Tag: evolution

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.

Photo by Sangharsh Lohakare on Unsplash

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.

A Very Boring-Sounding Title: The Foundation of True Discourse

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“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I can’t understand how anyone could believe that.”

“Anyone who thinks that is a complete idiot and understands nothing.”

We’ve all heard people say things like this, and most of us have said some of them ourselves. But the more I observe people interacting in person and online, the more I see how destructive such attitudes are towards the goals of honest conversation and true discourse.

It is the most natural inclination of any group with shared beliefs to reinforce those beliefs by developing arguments against the beliefs of others. This in and of itself is fine and good. This is why Christians study and discuss the wrong beliefs of Muslims, Mormons, and atheists, and why Camaro enthusiasts talk trash about Mustangs. The last thing we want is to say that one belief is as valid as another, or else we end up with plain old relativism and that is about as helpful as a set of black and white traffic lights or pharmacists who only administer placebo pills. 

And yet something critical is lost when the Camaro Club members come to believe that the Mustang is a useless piece of junk and quite literally the worst car ever made, or when a Christian says that Muslims or Mormons or atheists are completely deceived and know nothing about God or the world. What is lost is simply the truth. In the effort of preserving and reinforcing one’s own beliefs, it is all too easy to leave the realm of truth and reality. Constructing crude caricatures of opposing views is so rampant in religious and political discourse that its easy to lose sight of how harmful and destructive it is. And it isn’t just harmful for the one being caricatured. No – it is even more harmful for the one doing the caricaturing, because even if that person holds the view that is really true, he has left the realm of truth in his attack on the other, and is now frankly unable to convince anyone else of the truth.

Why is this? It’s because of a very simple and understandable reaction that always occurs when someone hears their own beliefs misrepresented. It’s essentially impossible to be convinced by an argument that is not addressing your position. And if I can narrow the focus a little bit to an especially guilty party of which I am a guilty member, we Christians are constantly doing this. The other partners in this fumbling waltz of misfired arguments are the atheists, who I daresay are just as bad. 

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I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Christians quote Psalm 14:1, “The fool says in his heart, “There is no God”” and then proceed to argue that atheists are all fools and if they had any working brain cells they would see that God exists. Now, the scripture is true, and in the last analysis, when all things are revealed and our profound blindnesses are cured, it will be obvious that it is a foolish thing to say there is no God, sort of like it is a foolish thing to say there is no such thing as speech. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t perfectly understandable why someone would be a committed atheist. In fact, I am quite sure I would be a committed atheist if I had been born to atheist parents and if God had not so clearly intervened in my life; there but for the grace of God go I and you too.

The truth is, if the deepest pre-supposition you held was that there is no such thing as the supernatural, God, or anything beyond the physical world, then it makes sense to look at all the data available and conclude, like so many do, that the universe somehow came into existence through a big kablamo and that by endless chance life came into being and through countless eons evolved into what we see today. A lot of very intelligent, sensible people believe this. Likewise, atheists should be able to imagine how an intelligent and thoughtful person could come to believe that God created all things and that Jesus is the son of God.

We need a kind of intellectual empathy that says “I can see how you could believe that.” 

This is the foundation for any conversation which might actually bear the fruit of mutual understanding, growth, and maybe even epiphany. 

Defending the truth is a vital and worthy objective. But often in the interest of defending the truth we build walls instead of bridges, creating insular intellectual communities instead of winsome truth-telling communities, based in fear instead of love.

Someone I know came back from a conference a few years ago and told me “Post-modernism is so stupid!” I don’t disagree with the fact but the sentiment is not likely to convince many post-modernists. Forgive the analogy but if you want the dog to come inside you’re going to have to do something other than throw sticks at it. 

Republicans routinely demonize and draw caricatures of the Democrats, who then turn around and return the favour with interest. Christians get together and make fun of those stupid know-nothing atheists, who also get together and chuckle at the poor misguided fools who believe in an imaginary omnipotent being. And then there was the guy in my class who had decided that any and all Japanese cars were ugly and stupid and that only Fords and Chevys were worthy of appreciation, a position so untenable that it was hard not to laugh. 

Building walls of mutual incomprehension will do a good job of preserving the status quo but it will also prevent any actual conversation and – most shockingly of all – any realization of our own errors and wrong beliefs. Ultimately it is the path to ignorance, blindness, and even hate and violence, for there is a sense in which the kinds of mental attitudes I’ve described contain the seeds of the dehumanization necessary for violence.