Fifty years ago, a malaria outbreak occurred among Borneo's Dayak
people. The World Health Organization came to the rescue. They sprayed
the people's thatch-roofed huts with DDT-and set in motion a
life-and-death illustration of the importance of respecting the natural
order.
The pesticide killed the mosquitoes, but it also killed a parasitic
wasp that kept thatch-eating caterpillars under control. The result?
People's roofs began caving in.
And then things really got bad. The local geckos feasted on the toxic
mosquitoes-and got sick. Cats gorged on sick geckos-and dropped dead.
And then, with no cats, the rats began running wild, threatening the
people with deadly bubonic plague.
The World Health Organization was in a quandary. What unexpected
disasters might occur if it now poisoned the rats?
Then someone determined that they needed to reintroduce part of the
natural order that had collapsed: specifically, cats to eat rats.
So one morning, the Dayak people heard the droning of a slow-flying
aircraft. Soon the sky was littered with parachutes bearing pussycats
to earth. Operation Cat Drop delivered 14,000 felines to Borneo. They
hit the ground-feet first, I suppose-and began taking care of the rats.
The story of the parachuting pussycats, while funny, makes a serious
point. As I write in my new book, The Good Life, there is a natural
order to the world. Ecosystems work a certain way. Cycles of nature are
unchanging. You don't grow a tomato plant in a dark closet.
No, the physical natural order of the universe is clearly evident, as
the World Health Organization bureaucrats discovered when they tampered
with it in Borneo. Not only that, but there is also a natural moral
order that arises from our learning how to behave within the limits of
the physical order. Morality, I argue, is basically choosing to
cooperate with nature's directions. As we do this, we discover a known
moral order. The object of life is to live in accordance with that
moral order.
It's tragic the way so many people go through life fighting against it.
We want to enjoy sex on our terms, not the way we were designed. We end
up with dejection, family dysfunction, disease. It's like planting the
tomatoes in a closet. It doesn't work. It breaks the immutable laws of
the universe.
I argue in the book that this discernible physical order clearly
reveals an intelligent designer. If God designed the physical
universe-as the evidence is indicating-isn't it reasonable that He
would teach us to behave in a way that conformed to His created order?
Morality is cooperating, remember, with nature's directions.
This is what Christians believe by faith, and as I argue in the book,
something we can all observe, that is, the natural order. And we need
to help our neighbors understand this: The good life can't be found
when you live in opposition to the natural order, regardless of its
moral demands. In the end, the moral demands are the only path to
health and happiness.
If you don't believe that, just ask the people of Borneo. They
discovered what happens when you tamper with the natural order-and were
rescued from mosquitoes, rats, and the World Health Organization
bureaucrats by parachuting pussycats.
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Today's BreakPoint offer: The Good Life:
Seeking Purpose, Meaning, and Truth in Your Life by Charles Colson
with Harold Fickett. Get a copy for yourself, and for a friend!
The story of Operation Cat Drop is told in Cornelius Plantinga's book Not the Way
It's Supposed to Be (Eerdmans, 1995), taken from Extinction: The
Causes and Consequences of the Disappearance of Species by Paul and
Anne Ehrlich (Random House, 1981).
