This week’s Five-Star Monday Mornings Newsletter (see link in menu bar to subscribe) included this Point of History: 

The Simon-Ehrlich Wager

One of the more famous bets ever made between two people involved two scholars with vastly different views of what lay ahead for the world. Biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb, was challenged by economist Julian Simon to put his money where his mouth was. Ehrlich believed that human population growth was going to outstrip the world’s resources, which would result in the price of those resources increasing greatly. Simon, on the other hand, was confident that advances in human ingenuity and resource use and allocation would have the opposite effect. They bet on the price of five commodities — copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten — starting September 29, 1980 and ending September 29, 1990. 

Though the world’s population grew by more than 800 million in that period, the prices of all five commodities dropped. Simon won the bet, Ehrlich lost.

God, however, continued to rule the world according to his own wisdom and to frustrate all who would dare predict its demise apart from his decision.

I had that sent out at 3:00 AM Monday. Later in the day I was surprised to find all sorts of other people tweeting and posting comments about Paul Ehrlich and just thought it was a really strange coincidence. Of course, soon I realized something else must be at work, dug a little deeper and discovered that Ehrlich had died on Friday — that’s why he was in the news.

The thing is, I hadn’t known that when I chose to write about the famous wager. It was what they call serendipity.

But pretty much Ehrlich’s entire career could be used to amplify that point about God continuing to be in charge of the world, no matter what humans may predict or be convinced of. He was very, very convinced he was right — even with decade after decade of growth and development that refuted his claims — and was still, when he died, very, very wrong.

This post at the Volokh Conspiracy, Paul Ehrlich Helped Create Roe v Wade, focuses on one particular error. It might be tempting to simply be amused at how someone so certain could be so consistently incorrect, but ideas have consequences, and his — because they were spread far and wide and had such influence — had horrific consequences. We can never know, of course, how many children were never born because of his ideas, but it isn’t an exaggeration to put the estimate in the millions.

Which should encourage all of us, then, to be diligent in identifying and opposing errors like Ehrlich’s, whenever and wherever they appear, and whoever believes them. Whether we’re guarding the truth of Scripture or looking to protect our nation and society from making costly and tragic mistakes, we need to be always learning and discerning to keep falsehood and its consequences at bay.