My master’s thesis at Durham University (2015) was on a science and religion topic. The broad goals of the field of science and religion are to find meaningful and productive resonances between them. I moved from St Chad’s College to St John’s at Durham University to make it easier to consult with my supervisor, who was the Principal of St John’s at the time, Professor David Wilkinson. He earned two doctorates, one in theoretical astrophysics and the other in systematic theology. He was therefore the ideal person to be supervised by for a science and religion thesis.

I was interested in theological accounts of the human person and decided, for this thesis, to focus on the concept of sin. I wanted to find resonances between the concept of sin and modern social scientific accounts of human behaviour encapsulated by the evolutionary social sciences, beginning with the pioneering work of Edward O. Wilson. My proximate reasons for doing so are in the introduction below. My long-term intentions were to expand on this explorative synthesis between theological and scientific accounts of the human person, something I continued to do when I moved to the University of Oxford to focus on science and religion with their MSt programme at their Faculty of Divinity.

Sin and the Evolutionary Social Sciences: Proposing a Mutually Constructive Relationship

Introduction

Since the scientific revolution in Europe in the 16th century, the increasing success of the scientific method in understanding the natural world opened avenues for stimulating interaction with Christian thought, Christianity being the dominant religion of the West at the time. The Galileo affair and Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection loom in the historical consciousness as high-profile episodes of conflict between science and religion concerning legitimate sources of knowledge about the natural world. Careful historical investigation, however, reveals a more nuanced picture. [1] For example, the historian Peter Harrison has pointed out that many scientists, including Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and Samuel Clarke, saw their faith as providing legitimate ground and motivation to discover the work of creation through observation and experiment. [2] He also proposed that there were certain values embedded in 17th century Protestantism that led to the persistence of the scientific enterprise in certain parts of Europe, which as a result, had no comparable developmental precedent elsewhere in the world. [3] By the 20th century, Einstein’s theories of relativity, the discoveries of quantum mechanics, and the modern evolutionary synthesis were underway. This sustained and broadened the science and religion conversation which then entered the public consciousness with globalisation and advancements in communications technology. Unfortunately, as a result, narratives of conflict were, and continue to be inflated disproportionately by the media, which, driven by market forces, capitalises on controversy. An “unholy alliance” between aggressive atheists and Christian fundamentalists, the former promoting ‘a particular philosophical commitment [i.e., metaphysical naturalism] as if it were a scientific conclusion’ and the latter promoting ‘a prescientific cosmology as if it were an essential part of faith’, enjoy extensive representation in the media. [4] By contrast, many do not see the progress of science and the claims of religion in conflict. Here, Ian Barbour’s four-fold typology of the relationship between science and religion: conflict, independence, dialogue, and interaction, may be helpful as a heuristic tool. Within this typology, scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Francisco Ayala fall under the independence model because they both, in varying degrees of nuance, hold that science and religion cover non-overlapping regions of knowledge and authority. [5]

Many who fall under the dialogue and interaction model have made seminal contributions. Contemporary examples within the areas related to evolutionary biology include the formulation of paradigms that offer to better understand the Christian doctrine of creation with the aid of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. Efforts also continue to be made to let the neurosciences and biblical anthropology dialogue with each other concerning free will and mind-brain dualism. [6] However, comparatively little work has been done on how the flourishing evolutionary social sciences and Christian theological anthropology concerning human nature, behaviour, and destiny may relate to and support each other. This dissertation explores the relationship between the broad theological concept of sin within Christian anthropology and the evolutionary social sciences around the ideological framework of Edward Wilson, the American naturalist who founded sociobiology. Wilson is firmly committed to consilience, a metaphysical conviction about the unity of knowledge, and wishes to apply its progressive insights to solve the problems afflicting the biosphere, including humankind’s role and future in it. He has criticised the Southern Baptist flavour of Christianity imposed on him in his childhood whose beliefs he considered backward and tribalistic. Consequently, his founding the discipline of human sociobiology in the 1970s and his continued support for the disciplines that evolved from it, collectively known as the evolutionary social sciences (ESS), [7] is motivated by his desire to reject an arbitrary form of transcendentalist moral reasoning that he considers to be maladaptive and deleterious, and, in its place, to ground moral reasoning in the empirical sciences. [8] This dissertation, in continuity with positive dialogue and interaction, seeks to show, despite Wilson’s protests, that his commitment to consilience commits the naturalistic fallacy. Moreover, there is no necessary incompatibility between empirical and transcendental moral reasoning with specific reference to Christian theology. Furthermore, meaningful similarities can be found between what the broad concept of sin and the ESS have to say about the human person, two of which, free will and altruism, will be examined. Consequently, it will show how in the above instances, science can help religion by furnishing its theological thinking with empirical paradigms, and religion can help science by offering an objective basis for making teleological statements as well as ethical direction for the use of science to solve human problems.

Endnotes

1. See Peter Harrison, ‘The religious origins of modern science’, The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, 6 July 2015.
2. See Harrison, ‘The religious origins of modern science’.
3. See Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism and the rise of natural science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 4-5; see also Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Joseph Needham, Science in Traditional China (Harvard University Press, 1981)
4. Ian Barbour, When Science meets Religion (London: SPCK, 2000), p. 36.
5. Gould conceived science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria”; see also Francisco Ayala, Darwin and Intelligent Design (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), p. x.
6. See, for example, Joel Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life (Michigan: Baker Academic, 2008)
7. See E. A. Smith, M. Borgerhoff Mulder, and K. Hill, ‘Controversies in the evolutionary social sciences: a guide for the perplexed’, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 16 3 (2001), for the first use of the term.
8. Following the MHRA guidelines, all the quotations, paraphrases, and sources of information from a single text will get one citation with the page references listed in order in each paragraph from this footnote onward; Ullica Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 39, 365, 38; Edward Wilson, Consilience (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), pp. 6, 260.