Explainer

Biology

Creed

12 January 2024

5 min read

Here's what Matthew Parris gets wrong on science disproving religion

Religion is not a by-product of evolutionary goals. Andrew Davison argues that our mental lives are more than a maelstrom of urges.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A man covered in dried and caked mud stands and looks to the side, a steel chain is draped from his shoulders.

Man, experimental.

Mahdi Bafande on Unsplash.

In a provocative recent column, the opinion writer Matthew Parris tells us that science has disproved religion. That’s quite a claim to make in 1,100 words, settling a debate that goes back decades. (‘Decades’, I write, not ‘centuries’, as historians have discredited the idea of some perennial conflict between science and religion.)

Parris’s argument is admirably clear: evolution has given us brains, which leaves them hardwired for evolutionary goals, and religion is simply a by-product. Evolution made us servile and grateful, so we imagine a God to thank and obey. ‘A driving need has always been felt by millions for a God-related hypothesis’, he writes. However, ‘today in the 21st century there’s an answer’: one that Charles Darwin ‘could have begun’ and which ‘we can complete’, thanks to the science of genetics.

If our mental lives were really no more than a maelstrom of evolutionary urges, we couldn’t have a sensible conversation about brains and evolution, never mind religion and gratitude.

I happily agree that our minds evolved; I don’t concede that means we can only think evolutionary thoughts. According to Parris, ‘once you accept that survival, procreation and teamwork are what natural selection has equipped us for, every human impulse is explicable in those terms.’ But are they? Take the example of procreation. Nothing about my life has been particularly geared in that direction, nor perhaps has that of Parris, but we both live using the brains evolution gave us.

That’s because the evolutionary advantage comes from having flexible, ambidextrous minds. Natural selection has given us brains like Swiss Army knives, instruments that can do many things. Not just one. We survive better because we can think about many things in many different ways.

It also seems that evolution has given us minds that are free. That’s somewhat disputed among philosophers and neuroscientists, and we certainly don’t know how freedom might emerge, but it’s not obviously false that it has.

Evolution has given us minds that can track reality, minds that can respond to what we find around us broadly and freely. There’s no denying the role of desires and drives in shaping our thoughts and decisions. It’s just that neither drives nor desires necessarily overthrow our reason, at least not most of the time. The history of thought – especially at its most impressive moments – shows us people trying to think as clearly as they can, whether as philosophers, scientists, theologians, historians, or whatever. By and large, they succeeded.

In fact, the claims that Parris makes requires us to believe that evolution has given us brains that are reasonably good at latching onto reality, brains that can think about all sorts of things in a generally accurate way. If our mental lives were really no more than a maelstrom of evolutionary urges, we couldn’t have a sensible conversation about brains and evolution, never mind religion and gratitude.

Attempts to reduce our mental and social lives to evolutionary forces are also challenged by the slow pace of evolution. Widespread disbelief in God is a recent phenomenon, even then only in the West, and even there not overwhelmingly. It’s all very new by evolutionary standards. Our recent ancestors were generally devout, our contemporaries less so. That can’t be about genes, since genes hardly change at all over the span of mere centuries.

Nor, to take up a couple of other points from Parris’, does recent history make it so clear that we’re genetically programmed to be grateful or obedient, given how quickly attitudes have changed on those matters of late: far faster than any genetic change would allow. ‘Natural selection has designed us to seek and serve structures of authority, to command and be commanded’, he writes, ‘and to find meaning, purpose and satisfaction in service to something (or someone) greater than ourselves. We are bred to bend the knee.’ If so, our genes have started doing a remarkably poor job of that, all of a sudden.

Perhaps the most we can say is something like this: (1) our genes (allegedly) predispose us to belief in God, as some sort of irrational urge, (2) this enthralled such unfortunate figures such as Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Edith Stein and Elizabeth Anscombe, but (3) newspaper columnists and other public intellectuals are now, by Herculean effort, suddenly able to break free from those unconscious genetic forces and see clearly for the first time. Perhaps, but I’m not convinced.

There’s little that isn’t enriched when explored in an evolutionary light. But we do evolution no favours, nor science more generally, by taking it as the arbiter of truth in every realm of thought.

Parris brings his column round to the theme of gratitude, writing that ‘not believing in a God to thank does not blunt my regular and strong feelings of generalised gratitude… I say “thank you”, knowing perfectly well there’s nobody to whom my thanks are directed.’ He thinks that we are hard-wired for gratitude, which leads to religiosity, as an invalid assumption.

G. K. Chesterton followed a similar line of thought in his book Orthodoxy, but I found it more convincing than Parris does, writing that the world bears the character of a gift, and a gift implies a giver. What Chesterton wrote towards the beginning of the twentieth century burst out again in French philosophy at the century’s end.

There’s a school of philosophy (phenomenology) that likes to start its thinking from what it is like to perceive phenomena, and for the world to ‘appear’ to us. In France, phenomenologists started saying that one of the most fundamental characteristics of how reality appears is as something given to us. Along Chesterton’s lines, that made some of these writers really quite religious. I’m not saying that Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, or Jean-Yves Lacoste automatically trump Matthew Parris, but they do suggest that an argument from givenness to gratitude to God isn’t simply foolish.

Evolution is fascinating and important. There’s little that isn’t enriched when explored in an evolutionary light. But we do evolution no favours, nor science more generally, by taking it as the arbiter of truth in every realm of thought.

Evolution can tell us a great deal about nature and humanity, but there is growing resistance among scientists towards doing that in a way that elides detail or simplifies into oblivion. Moving from explaining to explaining away is a good sign that science is no longer being used responsibly.

There is an evolutionary dimension to religion. But supposing that evolution explains religion, so that you no longer have to think about religious claims on their own terms, is no more rigorous that supposing that the evolutionary basis for smell means that nothing has a scent.

Article

Advent

Christmas culture

Joy

Poetry

20 December 2024

6 min read

The Advent poets who can’t wait until the world is sane

Tennyson to Eliot, Rossetti to L’Engle, find despair doesn’t preclude joy.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

Beyond a misty and raindrop streaked window, a colourful triangle shape emerges.

Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash.

After his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, critics began to notice a change in T. S. Eliot’s poetry. Some thought this was for the worse, that Eliot’s newfound faith dimmed his literary powers, making his usually impenetrable style more conventional. But there is a less cynical view. I think, instead, that his conversion brought a sense of clarity and purpose to his poetry. I think what really happened is that, like many Christian converts before and after him, he found a sense of joy.

Nowhere better can we find that distinctly Christian sense of joy than in Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’, an Advent poem recounting Jesus’s birth from the point of view of the magi travelling to meet him. Like many of my favourite Advent poems, ‘Journey of the Magi’ is not straightforwardly cheerful, instead dwelling on the idea of alienation. The last stanza of the poem in particular is devoted to the magi’s confusion at returning to their old life after witnessing the miracle of Christ’s birth:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

It’s hard not to read these lines and imagine that Eliot himself might have experienced a feeling of alienation, as a new convert, when looking back on his old life. And yet, the magi’s sense of being ‘no longer at ease’ in their old home, of being among ‘an alien people’, is not something that only converts experience. All of us, whether we are converts or reverts, whether we were brought up in the Christian faith or are still contemplating it with uncertainty, have a moment when we realise that believing in Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection radically changes the way we look at the world.

And conversion isn’t something that just happens once. Every year, during Advent, we are asked to meet despair with joy. For those of us living in the northern hemisphere, we’re specifically asked to do this in the darkest and coldest time of the year, when nature looks so gloomy and unwelcoming. As Christina Rossetti puts it in one of our country’s most beloved Christmas hymns, Jesus comes not at a time of flourishing nature, but rather ‘in the bleak midwinter’, when the earth is ‘hard as iron’ and water frozen ‘like a stone’. Just as we persevere in our yearly hope that spring will come again, so too we are called to renew our conversion of heart each Advent, waiting in hope for Christ’s birth.

But hope doesn’t have to mean blind optimism. The older I’ve become, the more I’ve come to think that rejoicing during Advent doesn’t have to involve unadulterated cheerfulness. Grief has its place within joy, as counterintuitive as that may seem. In fact, Advent is an opportunity to cultivate the virtue of hope in spite of grief, and in spite of the evils that we see in the world. ‘Were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?’, ask the magi. The answer is both. Each year Christ’s birth reminds us that faith requires us to die to our old selves. For some, this means having uncomfortable conversations with family or friends who don’t understand their conversion to the faith. For others, it means facing illness or death of a loved one or other kinds of trauma without giving in to despair.

None of this is easy, of course. Clinging to hope in dark times can truly feel like ‘bitter agony’, as Eliot writes. And yet, as one of the magi says in the final line of Eliot’s poem, ‘I should be glad of another death’. When we die to our selves, we also experience a new birth in Christ. Even as we celebrate his birth, we are reminded of his death on the cross for us, of the fact that he so loved us that he was willing to bear unbearable pain for our sake.

That kind of love, although it doesn’t remove all the sources of suffering in our daily life, does call for rejoicing. Another wonderful Advent poem, Madeleine L’Engle’s ‘First Coming’, emphasises the necessity of joyfulness in the face of a corrupted world. L’Engle begins by reminding us, stanza after stanza, that Jesus didn’t wait for humanity to become perfect before coming to us: ‘He did not wait till the world was ready’, she begins, before adding, ‘He did not wait for the perfect time’, ‘He did not wait till hearts were pure’. Rather, Christ came ‘in joy’, to ‘a tarnished world of sin and doubt’, right ‘when the need was deep and great’.

L’Engle ends ‘First Coming’ by encouraging us to imitate Christ not just in his patience, but also in accepting joy now, not when we world finally stops being rife with sin and pain:

We cannot wait till the world is sane
to raise our songs with joyful voice,
for to share our grief, to touch our pain,
He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

We can’t wait until ‘the world is sane’ to be joyful. Joy is remembering that Christ really did come ‘to share our grief’, no matter how seemingly unbearable it may be. Lord Tennyson expresses a similar sentiment in his poem In Memoriam, an elegy written after the loss of his dear friend Arthur Hallam. He admits that the pain at his friend’s death is so intense that, as Christmas is drawing near, he almost wishes ‘no more to wake’, and for his ‘hold on life’ to ‘break’. Then, he hears the sounds of bells:

But they my troubled spirit rule,
For they controll'd me when a boy;
They bring me sorrow touch’d with joy,
The merry merry bells of Yule.

Happy memories of Christmas bells from childhood are mixed with pain for Tennyson, bringing him ‘sorrow touch’d with joy’. That’s what all the best Advent poems, from Tennyson to Eliot, From Rossetti to L’Engle, show us: that sorrow doesn’t preclude joy. In the weeks leading up to Christ’s birth, it’s normal to dwell on both birth and death; Advent can be a season for both somberness and merrymaking. Most of all, Advent is a time for prayer, that our hearts may be filled with the knowledge that Christ loves us even in our sorrow, and that the very knowledge of Christ’s love may in turn fill our hearts with joy.

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