As a pre-teen growing up in Perth, Western Australia, I had a wonderful opportunity each summer to spend a couple of weeks on a farm in the small southwest town of Donnybrook. (My grandfather owned a bakery in the same town. It’s still there today, along with a commercial mixing machine that’s now over 100 years old—and still in use!) With dairy cattle, pigs, and an apple and pear orchard, the farm was a young lad’s wonderland with horses to ride bareback and miles of hills to wander.
As with any farm, one sees the full circle of life unfold from birth to death. I marveled at how a baby calf, just born, was quickly on its legs and mobile. As I grew, I saw that all manner of mammalian life quickly became independent, except for the early need of nourishment from the mother. Wildebeest, antelope, elephants, even towering giraffes drop their newborn on the African savanna and within minutes they are standing, suckling, and moving among the herd to quickly learn survival skills. If this were not so, they would in short order become a meal for the many predators around them. Even in the ocean, whale and dolphin mothers nudge their newborn to the surface for their first breath of air, and then they are swimming alongside with the pod. Marvelous!
Humans, however, are born totally helpless. Without parents, we would not be able to survive! Walking, talking, socializing, learning, skills development—the list is long, and the proficiency needed to function and prosper takes time, a lot of time. Yet here we are, the pinnacle of God’s creation, but without massive and prolonged help we cannot even get off the starting blocks! Nor do we find any real comparison in our nearest primates. Certainly, chimpanzees exhibit nurturing, familial behaviors, but youngsters must learn safety and survival skills far more quickly than human infants.
Materialistic science offers a variety of reasons why we humans are born so dependent, the size of the newborn’s brain and head, the mother’s birth canal and pelvis, etc. Though not all find these physiological traits sufficient explanation.
A 2012 Scientific American article noted that natural selection favored childbirth at an earlier stage of fetal development to accommodate selection for both large brain size and upright locomotion—defining characteristics of the human lineage:
“When I asked paleoanthropologist Karen Rosenberg of the University of Delaware, an expert on the evolution of human birth, what she thought about the new work, she called it “important and interesting.” But “just because there’s a metabolic moment when it becomes reasonable to have a baby doesn’t mean it isn’t also true that the pelvis is a tradeoff between giving birth and walking on two legs,” she contends.
“Given how difficult human birth is, one would think that if the pelvis could get bigger without compromising locomotion, then it would--but it doesn’t,”, Rosenberg observes; “I think it’s still the case that the pelvis is adapted to functions that select in opposite directions,” she says.
Rosenberg additionally noted—and I found this especially fascinating—that the author’s mention of the possibility that the timing of birth [optimizes] cognitive and motor neuronal development. That idea, first proposed by Swiss zoologist Adolf Portman in the 1960s, is worth pursuing, she says. “Maybe human newborns are adapted to soaking up all this cultural stuff and maybe being born earlier lets you do this,” she muses. “Maybe being born earlier is better if you’re a cultural animal.” Food for thought.*
Food for thought indeed, and perhaps we also should think about another idea, that a Creator God placed man above the animal kingdom. Our need for years of nurturing has a spiritual and emotional development dimension, in addition to a physical one.
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So, God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:26–28 ESV)
However, let us unpack this in a different way. Animals are created with both body and a brain. This can provide functions as simple as basic instinct, like a cow chewing its cud, or simple reaction, like sheep running toward a fire rather than away from it, not conducive to survival! In either case, one does not get the feeling that there is much self-awareness going on. Pigs, on the other hand, are supposed to be quite intelligent, as are some breeds of dogs. Whales and dolphins are ascribed an even higher intelligence, but I do not believe we have evidence that they contemplate anything about their existence.
Is this what separates us from them? Earliest Man pondered the heavens and considered puzzling questions about why we are here and what happens when we die. We are self-aware and we are social, and somewhere inside of us there is that nagging sense that we are connected to something, some entity larger than ourselves. Molecular biologist Dean Hamer called it “the God Gene” in a book of the same name. The reality is that unlike animals we are comprised of body, mind, and spirit, and the spirit is our connection to the One who created everything—the universe and all that is in it, visible and invisible. I believe that it is this difference which requires us to have the benefit of both mother and father to aid in our physical and spiritual formation. Sadly today, that important support framework is collapsing at an alarming rate in Western societies
In my book Why God? Why Now? I talk about spirituality and our connection to God: “As I have stated at the outset, I earnestly believe that God has given us both intellect and curiosity to probe deeper into the mystery that is the spirituality He infuses into our very being. That spirituality is all too often covered by the dust and crud of a broken world, and it takes effort, sometimes mighty effort to begin to sweep away the detritus of our humanity that covers our spirituality and stifles our soul.” We are set apart by God for a special relationship by which we are saved from both the brokenness of our humanity and the broken world, which we occupy for a time. Our lifelong task is to rise above that brokenness.
For this our Creator has provided a detailed roadmap in the sixty-six books of the Bible. Through faith in His word, we learn to put our body and mind into the correct perspective and to give our spirit the attention it needs so that we grow into the person God intends for us to be. The task is hard, and it becomes harder as society increasingly shuns God and religion and treats the faithful as pariahs. It has never been more essential that Christians who are faithful to the original meaning of the gospel come together in unity and build each another up through Jesus Christ, our Savior. Meet communally in person where possible, virtually where it is not possible. Above all, pray continually for our brothers and sisters who are under physical, spiritual, and emotional attack.
Maranatha, come Lord Jesus come.
* Kate Wong. “Why Humans Give Birth to Helpless Babies,” Scientific American, August 28, 2012.