Parental love convinces us of the reality of divine existence, piercing through the horizons of naturalism.
Many people who have siblings have probably experienced—or at least had the impression—that their parents somehow make distinctions among their children: giving more attention to some, less to others, even appearing to love one child more and another less.
But this is not, in fact, a matter of lack of parental love toward any particular child. It is simply impossible for a healthy and normal parent to love their children unequally, as though love could be measured or divided. And yet, some mysterious “difference” does seem to exist—and parents should not be judged for it. On the contrary.
Parents are—if we put it somewhat naturalistically (as Professor Richard Dawkins does in his famous book The Selfish Gene)—genetically programmed to protect their offspring. However, when they have more than one child, their energy and attention will naturally be directed towards those who are objectively most vulnerable—even at the cost of seemingly neglecting those who are strong, stable, and self-sufficient. The latter are already on the right path; all signs indicate that they will live and thrive—hence the absence of overt parental concern. Towards those who are insecure, whose life and future seem endangered or uncertain, parents will direct all their care and effort. Leaving aside the strong and healthy, they will devote themselves to the weak and frail. Why? Simply so that they too may live, just as the strong do.
This is, in fact, how parental love works. Therefore, one should not envy one’s weaker siblings for being apparently more surrounded by parental attention and affection. Here human beings behave in a way completely opposite to the so-called “mechanism of natural selection,” which lies at the core of the theory of evolution. Nature “selects” those individuals best adapted to their environment and grants them the privilege of passing on their “good genes,” while those less adapted are “eliminated.” Yet in the case of parenthood, this naturalistic explanation collapses. If evolution has shaped us so that the primary imperative is survival, whence comes this non-Darwinian parental behavior?
Even Richard Dawkins, the ardent Darwinist and naturalist himself, acknowledges this inconsistency in one of his interviews:
“I am deeply sympathetic to the idea that we can transcend biology through the use of free will. Indeed, I constantly encourage people to do just that. Much of the message of my first book, The Selfish Gene, was precisely this: we must understand what it means to be a ‘gene machine,’ to be programmed by our genes, so that by that very understanding we can better free ourselves from that programme.
We must use our large brains and our consciousness to distance ourselves from the dictates of selfish genes and build a new kind of life for ourselves. In my view, the less Darwinian that life is, the better. The Darwinian world in which our ancestors were selected for survival was a very cruel one: nature, indeed, had ‘red teeth and claws.’
When we now sit down to think about how we want to organize our societies, we should hold Darwinism up as a warning—as an example of how society should not look.”
What, then, is the central paradox of Dawkins’ naturalism? It lies precisely in the assertion that Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms “programme” us to behave non-Darwinianly. Dawkins maintains that human beings are products of evolution—genetic machines whose consciousness is the result of gene selection. Yet he simultaneously claims that this very consciousness can overcome its evolutionary conditioning and that “the less Darwinian something is, the better.” In other words, he uses Darwinian determinism to explain the existence of consciousness, and then introduces non-Darwinian choice (free will) to correct the consequences of that same mechanism. This is a self-refuting claim: if the human mind is merely a product of natural selection, then every idea it produces—including Dawkins’ critique of Darwinism—is itself an evolutionary by-product, not a rational choice.
But such reflections should be left to the advocates of naturalism—those who absolutize it epistemologically and ontologically, claiming that everything is explicable through nature and that everything that exists is nature.
The mystery of parental love, however, leads us beyond the naturalistic horizon. The best parable of Christ that illustrates this mystery of seemingly unjust parental love is that of the lost sheep:
“What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing; and when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbours, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’” (Luke 15:4–6)
He leaves ninety-nine sheep in the wilderness for the sake of one that was lost. He no longer even mentions the ninety-nine, but only the one for which he searches and over which he rejoices when he finds it.
Christ tells this parable in the context of God’s forgiveness of the repentant sinner. Yet the same dynamic occurs within the mystery of parenthood, as well as within the mystery of divine forgiveness itself. Parenthood is a great mystery—it is a living icon of divine love, the deepest and most moving kind of love, the one manifested by the God-Man through His death on the Cross. Only a parent would, without hesitation, be willing even to die for the life of their child.
It is no wonder, then, that this parable of Christ applies equally to the mystery of parenthood as it does to the mystery of God’s love for the repentant sinner. For God is a Parent— the Father, the One who eternally radiates that mysterious love through the begetting of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit. Likewise, the experience of parenthood reveals to us the reality of divine existence and convinces us of the presence of God. As Elder Zosima tells a woman of little faith in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “It is not possible to prove God, but it is possible to be convinced of Him.” “How?” she asks. “Through active love,” answers Elder Zosima.
Indeed, it is so. Parents know it to be so. Parental love convinces us of the divine existence—of the reality of God—piercing powerfully through the confines of naturalistic horizons.
Presbyter Dr. Aleksandar Milojkov
