I haven't read the latest book that attacks the viability of the traditional family – this one from the altogether novel angle that it represents a perversion of nature – but I suppose I should read it, however unpleasant that may be.
Called "A Natural History of Families," it's written by Scott Forbes, a biology professor at the University of Winnipeg, and published by Princeton University Press.
If the reviews are accurate, it amounts to a restatement of what C.S. Lewis called "the problem of pain." In short: "How could our horrible world possibly have been created by a good God?"
Forbes cites the way offspring are raised by certain birds, animals and fish to illustrate the horrors – how the larger nestling in a two-bird brood tries relentlessly to destroy the smaller, how a panda if she bears twins will ruthlessly abandon one of them, how the burying beetle customarily devours its own offspring, how sand tiger sharks eat their own siblings, and on and on.
From this long catalogue of indifferent or vicious parenting in nature, he concludes that natural families are neither warm nor nourishing. "They're far more interesting," he declares, serving rather "as forums for rival revolutionary agendas, where brothers and sisters, parents and offspring co-operate, compete, deceive and nurture ... in a war of genes derived from mother and father."
Forbes details all this, writes one reviewer, "with obvious relish," delighting in "the seemingly nasty behavior of families in the natural world." Why such satisfaction, you wonder. The likely answer is that it shows how foolish religious people are to ascribe to a benign and infinitely loving God, what Tennyson called "nature red in tooth and claw."
How we humans might benefit from his observations, Forbes (or at any rate his reviewers) does not say. Are we to encourage our children from infancy onward to be clawing at each other? Should the dinner table become a "forum" for mutual destruction?
That's why I should read the book – to find out exactly how Forbes, or someone else, might apply his research. We must never assume that people preoccupied with genetics and such will not proceed to political conclusions. And if the only rule we know is the survival of the fittest, then certain conclusions suggest themselves – like the one that suggested itself in Germany in the 1930s.
Lewis' own conclusions on the problem of pain are perhaps relevant. It was the subject of the first book he wrote after he abandoned atheism for Christianity, because, he said, the existence of pain poses the most serious argument against the existence of a "good" God.
He sets out the problem even more persuasively than Forbes appears to have done, portraying nature in all its fierce reality: how every creature can exist only by devouring other creatures; how human history is largely a tale of war, famine, pestilence and death, relieved occasionally and briefly by what we call a civilization; how the highest of the creatures, man, suffers the further pain of anxiety – aware that his own existence is terminal, and acutely desirous of forestalling its termination.
If the only information we have comes from nature, said Lewis, then we must conclude either (a) that God is evil, or (b) that God is indifferent to good and evil, or (c) that there is no God.
But the very strength of the atheist case, he saw, posed another problem. If our only source of truth is the nature we see around us, if strife and brutality is all there is, then wherever and however did we find the idea of a good God? Belief in an ultimate goodness must have come from something out and beyond nature. Thus whenever we invoke any moral value, we must be alluding to something which is beyond nature itself, and which nature can never verify.
This same dilemma presents itself in another curious way. Why is it that so many religious skeptics are keen environmentalists? If the extinction of species is the single method by which nature develops, why do we give a damn what happens to, say, the spotted owl? So it's becoming extinct. So what? Millions upon millions of creatures have become extinct.
Well, I do give a damn, as a matter of fact. But that's because I believe we have more than nature to go on, namely Something or Someone telling us how we should and should not live – and also that we have nothing to learn from the burying beetle on how we should raise our kids.