Some varieties of atheism

A religion typically has both practical and theoretical aspects.  The former concern its moral teachings and rituals, the latter its metaphysical commitments and the way in which its practical teachings are systematically articulated.  An atheist will naturally reject not only the theoretical aspects, but also the practical ones, at least to the extent that they presuppose the theoretical aspects.  But different atheists will take different attitudes to each of the two aspects, ranging from respectful or even regretful disagreement to extreme hostility.  And distinguishing these various possible attitudes can help us to understand how the New Atheism differs from earlier varieties.

Consider first the different attitudes an atheist might take to the theoretical side of a religion.  There are at least three such attitudes, which, going from the most hostile to the least hostile, could be summarized as follows:

1. Religious belief has no serious intellectual content at all.  It is and always has been little more than superstition, the arguments offered in its defense have always been feeble rationalizations, and its claims are easily refuted.

2. Religious belief does have serious intellectual content, has been developed in interesting and sophisticated ways by philosophers and theologians, and was defensible given the scientific and philosophical knowledge available to previous generations.  But advances in science and philosophy have now more or less decisively refuted it.  Though we can respect the intelligence of an Aquinas or a Maimonides, we can no longer take their views seriously as live options.

3. Religious belief is still intellectually defensible today, but not as defensible as atheism.  An intelligent and well-informed person could be persuaded by the arguments presented by the most sophisticated contemporary proponents of a religion, but the arguments of atheists are at the end of the day more plausible.

Obviously one could take one of these attitudes towards some religions, and another of them towards other religions.  For example, a given atheist might take a type 1 atheist position with respect to Christianity and a type 2 atheist position with respect to Buddhism (or whatever).  Or he might take a type 1 attitude towards some versions of Christianity but a type 2 or type 3 attitude towards other versions of Christianity.

Now, among well-known atheists, it seems to me that Quentin Smith is plausibly to be regarded as taking a type 3 attitude toward Christianity, at least as Christianity is represented by prominent philosophers of religion like William Lane Craig or Alvin Plantinga.  Keith Parsons, by contrast, seems to take at best a type 2 attitude towards Christianity and maybe even a type 1 attitude.  And Jerry Coyne seems almost certainly to take a type 1 attitude, though perhaps on a good day and with respect to at least some varieties of religious belief he’d move up to type 2.  (I’m happy to be corrected by Smith, Parsons, or Coyne if I’ve got any of them pegged wrong.)

Now let’s consider three different attitudes an atheist could take toward the practical side of a religion, going again from the most hostile to the least hostile:

A. Religious practice is mostly or entirely contemptible and something we would all be well rid of.  The ritual side of religion is just crude and pointless superstition.  Religious morality, where it differs from secular morality, is sheer bigotry.  Even where certain moral principles associated with a particular religion have value, their association with the religion is merely an accident of history.  Moreover, such principles tend to be distorted by the religious context.  They certainly do not in any way depend on religion for their justification.

B. Religious practice has a certain admirable gravitas and it is possible that its ritual and moral aspects fulfill a real human need for some people.  We can treat it respectfully, the way an anthropologist might treat the practices of a culture he is studying.  But it does not fulfill any universal human need, and the most intelligent, well educated, and morally sophisticated human beings certainly have no need for it.  

C. Religious practice fulfills a truly universal or nearly universal human need, but unfortunately it has no rational foundation and its metaphysical presuppositions are probably false.  This is a tragedy, for the loss of religious belief will make human life shallower and in other ways leave a gaping void in our lives which cannot plausibly be filled by anything else.  It may even have grave social consequences.  But it is something we must find a way to live with, for atheism is intellectually unavoidable.

Here too a given atheist might of course take attitude A towards some religions or some forms of a particular religion, while taking attitude B or C towards others.  Once again, Jerry Coyne seems to be an example of an atheist whose attitude toward religion lays more or less at the most negative end (A).  Perhaps Stephen Jay Gould took something like attitude B.  Atheists of a politically or morally conservative bent typically take either attitude B or attitude C (though I know at least one prominent conservative who is probably closer to attitude A).  Walter Kaufmann is another good example of an atheist (or at least an agnostic) who took something like attitude B towards at least some forms of religion.  Indeed, he seemed to regard religion as something that speaks to deep human needs and whose moral aspects are of great and abiding philosophical interest.

Now these two sets of possible attitudes can obviously be mixed in a number of ways.  That is to say, a given atheist might take a more negative attitude towards the theoretical side of a given religion and a more positive attitude towards its practical side, or vice versa.  And he might take different mixtures of attitudes towards different religions or forms of religion.  For instance, he might take attitudes 2 and C towards some kinds of religious belief, and 1 and A towards other kinds.  Thus we could classify atheists according to their combinations of attitudes towards the practical and theoretical sides of religion or of a particular religion -- A1, B3, C2, and so forth.  

An A1 atheist, then, would be the most negative sort, especially if he took an A1 attitude towards most or all forms of religion.  A C3 atheist would be the most positive.  At different times during my own years as an atheist, I would say that I tended to take either a B or C attitude towards the practical side of religion, and perhaps attitude 2 towards the theoretical side (at least until the latter part of my atheist years, when I started to move to 3 before finally giving up atheism).  No doubt I had moments when I probably came across as more of an attitude 1 and/or attitude A type atheist with respect to at least some forms of religious belief -- it’s easier to remember specific arguments with people than what one’s general attitude was during a given year, say -- but overall I’d say that I probably hovered around B2 territory for at least much of my time as an atheist.  (Walter Kaufmann was one of my heroes in those days.  Indeed, Kaufmann’s attitude towards Christianity -- which was more negative than his attitude towards other religions -- influenced my own, and no doubt helped delay my eventual return to the Church.)

I find that atheists who fall on the most negative ends of these scales -- A1 territory -- are invariably the ones who are the least well-informed about what the religions they criticize actually believe, and the least rational when one tries to discuss the subject with them.  And when you think about it, even before one gets into the specifics it is pretty clear that A1 is prima facie simply not a very reasonable attitude to take about at least the great world religions.  To think that it is reasonable, you have to think it plausible that the greatest minds of entire civilizations -- Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, Averroes, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Buddha, Adi Shankara, Ramanuja, et al. -- had for millennia been defending theoretical and practical positions that were not merely mistaken but were in fact nothing more than sheer bigotry and superstition, more or less rationally groundless and morally out of sync with the deepest human needs.  And that simply isn’t plausible.  Indeed, it’s pretty obviously ridiculous.  Even if all religious belief turned out to be wrong, it simply is not at all likely that its key aspects -- and especially those aspects that recur in most or all religions -- could have survived for so long across so many cultures and attracted the respect of so many intelligent minds unless they had some significant appeal both to our intellectual and moral natures.  Hence a reasonable atheist should acknowledge that it is likely that attitudes 2 or 3 and B or C are the more defensible attitudes to take towards at least the ideas of the greatest religious thinkers and the most highly developed systems of religious thought and practice. 

When one considers the prima facie implausibility of the A1 attitude together with the ill-informed smugness and irrationality of those who approximate it, it is pretty clear that its roots are not intellectual but emotional -- that it affords those beholden to it a sense of superiority over others, an enemy on which to direct their hatreds and resentments, a way to rationalize their rejection of certain moral restraints they dislike, and so forth.  In other words, A1 atheism is pretty much exactly the sort of ill-informed bigotry and wish-fulfillment A1 atheists like to attribute to religious believers.

And here’s the thing: If there is anything new about the New Atheism, it is the greater prominence of atheists who at least approximate the A1 stripe.  In Walter Kaufmann’s day, A1 atheism was represented by marginal, vulgar cranks like Madalyn Murray O’Hair.   Now, equally vulgar cranks like Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Myers, and Coyne are by no means marginal, but widely regarded as Serious Thinkers.  This is the reverse of intellectual progress.  And we know what Walter Kaufmann would have thought of it.

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Monkey in your soul?

Before we get to part II of my series on modern biology and original sin, I want briefly to reply to some of the responses made to part I.  Recall that my remarks overlapped with points recently made by Mike Flynn and by Kenneth Kemp in his American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly article “Science, Theology, and Monogenesis” (which, I have since discovered, is available online).  If you haven’t yet read Flynn and Kemp, you should do so before reading anything else on this subject.  As they argue, there is no conflict between the genetic evidence that modern humans descended from a population of at least several thousand individuals, and the theological claim that modern humans share a common pair of ancestors.  For suppose we regard the pair in question as two members of this larger group who, though genetically related to the others, are distinct from them in having immaterial souls, which (from the point of view of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and Catholic theology) are a necessary condition for the possession of genuine intellectual powers and can be only be imparted directly by God.  Only this pair and their descendents, to whom God also imparts souls and thus intellects, would count as human in the metaphysical and theologically relevant sense, even if the other members of the original larger group are human in the purely biological sense.  As Kemp writes:

These first true human beings also have descendants, which continue, to some extent, to interbreed with the non-intellectual hominids among whom they live.  If God endows each individual that has even a single [metaphysically] human ancestor with an intellect of its own, a reasonable rate of reproductive success and a reasonable selective advantage would easily replace a non-intellectual hominid population of 5,000 individuals with a philosophically (and, if the two concepts are extensionally equivalent, theologically) human population within three centuries.  Throughout this process, all theologically human beings would be descended from a single original human couple (in the sense of having that human couple among their ancestors) without there ever having been a population bottleneck in the human species. 

So there is no problem of reconciling the claims in question.  On the scenario proposed, the modern human population has the genes it has because it is descended from a group of several thousand individuals, only two of whom had immaterial souls.  But only those later individuals who had this pair among their ancestors (even if they also had as ancestors members of the original group which did not have immaterial souls) have descendents living today.  In that sense, every modern human is both descended from an original population of several thousand and from an original pair.  There is no contradiction because the claim that modern humans are descended from an original pair does not entail that they received all their genes from that pair alone.  As Flynn points out, critics like Jerry Coyne confuse the claim that there is one man from whom all modern humans are descended -- a claim that is part of the doctrine of original sin -- with the claim that all modern humans are descended from only one man -- a claim which need not be understood as part of the doctrine.  And as Flynn also points out, it is arguably only the male of the pair, and not the couple, that the doctrine requires all modern humans to be descended from. 

Now, recall that this whole blogospheric debate got started because Coyne boldly proclaimed that “we can dismiss a physical Adam and Eve with near scientific certainty” but also professed interest in hearing “the best way to reconcile the Biblical story of Adam and Eve with the genetic facts” (even offering as a prize for the best answer an autographed copy of his book Why Evolution is True).  So, now that he’s got his answer, what does Coyne do?  He completely misses the point.  In response to my recent post, Coyne writes:

If souls and sin are transmitted vertically, from parents to offspring—as suggested by [Feser’s]  hypothesis… —then we should still see a two-person genetic bottleneck some time in the past, tracing back to those two lucky individuals who won the soul lottery.  We don’t see that.

Moreover, all the genes of every living human should “coalesce” back to the same time and the same two people.  But we don’t see that either: each gene segment had its ancestor at a different time (and often at a different place) in the past: the Y chromosome, for instance, coalesces back to an ancestor who lived about 60,000 years more recently than the female ancestor who bequeathed us the genes in our mitochondria.  So this solution is also untenable.

How can Coyne say such things, given that one of Flynn’s and Kemp’s main points is that the doctrine of original sin does not in fact entail a bottleneck; given Flynn’s argument that it does not even require that all modern humans descend from the female of the original pair, but need regard only the male as their common ancestor; and given Flynn’s further point that the scenario proposed does not require identifying Adam and Eve with “Y-chromosomal Adam” and “Mitochondrial Eve,” respectively?  

He can say them because Coyne obviously didn’t bother reading Flynn or Kemp, that’s how, even though I cited them.  True, I didn’t say much about the details of Flynn’s and Kemp’s arguments myself in my own original post (for I didn’t have anything to add to what they said about the genetic considerations, but wanted to emphasize instead the crucial difference between a metaphysical account of human nature and a purely biological one).  But then, I doubt that Coyne read even my post.  It seems pretty clear that he was relying on Jason Rosenhouse’s summary of what I wrote.  Yet Rosenhouse did apparently read at least Kemp, and does not say the point-missing things Coyne does.  (Coyne says that Rosenhouse “overlooked” the “flaw” Coyne claims to identify.  But Rosenhouse didn’t “overlook” it; rather, he actually did some homework, and perhaps concluded that Coyne’s original objection had been effectively answered by Kemp and decided to drop the subject.)

So, Coyne has no excuse.  Had he bothered to do his own homework he would have known that his reply completely misses the point, and had already been answered by Flynn and Kemp.  But reading a blog post summary of another blog post’s allusion to what a third blog post and a journal article had to say is evidently Coyne’s idea of research, at least when he pontificates on the subject of religion.  The results are predictably embarrassing, or would be if Coyne were capable of embarrassment.  And so the real mystery here is not the doctrine of original sin.  The real mystery is why anyone still takes seriously anything Jerry Coyne has to say about religion.   Anyway, Prof. Coyne, Mike Flynn and Kenneth Kemp are waiting for their signed copies of your book.  (I’ve already got a copy, so no need to send me one.)

Rosenhouse has criticisms of his own.  But though he does not miss the point the way Coyne does, his objections have no more force than Coyne’s.  Rosenhouse says, first of all, that:

The first piece of evidence against [the scenario summarized above] is that the Bible does not teach anything remotely like what Feser is describing… Where in the Genesis story does he find a preexisting population of physically human but unensouled creatures?  And how does he account for the Genesis language, which explicitly tries to account for physical bodies and not just for mental endowments?

In other words: “Wait, you’re not a fundamentalist!  That’s not fair!”   

As I noted in my previous post, what Catholic theology requires is that all humans living today have Adam as an ancestor, and that Adam’s soul was infused directly by God.  It does not require that Adam was literally made directly from dust or clay.  And though Rosenhouse is correct that Genesis is interested in the formation of Adam’s body and not merely the origin of his soul, that too is consistent with the Flynn/Kemp account if we think of the matter God used to form that body as derived from pre-existing hominids rather than straight from the earth.  I know Rosenhouse, Coyne, and Co. would like it to be the case that all Christians are crude literalists --after all, that would facilitate atheist combox smart-assery and other forms of Serious Thinking.  But it just isn’t so.  As a matter of fact, the most traditional Christians are not crude literalists.  As Mike Flynn emphasizes in his post, that the literal and figurative senses of statements in the book of Genesis must be carefully distinguished is a long-standing theme in traditional biblical exegesis, and was famously explored by St. Augustine.  Flynn writes:

If I want to know "what Christianity teaches," I would be inclined to ask the Orthodox or Catholic churches, as they have near 2000 years of noodling over it.  Yet when the Coynes of the world want to tell us 'what Christians believe,' they agitate over the idiosyncratic beliefs of Bill and Ted's Excellent Bible Shack, whose teachings go back to last Tuesday.  Go figure.

To be sure, this does not mean that Catholic theology allows us to reinterpret just any old passage of Genesis as we see fit.  The point is just that the situation is far more complicated than claiming either that it all must be taken literally or that none of it need be taken literally.  A reader calls attention to some articles by Fr. Brian Harrison -- here, here, and here -- which detail the history of the Church’s doctrinal statements concerning human origins and evolution, and argue that Catholic teaching on the subject is more conservative than many realize.  In particular, Fr. Harrison argues that the miraculous formation of Eve from Adam’s side is binding Catholic doctrine.  At the same time, Fr. Harrison acknowledges that the Church does not condemn either “special transformism” -- the view (which Pius XII evidently had in mind in Humani Generis) that in forming Adam, God conjoined a human soul to matter derived from pre-existing hominids and “upgraded” so as to make it suitable for such infusion -- or evolutionary accounts of sub-human species.  And special transformism is all that is essential to the point that Flynn, Kemp, and I have been making about the compatibility of the doctrine of original sin with the genetic evidence.  In any event, as I say, the situation is more complicated than fundamentalists, theological liberals, and New Atheists suppose.

Even given a completely literal reading of the relevant passages in Genesis, there is less conflict with Flynn’s and Kemp’s proposal than Rosenhouse suggests.  We are told that Cain feared that others might kill him.  Who were these others?  That we are not told, and thus have to speculate.  Perhaps they were further progeny of Adam.  But Flynn’s and Kemp’s account provides another possibility -- that they were (to use Rosenhouse’s words) members of “a preexisting population of physically human but unensouled creatures.”

Rosenhouse’s other response to what I wrote is (again, perhaps because he could see that Kemp had in effect answered Coyne’s original objection) to change the subject.  The subject, you’ll recall, was whether the doctrine of original sin is compatible with the genetic evidence.  The subject was not whether the doctrine is true.  Obviously I think it is true, but that is a separate issue requiring a separate discussion.  Flynn, Kemp, and I were not trying to convince skeptics to accept the doctrine of original sin, but only to show that rightly understood, the doctrine is compatible with the claim that modern humans descended from a population well above two individuals.  Rosenhouse, however, complains that we have not established the truth of a key presupposition of our defense of the doctrine, viz. the immateriality of the human soul -- even though I explicitly said that I was not claiming to have done that in the post he’s responding to (since doing so was not necessary to answering the specific objection at hand and the post was already long enough).

I also noted that the immateriality of the human soul is something I have argued for elsewhere.  For example, I treat the subject at length in my books Philosophy of Mind, The Last Superstition, and Aquinas.  I address it in numerous previous blog posts.  Yet Rosenhouse assures us that:

Catholic theologians have not the slightest basis for saying that our nature is simply not exhausted by our physical attributes.

Hear that?  Not “a highly controversial basis.”  Not “a basis that I, Jason Rosenhouse, find unconvincing.”  No, not the slightest basis.  Now, forget about my own arguments for the intellect’s immateriality (though Rosenhouse says nothing in response to them).  A great many more important Catholic philosophers and theologians have also presented serious arguments for it, as have non-Catholic Christians and pagan thinkers in the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions.  Secular writers like Karl Popper and David Chalmers have endorsed forms of dualism.  Secular writers like Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, and Galen Strawson, while they do not embrace dualism, nevertheless reject physicalism.  Yet others, like Thomas Nagel, Jerry Fodor, and Joseph Levine, have argued that there are at least serious difficulties facing physicalism which have yet to be answered.  And many materialists who think these difficulties can be answered at least acknowledge that the difficulties are indeed serious ones raised by critics in good faith.  Then there are secular non-dualists like Tyler Burge, John Searle, and William Lycan, who (as I have noted before) have expressed the opinion that the dominance of materialism in contemporary philosophy of mind owes less to the quality of the arguments in its favor than to ideological thinking.  

But for Rosenhouse, it seems, none of these thinkers has the slightest basis for his views.  It’s all just transparently feeble religious apologetics, apparently even with the many secularists among them.  No doubt that’s because Rosenhouse read a materialist philosophy of mind book once back in college which he thinks “refuted” all the objections to materialism once and for all.   (As we know from his dismissiveness towards the cosmological argument, once Prof. Dr. Jason Rosenhouse has found some particular book on a philosophical subject convincing, causa finita est and philosophers need wrestle over it no further.)  

Such preposterous overstatement would be inexcusable even if Rosenhouse had shown any evidence that he understands the issues.  But he quite obviously does not understand them.  He continues:

Intelligence and rationality appear to be things that come in degrees.  Dogs already have the ability to learn hundreds of commands.  They can form complex emotional relationships with people.  They can understand their place in a pack.  All of this requires considerable mental processing ability.  What basis is there for saying that purely physical processes in the brain can account for these, fairly sophisticated, mental accomplishments, but cannot account for abstract reasoning or rationality as well?

Even the brief comments I made in my previous post should make it obvious what is wrong with this argument from an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) point of view.  None of the examples Rosenhouse gives requires a grasp of abstract concepts, as opposed to mere sensation, mental imagery, or the processing of material symbols.  And it is abstract concepts -- for instance, the concept man as opposed to a sensation of a particular man or a mental image of a certain man’s appearance or voice,  or a neural structure that is causally correlated with particular men encountered in the past -- that A-T philosophers (and by no means only A-T philosophers) argue cannot be material.  For conceptual thought can have a determinate, unambiguous content and a universality of reference that sensations, mental imagery, and material symbols cannot have even in principle.  Rosenhouse is free to argue against this claim if he wishes, but he really ought at least to try to understand it, and the reasons A-T philosophers would give for it, before doing so.  As I often do, I would recommend James Ross’s article “Immaterial Aspects of Thought” for a fine contemporary statement of those reasons.  (That the resulting position is in no way at odds with what we know from modern neuroscience is something I have argued for here.)

Rosenhouse continues:

And that's just dogs.  Once we start contemplating apes the basis for Feser's arguments gets very rickety indeed.  Apes have sophisticated tool-making and tool-using capabilities.  They can learn sign language and have shown an ability to combine signs in logical ways to express concepts beyond what they were specifically taught.  Are you really confident they have no ability for abstraction or the use of logic?

The answer is Yes, I am confident of that, for the same sorts of reasons Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker are confident that the “evidence” for ape sign language is completely bogus.  (Last time I checked, Chomsky and Pinker weren’t religious apologists.)  But even if Chomsky, Pinker, and I are all wrong, that wouldn’t show that the intellect is material.  For if it turned out that apes really did have genuine intellectual powers, what would follow instead is that they too had immaterial souls -- and indeed, that they were arguably therefore “human” in the metaphysical sense even if not in the genetic sense, for they would in that case be rational animals.  

Until there’s real evidence for that, though -- and I won’t hold my breath -- it looks like there ain’t no monkey in any (metaphysically) human soul.  In our bodies maybe, but souls, no.  But don’t let that stop you from enjoying the classic Steely Dan tune:

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Ten years on

I had been out of grad school for a couple of years, but I was still keeping grad school hours.  Having stayed up very late the night before and not having to teach that day, I was exhausted and intent on sleeping in.  So when my wife tried to wake me before leaving for work, I barely registered what she was telling me.  World Trade Center?  Airplanes?  What the hell is she talking about?  Doesn’t she know I’m not going to get anything done today if I don’t get some rest?  I rolled over, weariness, irritation, and confusion drowning curiosity, and fell back asleep.

Some time later I woke up again.  The edge had been taken off exhaustion and curiosity took control.  As I lay there rubbing the sleep from my eyes I tried to remember.  What was it that she had said?  Something weird.  I got up and turned on the TV. 

Even more than the astounding images, I will always remember that bulletin staring out matter-of-factly from the bottom of the screen.  “World Trade Center Destroyed.”  It was like something out of a movie, or a nightmare, or a Jack Kirby comic book.  There will never be any way to describe it without resorting to clichés.  I had been there once, years before, at the Windows on the World restaurant.  Now it was empty space.  Or empty, anyway, apart from smoke and dust.  

For most of the nineties I had been an atheist, though a decreasingly smug one.  The rethink started when I was still in graduate school, when I began to study the arguments of writers like Aquinas and Leibniz in greater depth, so that I could try to help the undergraduates I was teaching understand why anyone had ever taken this stuff seriously.  By the summer of 2001 I was trying to argue my wife’s physicist brother-in-law into philosophical theism on the train the four of us were taking from Oswiecim to Prague.  Or maybe it was on the train from Prague to Berlin.  Naturally, the horrors of Nazism and Communism were on our minds.  That was all in the past, thank God.

Catholicism was also on the argumentative agenda, and the London leg of our trip included the customary visit to Foyles and a stack of Catholic books alongside the usual philosophical stuff.  Officially, I was still non-committal on Catholicism.  There were a few more i’s to dot and t’s yet to cross.  One could take one’s time, and besides, there was much to admire in other religions.  It may have been during that trip that my wife and I spotted a young Muslim man on the Underground.  He stood out because of his garb, and because he seemed to be absorbed in prayer.  I would remark to her that he might be the most serious human being on the whole train.  After all, what were the others thinking about?   Where to have lunch?  Which DVD to watch that evening?  Pop stars and surfing porn?  Yet his thoughts were evidently focused on the First Cause of the universe.  I respected that enormously wherever I saw it, and still do.   In other respects, I was to become less ecumenical.  

Though I had been something of a theist for a while, September 11, 2001 may have been the first time in many years that I had myself actually prayed, at least on my knees.  It may also have been the first time I ever wept over some distant event, a televised calamity happening to others.  

The nineties and all their foolishness were over, for our country and for me.  I was in my early thirties.  By year’s end, we would be expecting our first child, and I would return to Holy Mother Church.  It was a time to get serious.

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Modern biology and original sin, Part I

Our friend John Farrell has caused a bit of a stir in the blogosphere with his recent Forbes piece on modern biology and the doctrine of original sin.  Citing some remarks by Jerry Coyne, John tells us that he agrees with Coyne’s view that the doctrine is “easily falsified by modern genetics,” according to which “modern humans descended from a group of no fewer than 10,000 individuals” rather than just two individuals.  Those who have responded to John’s piece include Michael Liccione, Bill Vallicella (here and here), James Chastek, and Mike Flynn. 

Several things puzzle me about John’s article.  The first, of course, is why he would take seriously anything Jerry Coyne has to say about theology.  (We’ve seen ample evidence that Coyne is an ignoramus on the subject -- some of the relevant links are gathered here.)  The second is why John seems to think that the falsification of the doctrine of original sin is something the Catholic Church could “adapt” to.  (John’s article focuses on Catholicism.)  After all, the doctrine is hardly incidental.  It is de fide -- presented as infallible teaching -- and it is absolutely integral to the structure of Catholic theology.  If it were wrong, then Catholic theology would be incoherent and the Church’s teaching authority would be undermined.  Hence, to give it up would implicitly be to give up Catholicism, not merely “adapt” it to modern science.

In fairness to John, it seems he may have been speaking imprecisely.  He says, for example, that Eastern Orthodoxy does not accept the doctrine, which (as Bill Vallicella has pointed out) is not true.  What is true is that Eastern Orthodoxy does not agree with the Catholic way of spelling out the doctrine.  So, perhaps John would allow that it is not the doctrine of original sin per se that is in his view problematic, but only the Catholic understanding of the doctrine.  Still, at least one of the aspects of the doctrine that John apparently objects to -- the claim that there was an original pair of human beings through whom sin entered the world -- is also traditionally taught by Eastern Orthodoxy.  And whatever one says about Eastern Orthodox and other non-Catholic approaches to original sin, the point remains that if John were right, Catholicism would be in trouble. 

But John is not right, and the third thing that puzzles me about his article is why he seems to think the evidence cited by Coyne is obviously incompatible with the doctrine of original sin.  After all, the question of human origins is not a matter to which biological considerations alone are relevant.  Metaphysical considerations are at least as important -- indeed, they are more important, as we shall see -- and when they are factored in it can easily be shown that there is no incompatibility between the doctrine of original sin and modern biology.  Nor is the biological evidence something that the Church must now scramble to “adapt” herself to in order to salvage the doctrine.  In fact the subject is one that was addressed long ago, by (among other theologians) Neo-Scholastic thinkers writing in the era of Pope Pius XII’s Humani Generis, who tended to approach the issue from a broadly Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) point of view.  (Unlike Coyne, John has knowledge of Scholastic and A-T philosophy and theology, so it is surprising that he does not consider the possibility that the answers to the questions he raises might be found in these writers.)

There are two main issues that have come up in the discussion sparked by John’s article.  First, is modern biology consistent with the claim that the human race began with a single pair à la the biblical story of Adam and Eve?  Second, is modern biology consistent with the claim that this pair transmitted the stain of original sin to their descendents via propagation rather than mere imitation?  The answer to both questions is “Yes.”  In this post I will show why this is so in the case of the first question and in a follow-up post I will address the second.  What I have to say in this post will overlap to some extent with what Mike Flynn has said in his own excellent reply to John, and with what Kenneth W. Kemp says in his important recent American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly article “Science, Theology, and Monogenesis” (see ACPQ Vol. 85, No. 2 -- the same issue in which my article “Existential Inertia and the Five Ways” appears).  But I will approach things in a somewhat different way than either Mike or Kenneth Kemp do.  

What is man?

We can begin by asking what a human being is.   The traditional A-T answer is, of course, that a human being is a rational animal.  We are animals insofar as we have the capacities typical of animality in general -- nutrition, growth, reproduction, sensation, appetite, and locomotion.  These are all purely material capacities, all requiring bodily organs for their exercise.  We are rational insofar as we possess intellect and will.  These are immaterial capacities, and do not directly depend on any bodily organ, although they do depend on such organs indirectly.  I have explained the how and why in several places -- most fully in chapter 4 of Aquinas -- and have addressed some of the relevant issues in earlier blog posts, such as this one.  I will summarize only the most relevant points here.

What intellect involves, for the A-T tradition, is the ability to grasp abstract concepts (such as the concept man or the concept being mortal), to put them together into complete thoughts (such as the thought that all men are mortal), and to reason from one thought to another in accordance with the laws of logic (as when we infer from All men are mortal and Socrates is a man to Socrates is mortal).  All of this differs in kind, and not just in degree, from the operations of sensation and imagination, which we share with non-human animals.  Concepts have a universality and determinateness that no sensation or mental image can have even in principle.  The concept triangularity, for example, has a universality that even the most general mental image of a triangle cannot have, and an unambiguous or determinate content that the auditory or visual image of the English word “triangle” (whose meaning is entirely conventional) cannot have.  Indeed, concepts have a universality and determinacy that nothing material can have.  So while the A-T tradition holds, in common with materialism and against some forms of dualism, that sensation and imagination have a material basis, it also holds that intellectual activity -- grasping concepts, putting them together into judgments, and reasoning from one judgment to another -- is necessarily immaterial.  (Again, I’m not defending these claims here but just summarizing -- I’ve defended them elsewhere.)

All the same, for A-T the intellect does depend on matter in an indirect way.  For one thing, though the concepts we grasp are immaterial, we must abstract them from the mental images that derive ultimately from sensation, and imagination and sensation are material.  For another thing, even when we grasp an abstract concept, we always do so in conjunction with mental imagery (which is why the philosophically unsophisticated often confuse concepts with mental images).  For instance, the concept triangularity is not identical with either the word “triangle” (since people who have never heard this English word still have the concept of triangularity) or with any particular mental image of a triangle (since any such image will have features -- a certain color, say, or being scalene -- that do not apply to all triangles in the way that the concept does).  Still, we cannot entertain the concept of triangularity without at the same time forming a mental image of some sort or other, whether a visual image of some particular triangle, a visual or auditory image of the word “triangle” or of the corresponding word in some other language, or what have you.  The judgment that snow is white is not identical with a visual or auditory image of the English sentence “Snow is white,” since a German speaker (say) could make exactly the same judgment even though he would express it instead with the sentence “Schnee ist weiss.”  Still, we cannot form that judgment without at the same time forming some image or other (e.g. a visual or auditory image of “Snow is white,” or of “Schnee ist weiss,” or of some parallel sentence of some other language).  And so forth.  And this entails that any rational animal must have a material nature that is complex enough to support sensory and imaginative activity of the level of sophistication required to subserve immaterial intellectual activity.   Such sensory and imaginative activity cannot be a sufficient condition for intellectual activity, but it is a necessary condition.

Now for A-T, all material things are composites of form and matter, and “soul” is a technical term for the form of a living thing, specifically.  The soul is that which organizes a living thing’s matter in such a way that it is capable of the operations distinctive of living things.  Since the activities of living things other than human beings are entirely dependent on matter, their souls are themselves dependent on matter, and A-T allows that such souls may therefore have material origins.  But the human soul is different, precisely because it is that which makes us capable not only of material activities like digestion and sensation, but also of immaterial activities like thinking.  Hence it operates, at least in part, apart from matter.  Indeed, unlike the forms of other material things it is a subsistent form, capable of carrying on in existence beyond the death of the body of which it is the form, as a kind of incomplete substance.  For this reason, for A-T the human soul cannot in principle have a material origin.  In fact, it has to be directly created by God whenever a new human being comes into existence.  

On the one hand, then, A-T philosophers and theologians have been open to the possibility of evolutionary explanations of various biological phenomena, including the human body.  It might be that sensory and imaginative capacities of a level of complexity necessary to subserve intellectual activity arose gradually via evolutionary processes.  On the other hand, there are metaphysical constraints on evolutionary explanations, just as there are on all forms of empirical inquiry.  I have discussed some of these constraints in an earlier post, and for a more detailed treatment interested readers might look at an older Scholastic work like Henry Koren’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animate Nature, or the biology-related material in David Oderberg’s recent book Real Essentialism.  Most relevant to the issue at hand, for A-T there can in principle be no evolutionary explanation of the human soul precisely because the human soul can have no material cause of any sort.  We know this because (so A-T holds) we know on independent grounds that the distinctive capacities of the human soul (intellect and will) cannot be material.

A useful analogy is provided by the famous “weasel” example from Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker (which I here adapt for my own purposes rather than his – so please spare me any complaints that I have misinterpreted him).  Dawkins describes a computer program which begins with a random sequence of 28 letters and “breeds” successive copies of the sequence, in such a way that via random errors or “mutations” in the sequence together with cumulative selection, the sentence “Methinks it is like a weasel” is eventually generated.  Now whether this is as useful an analogy to biological evolution as Dawkins thinks it is can be debated, but that is not to the present point.  The point is rather this.  Suppose we allow that a string of marks that looks like “Methinks it is like a weasel” could arise in nature via random mutation and natural selection.  Indeed, suppose we even allowed for the sake of argument that such a string could result only via random mutation and natural selection.  Would it follow that the English sentence “Methinks it is like a weasel” has, in that case, a completely naturalistic evolutionary explanation?  

No, that wouldn’t follow at all.  For an English sentence is not merely a string of marks, even if it is partly that (at least when written).  It also has a semantic content, and an evolutionary process of the sort described would no more generate that content by itself than my spilling ink on the ground in a way that left a set of shapes that looked vaguely like the word “cat” would by itself generate the actual word “cat,” semantic content and all.  The existence of the marks – whether the marks making up the word “cat” or those making up the sentence “Methinks it is like a weasel” -- is a necessary condition for the existence of the (written) word or sentence, but it is not a sufficient condition.  So, to explain the origin of a sequence of marks is simply not by itself to explain the origin of a certain English sentence.

In the same way, to explain how sensation and mental imagery might have developed via natural selection is simply not by itself to explain the origin of human thought, even if it is part of the story and even if it were allowed that the relevant material structures and processes could not have come about in any other way.  The same could be said of evolutionary explanations of whatever purported symbolic processing mechanisms cognitive scientists might claim to uncover.  Such mechanisms are really all sub-conceptual and not truly “cognitive” at all; for they are all, in effect, at the level of what A-T philosophers mean when they speak of sensation and imagination, insofar as computational symbols are of themselves no more universal or determinate in their content than mental images or words are.  These mechanisms may track our intellectual operations in a rough way, but they can never in principle either exhaust those operations or even exactly track them, since there is always some slack between conceptual content on the one hand and material symbols on the other.  (Again, these are themes I have explored at greater length elsewhere, including in this post and many other previous posts.)

To make a human being, then, it is not enough to make something having all the sub-conceptual or sub-intellectual capacities of the human body.  An animal having all those capacities may well look like a human being, and indeed have all the genetic and phenotypic attributes of a human being short of those phenotypic traits indicative of intellectual activity, such as language.  Perhaps it would look and act like the apparently sub-rational “humans” in the original Planet of the Apes movie.  But it would not be a human being in the sense in which A-T philosophers and Catholic theology understand “human being.”  For our nature is simply not exhausted by whatever traits flow from our genetic endowment.  “Human being” as used in A-T philosophy and Catholic theology is a metaphysical concept, and does not correspond exactly to (even if it overlaps with) the modern biological concept homo sapiens sapiens.  (In fact, some A-T philosophers would hold that the specific genetic and phenotypic traits typical of homo sapiens sapiens are not even essential to human beings considered as a metaphysical category: Anything that was both animal and rational would arguably be “human” in the relevant sense, even if it had a body plan radically different from ours.  See Oderberg’s Real Essentialism for a useful discussion.)

The origin of man

What has been said so far is along the lines of the sort of views you’ll find in Scholastic writers of the period of Pope Pius XII’s Humani Generis, and it reflects the pope’s teaching in that encyclical that:

 [T]he Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.  

However, the pope goes on to say:

When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty.  For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents.  Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

This is the passage John highlights as problematic.  Perhaps he thinks that what the pope is saying is that enquiry into an evolutionary explanation of human origins is permissible only to the extent that it might confirm, or at least be compatible with, the claim that evolution somehow generated exactly two human beings, one male and one female, from pre-human ancestors.  And since such a claim has been falsified (so John’s argument continues), Pius’s concession can be seen to have been too modest.  Given that the earliest human population could not have numbered less than 10,000 or so, a much more radical rethinking of human origins is now necessary.

But in fact no such rethinking is necessary, and Pius XII was making no such claim.  Notice that what the pope opens the door to is the possibility in principle of an evolutionary explanation of the human body, specifically, not of human beings full stop.  Nor does the pope say that exactly two such bodies will have to have been generated by evolution for an evolutionary explanation to be reconcilable with Catholic doctrine.  He also insists that the human soul can only have come from God.  

The implications of all of this should be obvious.  There is nothing at all contrary to what Pius says in Humani Generis in the view that 10,000 (or for that matter 10,000,000) creatures genetically and physiologically like us arose via purely evolutionary processes.  For such creatures -- even if there had been only two of them -- would not be “human” in the metaphysical sense in the first place.  They would be human in the metaphysical sense (and thus in the theologically relevant sense) only if the matter that made up their bodies were informed by a human soul -- that is, by a subsistent form imparting intellectual and volitional powers as well as the lower animal powers that a Planet of the Apes-style “human” would have.  And only direct divine action can make that happen, just as (for A-T) direct divine action has to make it happen whenever one of us contemporary human beings comes into existence.

Supposing, then, that the smallest human-like population of animals evolution could have initially produced numbered around 10,000, we have a scenario that is fully compatible with Catholic doctrine if we suppose that only two of these creatures had human souls infused into them by God at their conception, and that He infused further human souls only into those creatures who were descended from this initial pair.  And there is no evidence against this supposition.

This scenario raises all sorts of interesting questions, such as whether any of these early humans (in the metaphysical sense of having a human soul) mated with some of the creatures who were (genetically and, in part, phenotypically) only human-like.  (If any of the latter looked like Linda Harrison in Planet of the Apes, the temptation certainly would have been there.)  Mike Flynn and Kenneth Kemp have some things to say about this, but it does not affect the point at issue here, which is that there is nothing in the biological evidence that conflicts with the doctrine that the human race began with a single pair -- when that doctrine is rightly understood, in terms of the metaphysical conception of “human being” described above.

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