A lot of my readers are fathers and will have experienced similar thoughts to mine: the miracle of life, the wonder of witnessing a new human being, etc. So what I’m expressing is probably nothing new, but I feel like expressing it anyway.
One of my first thoughts at seeing my newborn son was that one year ago, this amazing creature didn’t exist at all. Even the sperm and egg didn’t exist a year ago — they were just a bunch of carbon and hydrogen atoms. For these disparate chemicals to come together and form this incredibly complex creature is truly a miracle.
The father of a newborn baby cannot avoid thoughts of Creationism. Surely there must be a guiding hand behind this creation of life. The old saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” should apply to new fathers as well.
Not only is this new life wonderful in itself, it is pre-programmed to develop. The DNA code dictates that certain changes will take place, at puberty, for example. In that little helpless baby are the seeds for creative or mathematical abilities, for how tall they will be in 30 years’ time, for personality types.
When I look at my baby, and when I look at my other son (now 3 years old), one thing that I do not see is evil. Young children do not hate. Does our DNA program us to hate, later in life, people who are not identical to us — blacks, Muslims, LGBTQs? If my baby is created by God, does God want him to grow up with the notion that he should kill gays and other minorities? I think not.
When I look at the hatred expressed by Christian Evangelicals towards minorities, I think I could make a pretty good case that Satan is at work. While I do not see Satan in my baby, I certain see him in many so-called Christians.
How can this happen? There may be many causes, but I feel that one culprit is the illogical leap from Creationism to morality. “God created me, therefore I must act in a certain way.” There is no logical connection here. My baby is not going to get his moral compass from God, who created him. Remember “Kill a commie for Christ”? Does my baby’s DNA program him to want to kill communists? It is society (of which I am admittedly a member) which will instill moral values in my baby. (There is, however, some research challenging this.)
I am getting close to those old French philosophers, here. Rousseau: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.”, or Voltaire’s ‘tabula rasa.’ To me, it seems that modern genetics shows that a baby is not completely a tabula rasa, but maybe only a moral tabula rasa. That is, a baby may be programmed to develop in a lot of ways, but I don’t see any moral programming. I see my baby as born without hatred or evil, but I have to wonder whether I will be the one responsible for instilling in him that hatred for ‘the other’. Or is there some kind of ‘hate-the-other’ combination of genes. I am at least grateful that my kids are bi-racial, so that at least they will not grow up to feel that they are the master race or master religion.