Ask Dr. E: How to respond to life’s ‘what ifs?’

Dear Dr. E: I find myself facing the “What if” conundrum. What if the now widely recognized phenomenon of gender is truly on a spectrum more comprehensive than a heterosexual male and female? Adam and Eve presumably had eyes, hair, and skin, all of which had a color. That’s the way God made them. Why, then, today, are there multiple colors of eyes? Hair? Skin? God made the original couple presumably in one way on each of these characteristics. But today, somehow, for whatever reason, there is more than a binary spectrum in each of these attributes of human physiology. Why would we then suppose that, somehow, for whatever reason, gender is immune from the kind of diversity extant in humans? What if gender turns out to be on a non-binary spectrum? Do I know that’s the way it is? Do you know it’s not? No. In the presence of life’s uncertainties, there are just too many “what-ifs.” Perhaps we should defer to a “power much higher and do
what Jesus tells us to do, stop judging and love! – Humble Friend from Michigan

Dear Humble: I appreciate your forthrightness in asking these questions. Please accept my response as one of candor and not undue confrontation.

First, I have to start by stating the obvious: Candidly, your “what if” scenario sounds an awful lot like Satan’s question to Eve in the Garden: “What if God didn’t really say that? Or if he did say it, what if he did so because he knows you can be like him? What if God told you not to eat that tree’s fruit because he knows that when you do, you will be able to define good and evil for yourselves, and you won’t need him to do it for you any longer? What if?”

Second, don’t you think your list of “what ifs” leaves way too much to the imagination? If gender identity, sexuality, and all the corresponding moral assumptions therein are decided by such hypotheticals, why stop with homosexual, bi, lesbian, queer, or trans sex?

For example: What if our Supreme Court tells us sex between adults and 14-year-olds is okay? What if our major universities start teaching that necrophilia is simply another iteration of the gender identity spectrum? Or what if Hollywood elites start portraying “interspecies love” as morally neutral? What if?

And if we are going to go down the path of “what if” why stop with sex? What if China decides to practice slavery with the Uyghurs? What if Western Europe declares euthanasia is an economic necessity for the old? Or, what if a Princeton professor named Peter Singer tells us that post-birth abortion is acceptable because of the quality-of-life questions for both mother and child? Oh, that’s right, these aren’t hypotheticals. All this stuff is already happening. All these “what ifs” have already become “what is,” haven’t they? 

And as to your anecdote about eye color, please correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t find anything in Scripture that suggests this is a moral issue. I don’t see one verse that tells me that brown, blue, green, or hazel matters a whit to God. To conflate the hew of my pupils with God’s moral code seems to be the poster child of a non sequitur. Frankly, if your theory regarding the evolution of eye color were to prove itself out, who cares? What difference would it make in assessing moral law and how human beings should behave?

Finally, I agree that it is wise that we defer to a “power much higher” and do what Jesus tells us to do. There is no “perhaps” about it, in my view. But frankly, on this matter, Jesus is pretty clear. The most loving thing for us to do for our neighbors is to stick with “what is” revealed in Scripture rather than speculate about my “what ifs” or yours. In fact, it just might be that the Bible is given to us by Christ himself to protect us from all our “what ifs.”