Strange Bedfellows

Or how biblical Christians and evolutionary biologists ended up sharing foxholes in the culture war.

One of the strange alignments of recent years has been the agreement between biblical Christians with a strong sense of God’s designing hand in human nature and evolutionary biologists who have their own strong belief in the way that human evolution has given us a whole set of hardwired propensities.

We find ourselves allied against a sweeping advance by those who see nothing permanent or fixed in human nature, and perhaps in all of nature. They advocate for a liquid selfhood, a plastic sexuality, a human nature which is endlessly malleable as long as we have the right social engineering and technology.

Biblical Christians oppose this because they believe that God designed men and women to have specific natures, and that these things are a given. Yes, they are given as in a gift, to be received with gratitude and thanks. Men should be glad to be men, rejoicing in those aspects of their design which are well suited to their roles, and rejoicing in the delightful, intriguing, mysterious, and never-quite-comprehensible femininity of the opposite sex. Likewise the women in their femininity, which can and does take a variety of shapes. This dance has provided the raw material for countless poems, stories, plays, movies, and comedy routines.

Those who believe in evolutionary biology are likewise convinced that human nature is not so easily changed, and that millions of years of reinforced neurological and instinctual development is not so easily overthrown.

And so we find these two groups – groups which a decade ago were squabbling over the age of the Earth and the obvious validity of evolution as well as the obvious absurdity of it – both under fire from a new front. We huddle in the foxhole together and endure public shaming for daring to oppose the great revolution in human nature, the complete remaking and reshaping of humanity.

No time to fight each other now with these bullets flying at us.

The transhumanist dream is to have autonomous control over our bodies and minds. It is the enthronement of the authentic inner self over and against any physical or social reality outside of it. Transgenderism follows the same essential logic. Therefore physical bodies must be surgically changed to conform to one’s inner sense of selfhood and society as a whole must be made to affirm and celebrate every such case as a triumph of one’s authentic inner identity over the constraints of nature.

Of those who mount rational arguments against this new regime, most will fall into one of the two camps described above. Either one grounds human nature in the will of a Creator, or one grounds it in the genetic and neurological hardwiring of our long evolutionary past. It seems obvious to me that the former provides a far more stable and enduring foundation than the latter, since evolution is by definition always in a state of change, but nevertheless quite a few courageous evolutionists have stood up for something like a stable human nature in the midst of our current cultural upheaval.

We should not mistake such a shaky alliance for more than it is. The differences of conviction between Christians and materialist evolutionists go very deep. But I for one am happy to consider them co-belligerents against what threatens to sweep so much good away.