So when man replaces an abacus with an adding machine, and an adding machine with a calculator, and a calculator with a computer whose central processing unit, by the year 2000, will be a single chip capable of performing 130 million calculations per second, produced for under one hundred dollars out of nothing but silicon, the main ingredient of sand, and made in an essentially pollution-free process, he is reflecting more clearly the creativity and knowledge of God. We have gone through the Stone age, the Iron age, the age of sailing, the steam age, the industrial age, and the space age. But knowledge has always been one of the chief distinctions between men and animals. It has enabled men to change and improve their environments rather than merely adapt to them. Because the growth of knowledge so outstrips the depletion of physical resources as to make each new resource or method yield higher output per unit of labor and capital than the one it replaces. . . .
Animals are dependent on what they find in their natural environment. . . .
It is this message that will enable us to respond adequately to the greatest threat to human freedom and prosperity in the coming century, the anti-population growth movement. First generating and then feeding on people's fears of resource depletion and environmental catastrophe because of growing population, this movement threatens to restore all the destructive controls of socialism through the back door of population control and environmental protection. Those who understand rightly the nature of man as revealed in Scripture and reiterated in Centesimus Annus will know how to respond. Please don't misunderstand me. I am predicting great material wealth for the vast majority of mankind everywhere.