to this one (see http://www.creationmoments.com )

If you have heard that maybe ethnic cleansing has a few negatives, how about species cleansing? The cleansee? About 90% of the "fat human biomass" on the planet, penciling out to about 5.8 billion lives.

In an address at the Texas Academy of Science's annual meeting, March 2-4, 2006, University of Texas biologist Eric Pianka suggested that maybe an Ebola virus wiping out 90% of the earth's human population could be the best thing for the earth's threatened biosphere.

What is frightening is that Pianka's talk took a small step for a man yet a giant step for monsterkind, seeming to make the hyperquantum leap from catastrophe concern to catastrophe sympathy.

Janet Mobley's article in the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, April 2, 2006, gives much of the detail. In particular, Mobley's article reveals Pianka's underlying earth-worshiping worldview:
"'The biggest enemy we face is anthropocentrism,' he (Pianka) said, describing the belief system in which humans are the central element of the universe.' This is that common attitude that everything on this Earth was put here for [human] use.' To Pianka, a human life is no more valuable than any other - a lizard, a bison, a rhino. And as humans reproduce, the demand for resources like food, water and energy becomes more than the Earth can sustain, he says."

Find Mobley's Seguin Gazette-Enterprise article (April 2, 2006) at:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/april2006/030406Imminent.htm

But in confronting Pianka's suggestions with the Bible, we get about as classic a case you can get in the clash of worldviews.

Pianka apparently believes that the world has marched inexorably from the mists of deep past time into the present and will continue that march into the mists of future time. And every scrap of biomass on this third rock from the sun has indistinguishable value since birthed by the same random processes of chemistry and chance. If this view is correct, then maybe the Ebola virus is not tough enough for the job to be done. Maybe Professor Pianka's mere 90% is too optimistic.

But the Holy Bible says man was created by God in the beginning with a unique and special dignity derived from being created "in the image of God." Further, Creator-God gave man responsibility to manage the world. In this respect, Pianka is precisely correct in pointing out man's abject failure to manage (not rape) the world's resources God has put here for us.

But Pianka misses three of the great truths of the Bible, the Word of God:(1) Mankind has a unique dignity and value, bearing the "image of God," and thus immeasurably exceeding the value of lizards and fungi;
(2) God knows the end from the beginning, hence what man may predict as "doomsday" will in fact be part of God's judgment on this evil world and the practitioner/advocates of evil in this world as he brings it all to shutdown;
(3) There will be an end. Repeat ... there WILL BE an end. And Jehovah God knows the day and the hour. So man's rapid race toward nonsustainabilty should be clearly seen portending the end foreordained by God from the beginning. And God is not a heavenly counterpart to race car driver Greg Biffle, who seems to occasionally run out of gas just before the race ends. God's tank has enough whatevers to get to the finish. You can count on that.

A fourth and final point likely missed by Pianka is the greatest truth of the universe. The Bible, in John 3:16, says "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes on him should not perish, but have eternal life."

Since the earth had a true beginning, who else can you trust but the true God Of The Beginning?

Respectfully submitted, D.U.