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When there is a problem I feel compelled to examine, I turn to the Bible for answers. The Bible devotes an entire book to census issues. In the book of Numbers, Moses records a census of the Hebrew population. Two thousand years elapsed between the time of Abraham and Jesus. During that time, the population grew steadily. If the human population continued to increase at the rate it did then, our current global census would be one billion. Instead, we have 6.5 billion.
What happened? The rate of population growth has changed because we—particularly those of us in the field of medicine—have fiddled with the limits imposed on us by nature. We have prolonged life, thus prolonging the length of each generation. By making three and four generations overlap, we have increased the total population of the earth.
One way of visualizing the rate of population growth is to take all of mankind's history and place it on a 12-month "Big Calendar of History." January 1 stands for the year 8000 BC. Each "day" represents twenty-seven years. December 31 on the Big Calendar of History represents ad 2000. Some important "days" are circled. In July, people start writing, building libraries, and using iron tools. In September, Christ lives, dies, and is resurrected. December 24 is a big day. By now 98 percent of all human history has passed. On this day, the Census Bureau throws a party. Mankind has reached the one billion mark. On the 29th of December, we reach two billion. We add another billion on the 30th, and during the 31st we add a billion in the morning, another billion in the afternoon, and another billion before midnight.
If we continue at our current growth rate, placing a check on the calendar each time we add a billion more to the census, January of the next "Big Calendar Year" will have sixty million check marks. This means that there will be sixty million billion people on the earth by the month's end, or ten people for every square foot of earth.
According to Carlson, the real reason for smaller families in Western countries is the rejection of Christian values. In fact, Carlson goes on to claim that religion is the number-one factor in determining birth rates, since religious people will, he assumes, desire large families and eschew the use of contraception. And Carlson is right when he says that people are having fewer children for selfish reasons. Declining birth rates are, in large part, the result of people turning away from Christian virtues like sacrifice, long-term commitment, altruism, and responsibility.
He is wrong, however, in his implicit assumption that everyone who had large families in the past was doing so out of obedience to Christian teaching. Human nature hasn't changed. Advances in medicine have simply given people new means of exercising their selfishness—or altruism—through contraception.
Is the use of contraception against Christian teaching? I have heard many versions of this argument, but they all boil down to the same thing: Contraception is against God's law, since it interferes with the created purpose of sexual intercourse. In short, contraception is unnatural.
I agree that contraception runs counter to "nature," and that science, by enabling people to engage in sex without the possibility of pregnancy, has altered the natural constraints within which previous generations of humanity have lived and died. But then, if we're being fair about this, science has also provided us with a number of decidedly "unnatural" ways to cheat death and prolong life. Indeed, our natural birth rate would not be a problem were it not for our current "unnatural" death rate. Why should we as Christians choose to accept what medicine can do to prolong life but abhor what can be done to prevent conception?
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