I've just read
Charles Foster's book
The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin in which Foster argues that it "is simply not possible to demonstrate either that natural selection has in fact produced everything that we see in the natural world, or that it could have done." Instead there is "plenty of room for other complexity generators" with Foster arguing that one of these has been "the force of community, of altruism, of selflessness" which has consistently "been at work moulding the shape of the biological world." How, he asks, could "selfish natural selection have allowed even apparent altruism to start in the first place"? Perhaps, he suggests, "there was a good force seeding it and inhibiting the usually unswerving efficiency of the selfish stamper."
Alongside his examination of evolution Foster also interprets the Genesis creation stories. His conclusion here is that, if we want to look for an historical Adam and Eve, we look among the "anatomically modern but behaviourally naive
Homo sapiens" of Africa and the Levant who existed alongside the Neanderthals:
"Just like the biblical Adam and Eve, they had an abrupt change. Something non-anatomical but profound happened to them which transmuted dramatically the whole way that they looked at themselves, at one another and at the world; which gave them self-consciousness, a fear of death and a taste for bangles; which catapulted their society and the world ito a catastrophic sophistication."
All this has considerable synergy with an argument which I put forward in relation to one of the essays at
NTMTC. There I argued that the Biblical creation stories are myth in terms of their literary genre but functioned as history for the Hebrew peoples using them following their first tellings. Their historical usage and roots cannot, therefore, be overlooked in our understanding and use of them.
Ernest Lucas, for example, notes in
Wonders of Creation that:
“The story of the Garden of Eden certainly has its roots in history. It is not just an imaginative fairy tale. Genesis 4 tells of a descendent of Adam called Tubal-Cain, who was the first person to use metal to make things. This means that Adam must have used only stone implements. Genesis 2 tells us that Adam was a gardener and that he tamed animals. All this adds up to a picture of Adam as what we would call a ‘New Stone Age man’.
Now, as far as Europe and the Near East is concerned, the New Stone Age began around 8,000 BC in the upland plateaux of Turkey, and then spread into Mesopotamia, Palestine and Europe. What is interesting is that the Bible places the Garden of Eden in the area where the New Stone Age culture first arose. From the second chapter of Genesis it seems that Eden was at the place where the Tigris and Euphrates rise – which is in the upland plateaux of Turkey. In addition the word ‘Eden’ may come from a Babylonian word meaning ‘plateaux’.”
The key word in Lucas’ analysis of the historical basis for the Genesis stories is probably ‘culture’. If Lucas is right in locating stories of Eden in the New Stone Age then what he is doing is locating them at the launch point for cultural evolution. This is the point in history when human beings begin, by a combination of social organisation (sociality) and individual creativity (development), to extract ourselves from dominance by the processes of biological evolution and to impose our culture onto nature itself (the domination of which
Genesis 1 speaks).
The creation stories, history and science could all agree that this is the first point in history at which human beings essentially could have a choice about how we behaved ethically. Prior to this point human beings had been hunters, migrants dependent on the movements of their prey and participants in the natural ‘kill or be killed’ processes of a nature that is “red in tooth and claw”. However, as human beings developed agriculturally and socially, the killing of animals and other human beings was no longer essential. In fact, the logic of human culture is towards co-operation not opposition.
Gerd Theissen has argued that:
“… cultural evolution replaces 1. chance mutations and recombinations through innovations, which are a priori aimed at the solution of certain problems, but which in a wider context still occur ‘blindly’. It replaces 2. selection through ‘reinforcement’, which is recalled, perceived and anticipated – i.e. through a ‘selection’ in human imagination which anticipates the external pressure of selection and makes it less harsh. It replaces 3. genetic transmission with tradition, which draws on individual experience and therefore can be modified by it – and which nevertheless often takes place mechanically as ‘inheritance’.”
Theissen’s thesis in
Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Approach is that cultural evolution transcends biological evolution as a result of the intervention of human consciousness which gives direction to the process. If this is so, then “cultural evolution represents a reduction of selection – i.e. an evolution of principles of evolution – protest against the harshness of the pressure of selection through the deliberate action and thought of human beings can be recognized as an obligation which is ‘pre-programmed’ into the structure of reality and which no one can escape who wants to accord with ultimate reality” .
The biblical creation stories locate the imago dei in the ability of human beings to be both consciously and directedly social and creative. The result is that human culture is seen as the means by which the universe is developed and perfected. To do this, human beings need to work against what the story calls the effects of the Fall i.e. biological evolution. From the New Stone Age onwards it was possible for humans to do so. As we can see from examining human sociality and creativity, this is not what human beings have chosen to do.
Looking first at sociality, three levels of relationality have been noted by
Daniel Hardy, in his essay ‘Creation and Eschatology’ in
The Doctrine of Creation, with the third being a definition of sociality:
• identity through dissociation: “varied spacio-temporalities of existent beings assign them varying stability and direction, and this constitutes their identities as different from each other, which their mobility and energy varyingly allow them to move freely as dissociated from others: they are themselves (identity) through dissociation (difference)”;
• coexistence: “the same features of [existent beings] may … lead them to acknowledge comparable features in others, and make suitable allowance for them. In such cases, there is co-ordinate spatio-temporality, the basis of coexistence”;
• directed choice of others: “identity (stability and direction combined with mobility and energy) arises through the conferral of recognition and scope for positive freedom upon others as others. In such situations, the ultimate form is dedicated spacio-temporality, where identity is a consistent, directed choice of others and a movement toward them through which they are identified as themselves and honoured as such – to which they respond in trust … [t]he theological term for such a dedicated spatio-temporality … is election, and the result covenant”.
The logic of cultural evolution and the biblical creation stories is that human beings should operate at level three. However, biological evolution and most human behaviour remains stuck in a combination of levels one and two. Chris Mitchell explains, in
‘Homo Ethicus?’, an article in
Third Way, that biologists “recognise three different types of altruism: ‘reciprocal altruism’ (as in the Prisoner’s Dilemma ), ‘kin selection’ (which gives help to individuals who are genetically related), and ‘signalling’, which is the apparently selfless behaviour of unrelated individuals to indicate their status to future mates” . Mitchell comments that the “biological imperative is “Save yourself!””
Looking next at creativity,
Brian Horne has argued (drawing on the work of Arthur Koestler and Martin Buber), in his
The Doctrine of Creation essay ‘Divine and human creativity’, that “the act of [human] creation is a ‘relational event which takes place between two entities that have gone apart from one another’” . Koestler uses the word ‘biosociative’ to describe the connection of “previously unconnected matrices of experience” . For these three, this “capacity to make something new, to bring about objects and situations that were ‘not there’ previously, by an act, at once intuitive and intellectual, of discovering the possibility of connecting hitherto disparate matrices of experience, is both distinctively and intrinsically human” .
Horne suggests that biosociative acts are:
“acts which release us from the kind of determinism which is characteristic of the natural order, that is, of purely animal existence. To put a theological gloss on this we might say that in the non-human world (the natural order) creatures are simply what their appearance shows them as being: they are determined, without choice; they glorify God by being only themselves in their instinctive behaviour. In the human world it is different: there is freedom to choose, to act in certain ways which are willed and which may result in a creativity that will glorify God.”
Horne cites both:
• the Eastern Orthodox tradition - “Man has been called a demi-urge, not only to contemplate the beauty of the world, but also to express it” ; and
• the Western Liberal tradition - “Art does three things: it expresses, it transforms, it anticipates. It expresses man’s fear of the reality he discovers. It transforms ordinary reality in order to give the power of expressing something which is not itself. It anticipates possibilities of being which transcend the given possibilities”
to argue that human creativity involves the development of possibilities inherent within the creation. Here Horne quotes
Paul Tillich - “Man stands between the finite he is and the infinite to which he belongs and from which he is excluded. So he creates symbols of his infinity.” – to argue that what “is created is not being itself, but symbols of being, or rather signs of new creative activity (not only in the fine arts) as a power ‘to carry on the creation of the world and anticipate its transfiguration’”.
The universe as we know it is basically deterministic – it develops naturally according to a network of inter-related elements and processes by which successful characteristics are generationally and genetically selected and replicated. Although deterministic, it is not simplistic - “there is neither order which is not to a degree chaotic, nor chaos that is not to a degree orderly” . Human beings are a part of these determined but complex processes but can also exercise a degree of freedom from them, through sociality and creativity, within the constraints of finitude. In exercising this degree of freedom we seem to be faced with two possibilities:
a) we can use this freedom in the way suggested by biological evolution i.e. we can use it selfishly utilising it to maximise the possibilities for human survival. This can involve both exploitation of and/or co-operation with ‘others’ (whether human or non-human) but always on the basis of the best outcome for ourselves. To do so, is to operate at levels one and two in Hardy’s three levels of relationality; or
b) we can use this freedom to identify the essential nature of all that is ‘other’ (both human and non-human) than us and develop the possibilities of those ‘others’ in line with their essential nature. To do so, is to: act within the image of God; operate at level three in Hardy’s three levels of relationality; fulfil the logic of cultural evolution; and create an act of worship, as God is praised in and by the perfecting of his creation.
Finally, living in the way outlined at b) is a form of evolution that does not have to involve death. This is a point noted by both
Dorothy L. Sayers and Theissen. Sayers states that:
“The components of the material world are fixed; those in the world of the imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction … of what went before. This represents the nearest approach we experience to ‘creation out of nothing’ and we conceive the act of absolute creation as being an act analogous to that of the creative artist.”
While Theissen says that one of the new things in cultural evolution is “that patterns of behaviour can be given up or changed without the death or extinction of those involved in them. Human beings can change their mind. They can be ‘converted’ to the better when they see that the way in which they are behaving will lead to disaster”
John Barton, in
People of the Book?, provides an excellent summary of Theissen's
Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Approach. Barton says that Theissen "believes fully in random selection. But he argues that from time to time the human race shows itself capable of what he calls 'evolution against evolution'. At such moments the inherent selfishness of genetic and biological development (as described, for instance, by
Richard Dawkins in
The Selfish Gene) goes mysteriously into reverse, and altruism arises. Altruism is a move against selection and towards the protection, instead of the destruction and elimination, of the weak ... Theissen maintains that we can see this happening in two highly distinctive phases of human religious history:
in the increasingly monotheistic faith of ancient Israel, and in the life, teaching and death of Jesus of Nazareth. In an evolutionary perspective religion has often been simply one of the social mechanisms by which control, and hence the continued survival of the strong, is established; but in these two cases religion takes an unprecedented turn, and becomes instead an agency of healing for the wounded. In the religion of the prophets, and in the religious commitment for which Jesus lived and died, we see the distillation of faith in a God who is on the side of the down-trodden rather than their oppressors, and who seeks to bring a new, supernatural order of justice and peace out of the natural laws of selection and mutilation that spell death for the weak and powerless ... "In the midst of history a possible 'goal' of evolution is revealed: complete adaptation to the reality of God"."
I think that Theissen's thesis also has synergies with the ideas of
René Girard who begins his explanation of the dynamic of scapegoating by postulating the ‘mimetic of desire’, which is basically a kind of jealousy, but with a twist: we learn what is desirable by observing what others find desirable. Having ‘caught’ our desires from others, in a context of scarcity, everyone wants what only some can have (i.e. survival of the fittest). This results in a struggle to obtain what we want - which in turn produces a generalised antagonism towards the individual or group that seems to be responsible for this disappointment.
The vicious riddance of the victim has the potential to reduce the eagerness for violence, and if not, then the assumption is that more scapegoats need to be sacrificed in order to achieve a sense of appeasement and restoration of the status quo. The removal of the victim or victims – the lambs to the slaughter, gives a temporary re-assurance of the crisis disappearing, and the sensation of renewed possibility. This is a description of cheap solidarity and cheap hope.
Girard concludes his anthropological and literary analysis of scapegoating by examining Judeo-Christian texts, and traces the movement away from the dynamic of scapegoating through the Old into the New Testaments. It was this experience that contributed to Girard’s conversion to the Christian faith. His analysis of the Bible ‘as literature’ led him to conclude:
- that Jesus is the final scapegoat (i.e. in Theissen's terms the evolution against evolution or in Foster's selflessness against selfishess);
- the New Testament is ‘on the side of’ Jesus, the scapegoat. The Gospels are unusual because here is literature that encourages people to see the world through the eyes of the scapegoat;
- the scapegoat in the Gospels refuses to let death be the final word and he rises again triumphant; and
- the followers of the scapegoat enact the seizing of the scapegoat, and the scapegoat’s triumph over death, in Eucharistic celebration.
All this is by way of suggesting that Foster's thesis finds support elsewhere which both strengthens and broadens the argument. Foster, I think, sees selflessness as a force alongside selfishness within evolution rather than the evolution against evolution for which Theissen argues.
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