A Christian Reflection on Darwinian Morality
Introduction:
Here, I want to explain the perspective of atheist and evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, who defends a Darwinian understanding of the origins of human morality. He draws some valid parallels between animals and humans but fails to recognize how humans can make distinct moral choices that animals cannot. As we Christians strive to model Christ’s morality, humans can express a morality that animals cannot. Humans are not reducible to animals, based on the Biblical standpoint and moral context that I wish to promote here.
We are getting close to 20 years since Richard Dawkins wrote his book The God Delusion, where he expresses the notion that our belief in a personal God, especially the one of the Bible, is characterizable as a delusion. The roots of morality and why we are good are discussed in chapter 6, starting on page 214.
He classifies many religious people as the kind who are unable to envision goodness without religion and are intensely negative towards those not sharing their faith. He mentions about the letters he receives from critics of his books, the worst of them being religious critics.
He quotes emails from religious people that clearly express the kind of gratuitous abuse, death threats, and obscenities that many of us have either directly witnessed during religious debates or have heard through the grapevine and the media. As the religious critic launches their abuse, they are praising Jesus and condemning “Satan-worshiping scum.”
That might be the most confusing part of all! Such hostility from the representatives of the essence of love (i.e., Christ Himself) is the epitome of blending good with evil, and for many of us, that has been traumatizing to an extent I fear many might not be able to forget or recover from! I see this as a reflection of religious trauma syndrome stemming from a toxic, controlling environment that damages someone’s self-esteem, sense of self-worth, self-identity, and perception of the world.
Dawkins is bewildered as to how people, who claim to be representatives of an all-loving God, could have violent disputes over different perceptions of God. When I was an atheist, I was always offended by a Christian’s brouhaha over doctrinal differences that seem to involve content that is not hugely consequential in the grand scheme of things.
We should face the facts: it is excruciating to lose friends and split churches over whether God is ontologically three-in-one or one-in-three, or whether the wine and bread transmute into literal blood and flesh, or whether God is a Calvinist or an Arminian in His plan for our salvation. Dare I even say that those things are not worth fighting about. In that context, it totally makes sense why Peter encourages all believers in 1 Peter 3:8 to “have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind.”
As Proverbs 6:16-19 makes it clear, the Lord despises discord among us. I think the emotional pain from the discord amongst us Christians, not only impacts us, but also the outsiders watching us. Think of any non-Christian who has felt the pain of watching their Christian loved one get ensnared in debilitating doctrinal debates. Any unwanted social consequence from this matter clearly demonstrates the truth and importance of those passages.
As Dawkins rightfully remarks:
“Why, I can’t help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.” (pg. 244)
I hope that I have vividly contextualized the place in which I think our society has arrived since Dawkins’ writing of the God Delusion in 2006. If you have any experience with repeated, long-winded internet debates on religious topics, you might know how it feels to be confused, gaslighted, manipulated, maligned, and tarnished publicly in a way that can leave you questioning everything and keeping you awake at night. I have suffered with this, after debating about these things on the internet since 2010.
The Nitty-Gritty Details of the Darwinian Explanation
If you typically feel that your selflessness outweighs your selfishness and you never dwell on your genes influencing your decisions, it may feel counterintuitive to you to consider a Darwinian explanation for our human goodness. However, natural selection seems like a brilliant explanation on the development of our ravenous, fearful, and sexual behaviors that help us to continue living and carrying our heredity units into the next generation. The blind mechanisms of natural selection can make intuitive sense to anyone who feels that their poverty, trauma, and romance debacles are pointless tragedies in a cold, meaningless, and indifferent 21st Century universe.
With all due respect to Dawkins who may have good intentions for educating us on the ills of religious zealotry and ignorance, Dawkins’ ideas on altruism and genetic preservation do not satisfy my inquiries about humans who have a haunting history of ruthlessness.
Off the top of my head, some eye-popping examples are psychotic men and women killing their kin, especially randomly in the middle of the night. Other examples are parents neglecting their children to feed an addiction, nations using technological expertise to build weapons of mass destruction that wipe out large populations and leave human collateral damage in their wake or raising up 20th Century Communist leaders to kill millions of religious people in the name of anti-superstition, materialism, and the ‘greater good.’
If it all boiled down to altruism and the continuation of heredity units, somehow, we humans would thwart so many human-caused, life-ending catastrophes and never miss a beat. The random, psychotic killing of kin would be at the top of the list of things to thwart. Atheism and secular humanism would have easily foreseen and forestalled the various 20th Century catastrophes done in their name, unless they were trying to preserve their genes at the expense of eliminating the genes of religious people. But I suspect that most atheists and secular humanists today will denounce the immorality of their predecessors and wish not to repeat that history again.
They must realize that exterminating religious people is not in their best interest, and I therefore do not want to make accusatory and rash assumptions about the contents of atheistic thoughts today that I cannot prove. But I still feel the need to mention that something does not add up, here.
Perhaps atheists today are haunted by the reputation of 20th Century atheistic Communism. And our trivial religious tussles of today remind them of a past they wish to keep unrepeated.
So, if genetic preservation is their unconscious basis for moral relief amongst our communities, they believe it is better to strategize with religious people on how we all can find common ground and coexistence amongst diverse peoples. However, that raises troubling questions about how that could even be possible, since we see so many irreconcilable differences among people all over the ideological spectrum.
When debaters realize that irreconcilability, they express their most genuine ill-conceived notions about their outgroups. For instance, think of someone who realizes that the world’s various religions and faiths cannot all equally lead to the one and ultimate God, but a return to the belief that Jesus is the one and only way still feels too barbaric and unenlightened. So then, they resort to assuming that anyone who still holds onto a Jesus-is-the-only-way type of theology is a barbaric, unenlightened, unsophisticated, unempathetic, cave-dwelling idiot.
Amongst all the appetites for destruction, how is mankind able to have any impulse to be unidentified donors to strangers who will never repay nor meet us? Think of someone of mediocre economic status in your locality, on whose doorstep you may want to lay an anonymous gift, or the devastated people in some faraway land who might receive your anonymous gifts as you live in a heavily populated, safe, industrialized, wealthy nation.
What is the nature and cause of this Good Samaritan impulse that appears inharmonious with the selfish gene? Dawkins asks this question on page 246, further stating that we have misconceptions about the ‘selfish gene’ and seeks to correct it for us.
Beneath the Surface
Among us humans is a competitive realm that does not exactly reach our conscious awareness. That is the realm of heredity units (our genes) competing against each other to selfishly pass through natural selection’s filter, and to leave their other contestants behind. On the surface, we feel selfless, benevolent, caring, loving, forgiving, and altruistic. But that is the feeling and image that emerges after the pool of vying genes reaches its verdict or conclusion on which genes should and should not continue into the next phase of existence. Selfishness does not characterize the organism, species, or ecosystem that “do not make exact copies of themselves.” Selfishness belongs to the gene among other “self-replicating entities” that is preexisting to the emergence of selfless organisms, species, and ecosystems. We find this on page 247.
Or should I say organisms, species, and ecosystems that have an appearance of selflessness?
I hope that you realize the obvious existence of feigned selflessness and false advertisements that can readily make themselves known to the naked eye in the activity of social interactions, economies, and institutions. Such a thing should be self-evident to you if you have ever experienced someone deceiving you into thinking they were selfless, when they were anything but that.
Haughty Eyes and a Lying Tongue
If God hates “haughty eyes and a lying tongue” it is quite self-evident that the authors of the Bible were aware of feigned selflessness, and therefore taught against it. An awareness of the need to express unfeigned selflessness should be derivable from the Bible’s teachings on looking to others’ interests above yours, loving your enemies, acting without selfish ambition or conceit, having unity of mind, sympathy, and humility, refusing to repay evil for evil, and backing up your faith with virtue.
On page 247, Dawkins states:
“The most obvious way in which genes ensure their own ‘selfish’ survival relative to other genes is by programming individual organisms to be selfish.”
Such a statement, to me, appears contradictory to earlier statements “that the unit of natural selection (i.e. the unit of self-interest) is not the selfish organism, nor the selfish group or selfish species or selfish ecosystem, but the selfish gene.”
Kin Altruism
But in a strange and paradoxical way, I guess the selfish gene’s goal is to have us act altruistically but without awareness of the gene’s selfishness. That is accomplished by normalizing kin altruism through strengthening a gene’s rate of occurrence in the gene pool as we cater to our kin who will then favor their future kin. Apparently, this is the unconscious causal force behind everything we do for our children and hope they will do for theirs.
In the name of propagation, various insects are genetically motivated to “care for, defend, share resources with, warn of danger, or otherwise show altruism towards close kin” for the same reasons that we humans try to preempt molestation and financial ruin for our children and try to educate them on the wiles and pitfalls of the world. That concludes what we find on page 247.
Reciprocal Altruism
Reciprocal altruism (‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’), is a theory communicated by the mathematics of game theory, tracing back to Robert Trivers, and is another cause for our morality, according to Dawkins on page 248. It depends on mutualism and symbiosis between members of various species instead of shared genes, thus perhaps explaining the foundation as to why humans engage in trade and barter. As flowers need pollination but cannot fly, they will pay a bee with the currency of nectar, which is equivalent to a hunter needing a spear, who pays a manufacturer with meat to make the spear.
All reality on the macroscopic level is transactional in a mutualistic and symbiotic way, from your individual household to your local town, to your surrounding towns, and beyond. It extends to the birds of the air and beasts of the field that have microorganisms colonizing for food within their guts that unwittingly benefit the animals, a phenomenon which also takes place in our human microbiomes. The transactions of reciprocal altruism take place in our universe because of the disproportionate arrangements between our needs and our powers to meet them.
The world of vampire bats seems to have transactions that make life not so smooth and free flowing without detriments. They use regurgitated blood as repayment for debts, and they know how to keep record of who is reliable for repaying and who will try to cheat.
Dawkins portrays the dog-eat-dog world that Christ tells us Christians to transcend, through the use of His holy goodness and wisdom.
On page 248, Dawkins states:
“Natural selection favors genes that predispose individuals, in relationships of asymmetric need and opportunity to give when they can, and to solicit giving when they can’t. It also favours tendencies to remember obligations, bear grudges, police exchange relationships and punish cheats who take, but don’t give when their turn comes.”
This forthrightly describes the inevitability of cheaters in a world that is beset by sin.
“For there will always be cheats, and stable solutions to the game-theoretic conundrums of reciprocal altruism always involve an element of punishment of cheats. Mathematical theory allows two broad classes of stable solution to ‘games’ of this kind. ‘Always be nasty’ is stable in that, if everybody else is doing it, a single nice individual cannot do better.” (page 249)
Humans try to follow a finite sequence of rigorous instructions to achieve stability among the chaos, and Dawkins tries to explain nature’s algorithmic strategy with a proverbial, down-to-earth rationale:
‘Start out being nice, and give others the benefit of the doubt. Then repay good deeds with good, but avenge bad deeds.’ (page 249)
This reminds me of the eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth philosophy that Christ upended in Matthew 5:38-39. Also, do not forget about what Romans 12:19 says about not avenging ourselves but instead leaving that to the wrath of God. Such moral precepts established by Christ, that I have witnessed some Christians accomplish through their choices and behaviors, are not captured by the algorithms of Darwinian natural selection as described by Richard Dawkins.
Continuing on page 249:
In a world where retaliators are outnumbered by the reciprocators, or the reciprocators are outnumbered by the retaliators, the majority will always win in setting the algorithm and tone to which everyone should comply. The outliers will not perform very well and may suffer as a result…so we expect. I think we can easily see this in a cruel world where a Christian is called to be like Christ by showing kindness to the individual whom everyone wants to punish. The Christian may face temptation to follow the crowd, and may feel the pangs of social rejection, but can still chart a better path for the group despite needing to swim against the tide.
Think of the story of Jesus who rescued the woman caught in adultery. Jesus was clearly outnumbered by a crowd and the religious leaders who wanted to execute the woman. Despite all of their clever tactics against Jesus and the woman, Jesus was still able to ward them off with a simple sentence: “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone.” See John 8:1-11
So, there you have it: kinship and reciprocation as two supporting structures of Darwinian altruism.
Dawkins goes on to talk about the reputation of generosity as another basis for morality. Babblers, a type of bird, will feed their inferiors as a way to demonstrate their supremacy. They will also demonstrate their supremacy by sitting on a high branch to act as a sentinel alarming the inferiors down below of any predators, a role which endangers the sentinel. Praise for this may be felt in the animal world, but I have repeatedly observed humans criticizing each other for having ulterior motives during their heroic acts, a criticism that I think is probably inspired by Jesus’ proclamation to not make a showy display of your righteousness. See Matthew 6:1.
Such Darwinian explanations for morality only describe the human depravity that can often disguise itself as morality. But we see the disguise for what it truly is once we compare it to what Scripture has called us to be as Christians. Though we can often witness Christians not living up to Christ’s morality, I have witnessed their success at demonstrating Christ’s unique, non-animalistic morality showing me that we do not have to be fully defined by Darwinian altruism.
Not Ultimately Defined By Darwinian Altruism
I think Dawkins only scratched the surface of the algorithms underlying our human morality and depravity, as he could not penetrate the core of who we are and what we are meant to be.
Alistair McGrath quotes English essayist William Hazlitt (1778-1830) saying, “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.”
I think Hazlitt alludes to our moral abstractions. In striving to understand what-is versus what-ought-to-be, we may gain understanding of a particular layer of moral abstraction but then later realize another unsolved layer. And in the midst of all our glory and progress, we can still end up making some kind of irrational mistake that could blow us away. We yearn for and pontificate about a future of “harmony, stability, and prosperity.” We often hope to achieve it through better technology, better healthcare, better charities, better public policies, less war, less discrimination, etc. We sense that something is deeply wrong with us, that there is a “vast gulf between what things are and what we feel they ought to be.”
But without the Bible, we cannot identify the core problem of a lost paradise portrayed in the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis. Without the Bible, we can only see the symptoms that play out in society’s ills.
The Story of Adam and Eve
Perhaps those ills manifest themselves most devilishly in the public offices where we all would like to manifest mankind’s highest ideals. Though benevolence is always the purported intention of the few in power, the temptation to drink from the cup of corruption is always present. The privileges of power have a dark side that tests the limits of natural human goodness, in such a way that we are left wondering if humans are honestly and naturally good or just pretentiously good for the sake of advertisement and solicitations for donations.
We vie for freedom but with ignorance to the costs, which I think can be seen in the story of Adam and Eve where God told the man “You can eat from any tree of the garden, except the tree-of-knowledge-of-good-and-evil.” See Genesis 2:15-17.
You could argue that Adam and Eve were not really free if there was one thing they could not do. Or you could realize that this freedom needed to be supported by accountability that had a cost if it was disregarded. You could also realize how this unveils mankind’s desire to always want more than we already have; to increase our privileges; to increase our control; to take whatever does not satisfy our presuppositions and treat it as a lie or superstition; to increase our provisions and wealth that would help us foist our nearsighted fantasies onto our neighbor and the outside world; to have our utopia and no one else’s; to remove all boundaries that appear arbitrary to us and lay down our own preconceived absolutes with no consideration of others’ suggestions; and to go where we should not, all in the name of curiosity, unhampered progress, and the ‘greater good.’ We label it curiosity as we always suspect that life and reality are hiding something from us. This helps to illuminate the old aphorism: ‘Hell is paved with good intentions.’
Mankind reveals his true nature when there is no surveillance from a higher authority and when he has his own privacy behind closed doors. Adam and Eve were living in paradise, with everything they could ever need or want, except for one thing. And after getting everything they wanted and needed, they showed their true nature. This is what men and women do. They hide their true intentions and motives when they have not been given what they want. Treaties, protocols, customs, social norms, and various rules all contribute to our personas. But eventually the mask comes off, and then your true self is known.
Perhaps that explains some forms of paranoia and heightened self-awareness. Why do we always get mad at someone who tells us something about ourselves, something we have ignored, after they have privately watched us enough times in the sanctity of our home or vulnerable place? Our kin and loved ones can see the skeletons of our closet that we think the world will never discover. We all feel a sense of fear and self-consciousness about how we would be judged if the whole world knew our deepest thoughts and secrets. Hence, such private meditations on the frailty of human nature should lead us to the realization that we all are sinners in need of a savior.
Although Darwinian natural selection has its lucid appeal and validity with regard to some aspects of life, it does not explain the multifaceted abstractions of thought in the human mind that is trying to navigate moral quandaries. I believe that the wisdom and spirit of Christ helps us to rise above the selfish gene and Darwinian altruism.
The author of this blog post is Matthew Sabatine, born and raised in the United States as a Christian but left the faith in his early twenties. He returned to the faith midway through 2022. Matthew has some experience in the mental health field as a direct support professional, caring for people with intellectual and development disabilities and people who were in long-term residency/rehabilitation programs. Though Matthew has no formal undergraduate or graduate degree, he has experience co-facilitating therapy groups under the supervision of licensed counselors. Matthew currently works in sales/marketing and blogs on his free time.
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