#STRask - Should People Have Fewer Babies Because of Overpopulation?

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

Questions about how Christians should regard the argument that the family structure should change and we should have fewer babies since the world is overpopulated, and whether charitable works like feeding the poor are acts of justice as well as love.   How should Christians regard the argument that the family structure should change and we should have fewer babies since the world is overpopulated? Are charitable works like feeding the poor and rescuing victims of abuse acts of justice as well as love?

Welcome listeners, and hello, Greg. This is hashtag SDR ask. Hi, Amy, sorry for laughing, but I can see you're thinking, how shall I start? All right, welcome to you. All right, this first question comes from Jean-Baptiste, J.B. Okay, so here he says, I recently had a discussion with a non-believer about whether it would be a good thing that family structure as it is today change and people have fewer bases. since the world is overpopulated. How should Christians regard the argument of overpopulation,

especially in light of Genesis 128? I don't think the world's overpopulated. So, Genesis 128 says be fruitful, multiply, and subdue. Anybody who flies very much knows that the world's not overpopulated, because you are flying over all kinds of areas that are completely, completely uninhabited or completely arable and growing crops. It's unbelievable when you fly across the plains and you see two vanishing points in all directions food being grown. There's plenty of food for all the people in the world, and it's easy to make more. I mean, overpopulation is a word that needs to be defined. And it might be, it might, I think most people think of overpopulation.

in that the resources cannot sustain the people. There are people that are starving, but the reason that they're starving is political. It has nothing to do with our ability to provide food. There's plenty of food on the planet. It's all political. And I can't go into all the details of this now, but the places that our suffering harm would do so much better if those who were in charge of them were not. not corrupt. So you said Africa, for example, famine in Africa. So he said all kinds of food to

Africa and it gets stolen by warlords there to make them rich and the people still starve. So we're not overpopulated. I have no reason to believe that. Back in 1971, I think it was. Maybe it was 1970. There is a picture that I have that I cut out from the Michigan State. University student newspaper of me standing by the Red Cedar River with my girlfriend. I'm standing. She's sitting between my legs and we're on a rock and she's holding my legs and sticking out of my pocket is Paul Ehrlich's, the population bomb. That was a book written 50 years ago about how the world is going to come to an end because

there's too many people. I mean, it's just silly. It hasn't happened. The population of the world has probably doubled since that book was. was written, there was starvation then, there's starvation now. It's not because of the too many people, it's because of too many crooked people. So the whole issue that was just raised by J.B. is predicated on the notion that the world is overpopulated.

So someone's going to have to clarify what that actually means to me. And like I said, it could be a spatial thing. It could be an issue of resources to sustain them, but none is the case. Neither is the case. And part of the problem here is that they're looking at human beings the wrong way. They have a wrong understanding of human beings. Because what they're imagining is that we have this pie and then we have to divide it up among all the people and then it's gone, right? So they're only viewing people as consumers.

Zero sum is what they call that. They're viewing people as entirely as consumers rather than as fountains of creativity. So because humans are creative, we've found ways to increase the food supply as people have increased. So as you increase the people, you increase the people who are creating. They're adding into the system. They're not just taking because human beings are made in the image of God and we create things. out of nothing in terms of ideas. We create wealth.

Yes, exactly. So as people increase, the wealth also increases. The ideas increase. So now we have more than we did a hundred years ago, way more. And yet there are way more people. The curious thing, though, is that whole cycle depends on people having the freedom to do that thing. Right. And there are a lot of forces in place now that are restricting people from having that freedom.

Well, who's doing the restricting? Anytime you emphasize equity as opposed to equality, equality is a broad value, but equity is a concrete, is meant to be a concrete economic reality. Equality is everybody is treated the same or has the same opportunities. I mean, you work towards that, at least in principle, Equity means everybody ends up with the same. Well, that's a Marxist concept. To each according to his need, from each according to his ability.

That's Marx. And that's what we see in politics. Now, what you have there is if you want everybody to have the same, Russian liberal used to call it what's spreading the misery. If everybody has the same, it can only be, no, let me back up and put it this way. Sorry, Amy, I'm getting animated and I bang your mic. Let me put it this way. If you allow liberty and freedom for people, you will never have equity, because you will

always have individuals who do what you just described, who use their minds and their talents and their capabilities and their resources, such as they are, and sometimes they're not very much at all. But they're creative people that can make much out of little, and that's the point. Wealth can be created. And history is filled replete with examples of that and daily life as well. People start with nothing and then build something. Standard Reason is an example.

We start a very, very small. Now we have almost 20 employees and providing value to other people and their, et cetera. So we produce products and stuff like that. So we call into being that which didn't exist in a certain sense. And so, but if you have a political system that squelch's individual liberty to accomplish equity, everybody gets the same, then that process is severely inhibited and therefore people do starve because those who are capable of changing those circumstances are not allowed to, which is why Rush Limbaugh said spread the misery. That's really what it amounts to. So as long as people are allowed to receive the fruit of their labor, as long as there's rule of law, as long as there are property rights, you will see people develop what they have to increase what they have. You know, the first person who got me interested in economics was Jay Wesley Richards, because he was speaking, he was actually speaking on naturalism, on materialism.

And by materialism, and this people might misunderstand me. I'm just talking about naturalism. Like all there is is the material. Yeah. And he was talking about how economics is, fits in the Christian worldview. And a misunderstanding about, about naturalism can lead to all sorts of misery because it starts with the idea that we aren't inputting anything into the system. Yeah. But we're just a cog in the wheel, so to speak.

Yeah. So, and that's what, it blew my mind because I thought, okay, yes, we are made in the image of God. We are adding into the system. Our creativity is creating things. And as long as those things aren't taken away and just hand it out, you see an increase. Otherwise, people just give up and they stop creating because they don't have any way to build anything or receive. There's no reward for their efforts and there's no created wealth capital with which they can, in a certain sense,

invest back into the project and make more of it. So ultimately, the point is that human beings are the point. They're not the problem. We are the point. God created us. We are valuable. And that's why religious people tend to have more babies because they see the truth of that. They know the value of human beings. And they know that God wants us to populate the earth. So I, one part of this question is whether or not it's a good thing to change the family structure as it is today. And since I don't have any, I don't have any more information about that, I'm not sure what that means. If that means the society should raise the children, I'm not sure.

But that is a terrible idea. You have the people raising the children, the mother and the father who created that child, and they're the ones that have the interest in the child, and the love for that child required to raise that child well. Yeah, I suspect that what's in view there with the changing the family structure is that the government needs to come in and say, here's what you can do and what you can't do, because we have the big picture involved and we know what's best.

This is what China does. And this has created terrible problems because they have limited number of children you could have. And then who are the producers? in that society, men or women, males or females. Who are the economic producers? In which society? Chinese. Oh, the males.

The males. And if you are limited in how many children that you have, and the males are the ones that produce for you, and you have a female, then what happens? What often happens in China is the child is abandoned, aborted or exposed or killed in some way, so they don't fill the quota yet, until they have another boy.

And now you've got this terrible problem where you have a population that's overwhelmed with males and very few females to go around. And this creates all kinds of other problems because marriage domesticated males in a good way. This could be overstated, but I think, and I know Nancy Piercy took exception with that notion, but I think there's some truth to it, that marriage does domesticate males. Now they have a responsibility. They have a family to take care of. They have, it's not like they're, it's not like they're awful before or so, but their priorities are so different.

Now they get a family, all these things that stabilize them and slow them down and keep them from being wild and crazy like they might be free to do if they have no other responsibilities. But when countries where you have the government interfering with family structures, like it sounds like is being suggested here, then you have. just absolute craziness. These are the kinds of things the government can't control. The market, the government can't control ultimately. The family stuff like this, whenever they try to do something like this, there's always something bad that pops out the other end as a consequence. Instead of letting the natural order that God has created manifest itself, go forward, be fruitful, multiply. You know, by the way, that's in the context of one man, one woman, becoming one flesh for one lifetime. And that's marriage.

And that's where the flourishing happens. It's within that context. So the things that are pre-political that were institutions like marriage that existed before government, the government should not, the government didn't create it. So the government should not change it or mess with it. And it's the same with our natural rights. I mean, this is what our country was created to protect, you know, the right to life, liberty, property. So as long as the government is respecting those rights that are our natural rights and the natural institutions, the system is going to work better than if we try to come up with something brand new that will go against human nature. Right.

And I can say that because human nature has created these institutions already. work with our human nature, so recreating it completely. That kind of flow from our nature, you know, they're consistent with it. And this is why up until 2015, with the Obergefell decision of SCOTUS, governments would characteristically regulate privilege and protect the one man, one woman kind of relationship, you know. In fact, when I was a kid, to get divorced, you had to go to court. And in fact, there's a TV show, you know, divorce court.

And so you can watch husbands and wives arguing with each other before the court. I think this was real-time stuff. Wasn't actors. I'm not sure. But the point I'm making is the government went way out of their way to protect that institution. Then you have no-fault divorce, I think, of the late 60s. And that made divorce so much easier and certain aspects of it, which were very painful. maybe were avoided, but it increased the amount of divorce and therefore instability. And then you had

things like ADC, AD dependent children, so mothers are paid not to get married. You know, the government pays for their kids. And that's what it amounted to, started in the 60s under Johnson. But these are all examples of outsiders trying to tamper with something that God is ordained from the outset and that humans in the past saw the wisdom of and did everything they could to sustain the stability of those relationships. And of course, since the 60s, all of that's changed. So bottom line, again, human beings create and they're the point of this creation. They're not a detraction from the creation. Plus, we're not overpopulated. Yes. Yes. All right. Let's go to a question. Question from Sarah. Are charitable works like feeding the poor and rescuing victims of abuse,

acts of justice as well as love? I hear these things characterized as justice ministries, but thought justice only involved punishing evil and rewarding good, while love was the obligation behind ministry to the needy. Well, we have a friend who wrote a book that characterized those things as justice, as I recall. I'm not going to mention the name because it's an excellent book. I endorsed it. But that was one little thing that kind of slipped in there. And And I don't see how this could possibly be considered something that's justice because charity is virtuous because it's not required in a circumstance. It's given freely is what I mean. It's not forced from someone.

Justice is required. And it's curious, though, one feature of justice is treating equals equally. This is why same-sex marriage doesn't make sense because same-sex couples. are not equal with heterosexual couples when it comes to the question of family. They are equal as citizens, but that's not the question. The question is, are they equal with regards to the institution of family, marriage and family, and they're not. It's another discussion, but so when we are, when we are, if we are forced or to give favor

to the poor in some, some way, that's not a. an act of justice. Well, what this presumes, see, this is Marxism coming in. What it presumes is that poverty is always a result of injustice. And so it's an act of justice to alleviate poverty. But some people are just poor. The Bible doesn't teach that there's poverty as an act of injustice. What it does teach is that people who are poor are vulnerable and they should not be taken

advantage of. That is an injustice when they are taken advantage of. but that they are poor is not an injustice, and therefore being charitable to them is not an act of justice. Gosh, I get so bugged because, look, the old saw is when words lose their meaning, people lose their lives. And what has been happening in the last 50 years is that the language has been twisted so much to twist the truth, to twist what's, what reality is like what's good.

so what's bad sounds good that evil ends up resulting. This is an example of that. I think the very word is either it's based on or it just brings out a completely different view of rights and government

and wealth. So if the idea is we should all have the same then or my wealth resulted from taking it from you, then that's a matter of justice. But I disagree that that's a description of the way things are.

Well, if you took it from them illicitly. Right. But I mean, just if you, by working, somehow you've taken it from somebody who was poor, that's kind of some people's view of their understanding of how wealth has gained, that it's always through oppression and injustice. The workers being exploited by the capitalist or whatever, and they're doing the work so they should get the payment. But there'd be no work to do if somebody didn't lay out capital in advance to make

the enterprise that they're working out and gaining a profit from their label. Now, I will say one of the things that Sarah mentioned here is rescuing victims of abuse. I think that is an example of justice. If by abuse you're talking about physical abuse or sexual abuse or something like that, obviously they have a right to not have those things happen to them. And that is a matter of justice. Yeah, if their abuse, I mean, if there is an injustice being done to them, then rectifying that is a moral good, and it's a restoration of justice.

But this was the point earlier about helping poor people. The question assumes that they're poor in virtue of an injustice that's been done to them, and that's a Marxist notion. Well, one, the reason why this gets confusing is because people are equating justice with something that you should do. And let me explain what I mean by that. That's good to do you mean. That's good to do. So I don't owe a poor person my money, but it is a good thing for me to donate money to charities and to help that person out.

But those are two separate things. And it's really important that we keep this distinction because of the gospel. What I see happening is people are starting to think God owes everyone's salvation. And the same thing is happening here. if somebody is poor, then we owe them our money. But that's not the case. It's not a matter of justice. It's a matter of grace.

And that is a beautiful, good thing. And so when God gives us grace, that's not justice. He doesn't owe us. And if we confuse the two, that makes it really hard to understand the gospel at all. So I think it's a dangerous thing to start confusing justice in grace. And, you know, we have – there's much more to say about this. But I do recommend, again, Jay Wesley Richards' book, Money Greeting God, that talks more about the ideas behind economics and things like that. And I also have a post on our website.

Oh, gosh, I can't remember what it's called. If we lose justice, we lose the gospel, something like that. Because I think it really is important that as a culture, if we start calling grace justice, that's going to make it more difficult. for us to explain the gospel to people. I haven't heard that yet, but it's so odd to think of it that way, that grace is justice. Now, I do think there is that trend that people have that God owes salvation, therefore, what about the person who never heard? He never heard about forgiveness, therefore it's unjust for God to punish him for the things

he did wrong. Well, of course, that equation doesn't work. And since I've, you know, for 50 years, I've been talking about that confusion, but it's still obviously it's something that people hold. All right. Thank you, J.B. and Sarah, we appreciate you sending in your questions, and we'd love to hear your question. And you can just send that in on STR.org if you look for our hashtag STR Ask page. Or you can go on X and use the hashtag SDRask.

But we thank you so much for listening. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason.