Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (17 page)

We began
part I
of this book by considering claims to the effect that contemporary evolutionary theory is incompatible with Christian belief (see
chapters 1
and
2
). I concluded that this conflict is vastly exaggerated; there is conflict between
unguided evolution
and Christian belief, but it is no part of contemporary evolutionary theory to declare that evolution is indeed unguided. We then turned to a
second alleged locus of conflict: special divine action in the world (
chapters 3
and
4
). We noted that many theologians, philosophers and scientists object to the thought that God acts specially in the world. At least some of their objections have to do with science: special divine action, they say, goes contrary, somehow, to science. As we’ve seen, however, none of these objections is even remotely cogent; there is nothing in current or classical science inconsistent with special divine action in the world.

So far, therefore, we have found no conflict between Christian or theistic belief and current science. But there are other areas of science, and in some of them theories clearly inconsistent with Christian belief are proposed. Do these theories, supposing they achieved the status of scientific orthodoxy, offer a defeater for Christian belief? Or is this conflict merely superficial? In
part II
of the book we’ll explore this question, beginning, in the next chapter, with some theories from evolutionary psychology.

In part I we examined some alleged conflicts between science and religion, in particular between science and theistic belief. First, there was the claim that there is conflict between theistic belief and contemporary evolutionary theory; and second, the claim that science somehow refutes or casts doubt upon the idea, common to the theistic religions, that God acts specially in the world. These claims turned out to be wholly mistaken. There is no conflict between theistic belief and evolutionary theory, including the thought that all of life has come to be by way of natural selection operating on random genetic mutation. According to theistic religion, God has created the world and created human beings in his image. It is perfectly possible, however, that he did so by employing, guiding, and directing the process of genetic variation and natural selection. He may not in fact have done it in that fashion; perhaps you think it rather unlikely that he did it that way. Still, he certainly could have. Of course there
is
conflict between the widely accepted idea that natural selection, or evolution more generally, is
unguided
; but that claim, though widely accepted, is no part of current science. It is instead a metaphysical or theological add-on; an assumption that in no way enjoys the authority of science.

Nor is there conflict between contemporary science—physics, for example—and the thought that God acts specially in the world. True, many have claimed that there is conflict between Newtonian
physics and special divine action. They have ignored the fact that Newtonian laws are stated for
causally closed
systems, but obviously no system in which God acts specially would be a closed system; hence God’s special action would not go contrary to the laws of Newtonian physics. And with the advent of quantum mechanics it has become harder yet to find conflict between special divine action and current physics.

There are other areas of science, however, where the appearance of conflict is matched by reality. I’m thinking in particular of
evolutionary psychology
and
scientific scripture scholarship
—historical Biblical criticism, as it is sometimes called. You may think that historical Biblical criticism and evolutionary psychology have little in common. Perhaps so; still, they are alike in a couple of ways crucial to our inquiry. First, in each of these areas we find claims and assertions incompatible with theistic or Christian belief; here there really is conflict. But second, I call this conflict “superficial,” and in
chapter 6
I will explains why. Very briefly, however: even though Christians are committed to a high view of science, and even if these disciplines do constitute science or good science (a state of affairs that is by no means self-evident), these developments in evolutionary psychology and historical Biblical criticism don’t offer, or even threaten to offer,
defeaters
for Christian or theistic belief. Hence there is conflict, but it is merely superficial.

Those who accept Darwinism, as one might expect, often try to explain various features of contemporary organisms in Darwinian terms. One way to do this is to show how the trait in question does or did contribute to the reproductive fitness of the organisms in question. Why do tigers have stripes? Because they provide camouflage,
which, given the tiger’s lifestyle, is fitness-enhancing. Or perhaps the trait in question is not itself adaptive, doesn’t itself contribute to fitness, but is genetically associated with traits that do. As a special case, perhaps the trait in question is a spandrel, a trait that isn’t itself fitness-enhancing, but is a consequence of traits that are.
¹
Such explanations sometimes seem plausible, at least within limits: if you think the organisms in question arose by virtue of natural selection, then this seems a fairly sensible way in which to try to explain at least some of their traits.

As one might expect, this sort of explanation has been extended to human beings as well; one enterprise of giving such explanations is sociobiology, or, as it is now called, evolutionary psychology. Sociobiology burst upon the scene in 1975 with the publication of E. O. Wilson’s
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
. Wilson’s work provoked pointed criticism. Some claimed it tended to dismiss rape and other violence as merely a part of our evolutionary heritage; others claimed it was deeply sexist; still others declared it bad science. Work along these lines is now called “evolutionary psychology”; we need not enter the controversy as to whether evolutionary psychology is a successor discipline to sociobiology, or just the same thing renamed to deflect criticism. Either way, evolutionary psychology has been growing, and is rapidly becoming an established part of academic psychology.

In essence, evolutionary psychology is an attempt to explain important human traits and behaviors in terms of the evolutionary origin of the human species. The heart and soul of this project is the effort to explain distinctive human traits—our art, humor, play, love, sexual behavior,
poetry, sense of adventure, love of stories, our music, our morality, and our religion itself—in terms of adaptive advantages accruing to our hunter-gatherer ancestors back there on the plains of Serengeti.

Some of this can be a pretty tall order. Take our love of beauty, for example: here it isn’t easy to see what an evolutionary explanation would look like. (Of course it is always possible to declare a trait a spandrel.) There is the glorious beauty and grandeur of mountains—Mt. Baker, for example, or Mt. Shuksan, or the Grand Teton, or any of a hundred more. There is the splendor of a craggy ocean shore, but also of a tiny highly articulate flower. Alan Shepard, the first American in space, gasped at the sheer beauty of the earth as seen from space. It is hard to see how a capacity to find marvelous beauty in such things would be of adaptive use to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. And of course there is Mozart, and Bach. Perhaps we can see how love of something like heavy metal rock could be adaptively useful, possibly like the martial airs that encourage troops going into battle. But Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus? Bach’s B-minor Mass?

Harvard evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker once told a gathering of musicologists why music had rated only eleven of his 660-page
How the Mind Works
: “He told the musicologists why the topic did not merit more attention: music was ‘useless’ in terms of human evolution and development. He dismissed it as ‘auditory cheesecake,’ a trivial amusement that ‘just happens tickle several important parts of the brain in a highly pleasurable way, as cheesecake tickles the palate.’”
²
Anthropologist Steven Mither defends music against this charge of being useless: music does too have evolutionary significance, he said, because it is connected with walking and marching and other rhythmical activities.
³
It’s a little startling to
see something as deep, powerful, and significant as music denigrated or defended in those terms. Is an activity important only if it has played a prominent role in our evolution, enabling our ancestors to survive and reproduce? What about physics, mathematics, philosophy, and evolutionary biology itself: do (did) they have evolutionary significance? After all, it is only the occasional assistant professor of mathematics or logic that needs to be able to prove Gödel’s theorem in order to survive and reproduce. Indeed, given the nerdness factor, undue interest in such things would have been counterproductive in the Pleistocene. What prehistoric woman would be interested in some guy who prefers thinking about set theory to hunting?

Evolutionary psychology is extremely popular, at present, and growing in popularity. As I said, it is becoming an established part of academic psychology; it is also gaining purchase in more popular culture. Just about every other issue of
The New York Review of Books
carries a review of still another book intended to interpret ourselves to ourselves along these lines. A recent high (or maybe low) point is a book in which a new understanding of
religion
is proposed. At a certain stage in our evolutionary history, so the claim goes, we human beings made the transition from being prey to being predators. Naturally that occasioned great joy, and religion arose as a celebration of that happy moment! Granted, that sounds a little far-fetched: wouldn’t we have needed the consolations of religion even more when we were still prey? Still, that was the claim. Some of these projects, therefore, are a little hard to take seriously, but others are both intellectually challenging and adorned with all the trappings of serious science, complete with mathematics, models, the fitting of models to data, and the sort of stiff, impersonal literary style in which science is properly written.

Even a cursory glance at the literature shows that many theories from this area of science seem, at least on first inspection, to be deeply problematic from a Christian perspective. According to Michael Ruse
and E. O. Wilson, “ethics is an illusion fobbed off on us by our own genes to get us to co-operate; thus morality ultimately seems to be about self-interest.”
⁴
They also claim that “humans function better if they are deceived by their genes into thinking there is a disinterested objective morality binding upon them, which we should obey.”
⁵
Why so? Individuals with our moral intuitions will be likely to cooperate with each other; groups with our moral intuitions will therefore do better, from the point of view of survival and reproduction, than groups that lack those intuitions.
⁶
What has been selected for, then, are people with a penchant for forming a twofold belief on this head. First, they have the sense that there really is such a thing as objective obligation, a categorical
ought
that holds, whatever your goals or aims, whatever you or anyone thinks or desires. And second, they think that among these obligations is something like the golden rule: treat others (or at least others in your group) as you yourself would like to be treated. We are thus inclined to think that this injunction is an objective and categorical requirement of morality. According to Ruse and Wilson, however, our thinking this is no more than a trick played on us by our genes to get us to cooperate: in fact there aren’t any such objective moral obligations or requirements.

Consider an example. Herbert Simon’s article “A Mechanism for Social Selection and Successful Altruism” is concerned with the problem of altruistic behavior—that is, behavior that promotes the fitness of someone else at the expense of the altruist’s own fitness.
⁷
Why, asks Simon, do people like Mother Teresa, or the Scottish missionary Eric Liddel, or the Little Sisters of the Poor, or the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth century—why do these people do the things that they do? Why do they devote their time and energy and indeed their entire lives to the welfare of other people? Of course it isn’t only the great saints of the world that display this impulse; most of us do so to one degree or another. Most of us give money to help feed and clothe people we have never met; we may support missionaries in foreign countries; we try, perhaps in feckless and fumbling ways, to do what we can to help the widow and orphan. Now how, asks Simon, can we account for this kind of behavior? Given our evolutionary origin in natural selection, a rational, properly functioning human being could be expected to act or try to act in such a way as to increase her personal fitness—that is, to act so as to increase the probability that her genes will be widely disseminated in the next and subsequent generation, thus doing well in the evolutionary derby.
⁸
A paradigm of rational behavior, so conceived, was reported in 1991: “Cecil B. Jacobson, an infertility specialist [in Alexandria, Virginia], was accused of using his own sperm to impregnate his patients; he may have fathered as many as 75 children, a prosecutor said Friday.”
⁹
Unlike Jacobson, however, such people as Mother Teresa and Thomas Aquinas cheerfully ignore the short or long term fate of their genes. What is the explanation of this behavior?

This behavior, says Simon, is to be explained at the individual level in terms of two mechanisms: “docility” and “bounded rationality”: