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

Creed

Mental Health

19 February 2024

5 min read

It’s OK to be angry about this, right?

Anger's real gift is the desire for action.

Anthony Baker

Anthony is a theology professor at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas.

In a darkened room, a man's angry face is lit as he rests on arms folded tightly around it.

Abhigyan on Unsplash.

When is anger appropriate? When we hear of hideous acts of war in civilian villages, shouldn't we be angry? When I read about a shell exploding in a Gaza hospital, I get angry. I do also when something unjust happens to me, or to someone close to me. Some moments seem to call for anger as the right, and perhaps righteous, response.

But I often don't feel very "right" when I'm angry. In fact, I feel a bit out of control, like some other force or energy has taken over my body and my will. This is especially true when my anger leads me to say or do something that is hurtful to someone else.

Is there such a thing as Christian anger? If so, what does it look like? How can anger be the sort of emotive response that deepens, rather than erodes, my connection to God, myself, and others?

It is the act, and especially the amalgamation of acts into habits, that leads to virtue or to vice.

Anger is a passion

The ambiguity of anger stems from its grouping within what Thomas Aquinas, here as usual following Aristotle, calls "the passions." A passion is a creature's reaction to either the loss of something or to a gaining of something. We are passive, or receptive, to this giving or taking. Sickness is a loss of health; sorrow is a lack of happiness. When on the other hand a friend sees me sick or sad and brings me a bowl of soup, I am receptive not only of the soup but of a passion, or a feeling—a receiving rather than a losing in this case— of pleasure.

The passions are morally neutral: we cannot really be praised or blamed for being sad or pleased any more than for being sick. They often do, though, lead to actions, and this is where virtue and vice come into play.

Love, for instance, is a passion: it identifies a desire within me, received through contact with something or someone beyond me. The act that this gives birth to might be virtuous: kindness or affection toward that something or someone. In these cases, the passion becomes the catalyst to the greatest of the theological virtues, caritas, or charity, translating the Greek word "agape", used by St Paul. It may also, however, be vicious, as when my desire leads to me to attack someone whom I perceive to be standing in its way (think “crimes of passion” here). It is the act, and especially the amalgamation of acts into habits, that leads to virtue or to vice.

Anger originates in such a taking or giving. Something or someone is taken from us, and we get angry: something that I perceive—rightly or wrongly—as belonging to or with me. Or perhaps something inappropriate (which literally means "not my property") is given to me which is not mine to have: a false accusation, say, or a punch to the jaw.

When anger leads me to hurt someone as a result of that loss or addition, I commit sin. But sometimes it also leads to virtue. How does this happen?

But this next act, as any parent or teacher knows, is likely not to be the right one. That's because I will be tempted to simply to act, rather than to seek counsel to ensure that I act prudently.

Prudence is the virtue anger needs

The key to understanding how anger about such losses or gains could lead to a virtuous, or let's say a righteous act, is in another virtue - the one Thomas calls prudence. Prudence is the form wisdom takes on within human practices. Its goal is wise action shaped by the particular context in which it is needed. The prudent person knows how to calibrate the next thing she does so that it leads will to the specific end she is pursuing.

This "know how" in turn comes through counsel. I know the next practical step not because I have memorized formulas in right action, but because I can learn from others, past or present, in ways that will instruct me in the art of finding the next right thing.

Prudence is the key to understanding righteous anger because anger is supremely a passion that demands activity. Anger wants action, as the therapists teach us. It pumps blood through my body, it makes my muscles flex and my jaw clench, and so prepares me for some bold and likely aggressive act.

But this next act, as any parent or teacher knows, is likely not to be the right one. That's because I will be tempted to simply act, rather than to seek counsel to ensure that I act prudently. Most likely I will act out of a desire for revenge: to cause equal or greater harm. What I need in that moment is the outside input that can help me shape my act in accordance with reason. This is how, Thomas says, the neutral passion becomes meritorious passion: anger becomes righteous.

Righteous anger has a gift to give

Anger's desire for action is in the end its real gift. Notice how anger and sorrow are different sorts of passions. In sorrow, what is taken from me is joy. I long for the lost joy and am tempted to become even more passive. Depression takes me to the zenith of inactivity. Even getting out of bed or calling a friend feels like too much action.

Anger though is all about action. Yes, to act too brashly, too quickly, to seek revenge on the one whom I perceive to have harmed me. Or even to harm the nearest one to me regardless of their involvement (the sin of kicking a dog or abusing a child). Still: anger calls me to act, and for all its risky unhinged-ness, this is potentially a good thing.

Disordered, which is to say un-counseled by practical wisdom, anger can lead to harm. In these cases we make matters worse by calling our anger righteous: that self-justifying claim may in fact be blinding us to the real price of our next act.

But well-ordered, anger can draw us into deeper community with God, ourselves, and others. First comes the passion itself: I am angry and primed for action. Then comes the seeking of counsel, so that my desire for action can shift from the immediate to the prudently discerned. Finally comes the act itself, which anger was calling for in the beginning, now tempered by practical counsel. In such moments I am enacting a right and righteous anger.

And on those days when a loss or an unwanted gain is enough to make me wish to withdraw from the world of human activity, anger may be just the gift I need.