The Questioning Christian

Original sin? How about unfinished natural selection?

Crispin Sartwell has a piece in the NY Times:  What's So Good About Original Sin?   He says, "I would like to entertain the notion that a secularized conception of original sin is plausible, and that believing it might have good effects. In short, perhaps it’s time for a new Puritanism, though with fewer witch trials this time around."

I wonder if this philosophy professor has any familiarity with evolutionary psychology. Yes, as Paul said in Romans, we do things we hate and we don't do things we want. But original sin seems a less plausible explanation than natural selection of variations.  To borrow from Jesse Jackson: In "his" continuing creation, God simply isn't finished with us yet.

 

Breathing, Photosynthesis, and the Continuing Creation

Think about what happened the last time you took a breath, and consider the cosmic machinery that made it possible:

• Within your body, the oxygen that you inhaled got combined with the energy-storing molecules in your food to release energy. That energy was used by your brain, your muscles, etc., to leave the cosmos just a tiny bit different than the way it was before.
• The energy you used to make that cosmic change had to be packed into your food somehow.  As we know from high-school biology, plants stored that energy in the food's constituent molecules, using CO2 from the air and sunlight as "feedstocks" for photosynthesis.
• One of the byproducts of your changing the cosmos was your release of a certain amount of carbon dioxide back into the air when you exhaled.
• Your exhaled CO2 will eventually be recycled by other plants — again using solar-powered photosynthesis — into still more molecules that will show up in foods, building materials, etc.
• Oh, and this:  All those molecules we've been talking about?  Every single molecule on the planet (apart from hydrogen and maybe some of the helium) is composed of atoms from the ashes of one or more exploded stars.
• And those dead stars? They came about as a result of a titanic process that's been in progress for billions of years, starting with the unimaginably-huge release of energy at (what we call) the Big Bang.

So let's sum up:  We humans are part of a very-long-term process by which the energy from the Big Bang is being busily transformed into an ever-evolving universe.  

If we wanted to speculate, we might even call this process a project — a continuing creation — in which we get to participate.

(Inspired by an NPR commentary yesterday by astrophysicist Dr. Adam Frank reminding us of the wonder of photosynthesis.)

The search for intelligent life elsewhere

From the often-hilarious xkcd.com – I read every strip on Google Reader:

Robert Wright's The Evolution of God - a must-read

Robert Wright never disappoints. His latest book, The Evolution of God, is an extended look at theology from the perspective of a journalist who understands the fallibilities of human perception and memory, and the natural limitations of scriptures.

Wright doesn't seem to be religious in the conventional sense. He accepts evolution as about as well-proved as anything we know. But he does think the evidence is consistent with the existence of ... Something 'out there.'

The Afterword, a nice summation, is worth the read all by itself. Here's an excerpt from the final paragraph (with extra line breaks added):

Though we can no more conceive of God than we can conceive of an electron, believers can ascribe properties to God, somewhat as physicists ascribe properties to electrons. One of the more plausible such properties is love.

And maybe, in this light, the argument for God is strengthened by love’s organic association with truth — by the fact, indeed, that at times these two properties almost blend into one.

You might say that love and truth are the two primary manifestations of divinity in which we can partake, and that by partaking in them we become truer manifestations of the divine.

Then again, you might not say that.

The point is just that you wouldn’t have to be crazy to say it.

Human evolution is speeding up – Stephen Hawking

[Stephen] Hawking says that we have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information."

But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred.

"I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said.

- From Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution," in The Daily Galaxy.

Muslim extremists’ narrative of grievance may be an evolutionary side effect of altruistic punishment

Islamic extremism is just one of countless movements that “create[] a collective identity by appealing to a set of common grievances and create[] a master narrative of suffering and oppression.” [1]   It’s possible that this tendency to frame the world in terms of a narrative of grievance is something of an evolutionary side effect of an otherwise-useful trait.

The trait:  Natural selection appears to have hard-wired us to seek to punish unfairness, even at a cost to ourselves, because doing so tends to promote group fitness.  This is often called altruistic punishment. 

The side-effect:  Consciously or not, movements that cast their sales pitches in terms of ‘the unfairness of it all’ are making a smart move, because it so often works.

(It’s not unlike sugary cereal manufacturers who discovered that they could increase sales by positioning their wares on the lower shelves, that is, at eye level for kids riding in their parents’ shopping carts.)

Our willingness to punish unfairness may partially explain why we can be so quick to buy into narratives in which —

1. the members of our group (whatever that might be) are entitled to certain things;
2. when we don’t get those supposed entitlements, it’s not merely the luck of the draw, a poor choice of parents, a consequence of past decisions, etc.  No — it’s unfair, a distortion of the cosmic fabric, a case of Life Not Being The Way It’s Supposed To Be;
3. our hard-wired response to any perceived unfairness is to identify those at fault and punish them.

Putting it another way: if a hammer is one of your primary tools, an awful lot of things can start to look like nails. 

This might also help to explain why anger at Those At Fault often seems more emotionally satisfying than the hard work of facing the facts about the things we don’t like and trying to do something constructive about them.

Related post:

• Good News, Bad News: Sin as Evolutionary Side Effect?

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[1] Reza Aslan in an interview in the Houston Chronicle (emphasis added).  Aslan is author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (2005) and the just-published How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror.  It’s not hard to think of other examples of group identities that are built on, or reinforced by, a narrative of grievance; think of extremists in, for example, North Korea; Serbia; the political parties of various countries; the Episcopal Church; etc., etc.  (And I’m not even going to mention some other obvious examples from history.)

The pragmatic value of virtue is a possible indication of divine design - Robert Wright in The Atlantic

"The Hebrew Bible, considered a holy text by all three Abrahamic faiths, sees the pragmatic value of virtue as itself part of divine design. ... [¶] Of course, the fact that ancient scripture sees the link between prudence and virtue as a reflection of divine purpose doesn’t make it so. But if, as a matter of fact, the prudent pursuit of self-interest has over time led humanity closer to a moral truth—namely, that people of all ethnicities and faiths deserve respect—that lends at least some heft to the argument that there is a larger purpose in human affairs."

- Robert Wright in One World, Under God, The Atlantic, April 2009, p. 38, at 53 (bold-faced emphasis added, italics in original).  This article is excerpted from Wright's forthcoming book The Evolution of God. 

Wright is one of my favorite authors. I was powerfully influenced by his earlier book Non-Zero, a sophisticated, entertaining, and readable work about evolution, game theory, and social science. In the book, he sticks to the facts, but concludes that the evolution of the human race is due in no small part to our capacity for love and reciprocal altruism. He conjectures that the increasing orderliness in our corner of the universe (sometimes referred to as "the optimistic arrow of time") may point to the existence of a God and perhaps even a divine plan.

Reading Wright's Non-Zero was a milestone event in my faith journey; I look forward to getting his The Evolution of God.

Norman Mailer: God as artist, not lawgiver

From John M. Buchanan, Writers and words, The Christian Century, March 10, 2009, at 3:

Not long before he died [, author Norman Mailer] granted a series of interviews, which are published in the book On God. Mailer said that he was an atheist for 30 years before coming to acknowledge that he did believe in God.

He tried reading theology and was repelled. Theologians, Mailer concluded, "were undernourished in their appetite for inquiry." I wish he could have had a conversation with the theologian Joseph Sittler, for one.

Mailer came to believe in God, he said, because of his intense lifelong "exploration of human reality."

He envisioned God as "an artist, not a lawgiver, a mighty source of creative energy," and human beings as God's "most developed artwork."

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

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Related post:

• The Continuing Creation: Not Carpentry, But Bonsai

Self-Replicating Chemicals Evolve Into Lifelike Ecosystem

Alexis Madrigal, Wired Science, Jan. 8, 2009

Evolutionary explanations for religious beliefs?

From a Scientific American posting, Is Religion Adaptive? It's Complicated - A group of Darwinian theorists discuss religion in Edinburgh, Scotland, by Jesse Bering of Queens University, Belfast (links are in original):

... [T]he past decade has seen tremendous and quite rapid developments in the naturalistic study of religion. Topics such as God, souls and sin are no longer being treated as “outside science” but rather as biologically based emanations of the evolved human mind, subject to psychological scrutiny like any other aspect of human nature.  ...

Here is the fly-on-the-wall’s view of just a few of the topics discussed last weekend: [¶¶]

Political scientist and evolutionary biologist Dominic Johnson from the University of Edinburgh presented his argument that the idea of omniscient supernatural agents served an adaptive social policing function in the ancestral past. Johnson reasons that this would have encouraged individuals in groups to conform to group sanctions out of the fear of divine punishment, thus lessening the chances of social fission. This phenomenon would have been biologically adaptive since larger groups meant better chances of survival and reproductive success for individual members. It’s a bit like Santa Claus knowing whether we’re bad or good (but Santa doesn’t cause you to suffer renal failure, kill your crops, or sentence you to everlasting torment).

Anthropologist Richard Sosis summarized his “costly signaling” hypothesis of religious behavior. The gist of Sosis’s clever theory is that people engage in all sorts of costly religious behaviors—wasting time on rituals, wearing uncomfortable clothes, spending their hard-earned money—because, in doing so, they are advertising their commitment to the religious in-group. In other words, if you’re willing to do things such as cut off your child’s foreskin, pay a regular alms tax of 2.5 percent of your net worth or sit twiddling your thumbs for two hours every Sunday morning on a hard church pew, then your fellow believers will assume that you’re really one of them and can therefore be trusted.

Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers from Rutgers University, meanwhile, discussed the possible role of psychological self-deception in the realm of religion and reviewed the impossible to ignore evidence that religiosity positively effects human health. ...