A recent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal reminded me of a conversation I had with a creationist a while back. He was touting the virtues of the golden rule over "survival of the fittest". At the time I only commented that the golden rule would be a considerable improvement on a lot of religion, but it made me think of how such things are viewed in the Bible.
There is a thread through the Old Testament of reward and punishment through your descendants. It happens with Adam, with Ham, with Abraham, and with David; it is clearly displayed in the ten commandments:
"I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments."
It is a very Darwinian attitude; your success is measured by the number and condition of your descendants. And it is very clearly displayed in the book of Job.
Job is one story that cannot be other than allegory, if the OT God is to retain any decency. As parable it says that bad things happen to good people; that this is not punishment or abandonment from God; that you should keep the faith and not treat as wicked those who fall on hard times. As a literal story, it shows Jehovah as vain and proud, and willing to sacrifice people's lives and happiness to show off on a bet.
But either way you read it, what happens with Job's children illustrates the Darwinian attitude clearly. Job is described as a good man: "...and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil." All of Job's children are killed in the story, but at the end God gives him "twice as much as he had before". A good man might well have loved his children, and wanted them back; and God has that power, but that's not what happens. Instead:
"So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses. He had also seven sons and three daughters. And he called the name of the first, Jemima; and the name of the second, Kezia; and the name of the third, Keren-happuch. And in all the land were no women found so fair as the daughters of Job: and their father gave them inheritance among their brethren. After this lived Job an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons' sons, even four generations. "He gets ten new children, and the girls are the fairest in the land, and get inheritances... so presumably they will marry well. And Job lives to see lots of descendants, as any good Darwinian would want.
It is no surprise that the OT would see things this way. It takes a long time and a lot of social development to change such an attitude. It is an evolutionarily advantageous attitude, the sort of thing that you would expect to be hard-wired, if anything so long-term could be.
But it's pretty funny to hear Creationists decrying it as terrible Darwinian invention, when they came up with it first.
