Recently I saw a science-fiction film that was produced in the 1960s. In it there was a geneticist who was greatly concerned with the Malthusian vision of the world's population overwhelming its food supplies. "By the year 2000," he said with alarm, "the earth's population will be three and a half billion. What will we do then?"
That film reflected popular concerns a quarter of a century ago. Yet today—well before the year 2000—the earth's population is estimated to exceed five billion! It's almost inconceivable to comprehend that number of people. But if you had five billion people stand side by side, the line of people would circle the earth at the equator some seventy-five times! While I'm not sure that example makes the issue any more conceivable, it suggests that the place and value of each one of us could be easily lost in such a vastly populated world.
In the face of such immense numbers of people, the Psalmist's question to God—"What is man, that thou art mindful of him?"Ps. 8:4.—may seem like a parody or a plea. It certainly would require an infinite Mind to know man, if we were thinking of men and women in those terms. Actually, Christian Science describes God as infinite Mind, but the question is, How do we begin to approximate and feel in our daily lives the infinite, eternal love of an infinite God?
