The fourth part of the master’s thesis on science and religion at Durham University (2015) is where I explore consonances between the doctrine of sin and the evolutionary social sciences. It’s the crux of the thesis. Stitching together two fields of inquiry typically yields interesting and useful insights. It may be career suicide for an academic, but since a strict academic career was not the path for me, I chose to pursue less-trodden pathways between established roads.

Serious and sustained interdisciplinary inquiry into human nature, from any disciplines that are either evidence-based (i.e., science) and/or have huge stakes in reality (i.e., practiced religion), will always be important. This belief justifies academic inquiry into the relationship between science and religion, a burgeoning field recognised by certain university departments, such as the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford with its science and religion programme.

This is the reason, following my stint at Durham University, I applied for the MSt programme in science and religion at Oxford and was accepted on the condition of graduating with distinction at Durham. More on this in a subsequent post.

Proposing a Mutually Constructive Relationship

While Wilson argues that he and the long line of naturalistic moral thinkers he identifies with have not committed the naturalistic fallacy, it is hard to see how he satisfactorily justifies a movement from “is” to “ought” on purely naturalistic grounds. [105] He is confident that with the progress of knowledge on how moral sentiments have co-evolved by genes and environment, humankind will agree that their current ethical codes are derived from a maladaptive mishmash of ‘Paleolithic egalitarian and tribalistic instincts’, and will accept a new ethic based on said scientific knowledge. [106] In the words of William Austin, ‘the suggestion seems to be that we can rather easily do without security and ingroup identity if we have a stirring vision and the exaltation of discovery. I wonder about that’. [107] Given the history of politics up to this present day, one may well wonder if Wilson is being naïve. [108] If evolutionary psychology is right in its diagnosis that humans have the propensity to engage in self-deceived rationalizations of self-interest, it is unlikely that any significant fraction would agree to a normative code of ethical or political conduct since it would inevitably favour some over others. Furthermore, if moral norms are defined as mind-independent values, as they have usually been by moral philosophers, then it is a de facto refutation of Wilson’s claim that “is” can translate into “ought” on naturalism. The philosopher Sharon Street’s definitional precision may help to clarify Wilson’s position. She calls their view an anti-realist theory of value, whereby subjective valuing came first, and then ‘now that there are creatures like us with marvelously complicated systems of valuings up and running, it is quite possible to come to value something because one recognizes that it has a value independent of oneself – not in the realist’s sense, but in an antirealist’s more modest sense’. [109] While this has been enough to ground ethical conduct in a social contract, it cannot ground ethics in an objective (i.e., mind-independent) sense. It seems therefore that the consistent naturalist would have to agree that ethical norms are merely the subjective tastes that fit different rulers’ conception of progress. [110] Since Wilson himself concedes that consilience is a metaphysical claim that cannot be proven by science, an anti-realist ground for value is, by definition, inadequate. [111]

It also seems strange for Wilson to champion scientific materialism so strongly since he believes Deism is a probable interpretation of the astrophysical data. In other words, he does not commit the “scientistic” fallacy of arguing that the explanatory power of science entails the acceptance metaphysical naturalism and the rejection of the ultramundane. [112] It is clear then that his desire to derive “ought” from “is” in biology is not motivated by scientific materialism at all, but primarily from his fear of maladaptive religious dogma. [113] Consequently, while he reasons that those who reject scientific explanations of human behavior do so because they are unwitting victims of their once adaptive but illogical inclination to believe in gods and not in the cold rationality of science, he commits the logical fallacy argumentum ad consequentiam when he argues that the immutable tribalistic morality associated with religion ought not to be imposed on people merely because it would cause further harm to a biosphere already threatened with violent extremism, mass extinction, and irreversible climate change. [114] Furthermore, the choice between moral empiricism and transcendentalism with reference to Christian theology is a false dilemma. An illustrative syllogism from Holmes Rolston will help to elucidate this:

1. If E (evolved), then not T (transcendent).
2. E.
3. Therefore not T. [115]

The syllogism is valid, but it is unclear why the first premise is self-evidently true. If Christian theology affords the possibility that God used the evolutionary process to nurture the kinds of moral norms that He wished for His creation to develop and embrace in changing ecological circumstances, then there is no compelling reason to conceive the relation between E and T as “either/or”. [116] Wilson has stated that once moral philosophers have imbibed the lessons of biology, ethics can be safely returned to them, instigating Austin’s apt rejoinder that ‘there is no comparable suggestion that religion should be returned to the hands of the theologians in due course. Theology is to be discredited by evolutionary explanations; ethics is not. Why the difference?’. [117] A brief look at the Christian scriptures bears out the legitimacy of this enterprise.

Some Christian thinkers have pointed out that, in contradistinction to Wilson and the forms of fundamentalist dogma that he associates with Christian theology in general, the scriptures testify that right moral action and attitude before God is not a static thing, but is always evolving in conversation with the contexts that His people find themselves. For example, Williams has pointed out that in the Second Temple writings, the roughly contemporaneous scrolls of Ruth and Ezra-Nehemiah, later relegated to the כתובים, present two different approaches to Jewish relations with larger Persian culture concerning intermarriage. In response to a dominant culture, a religious and ethnic minority can choose to adopt an “isolationist” position, enclosed in the stipulations of Ezra-Nehemiah (i.e., outbreed the competition), or an “accomodationist” one (i.e., create social bonds with the dominant culture), alluded to in Ruth. [118] Similarly, in the New Testament, Mike Higton has shown how moral decision-making tends to be cast as a process of thinking mediated by the εúανγγελιον. [119] John Bowker has also pointed out that Jesus’ summary of the Decalogue and the whole collection of Hebrew scriptures that he was familiar with, collectively referred to in the gospels as ò νóµος καì οì προφyται, as the love of God and neighbor, is a context-independent command which requires differential application in different contexts. One example would be the ‘visionary application’ at the Jerusalem consultation concerning Gentile religious practices recorded in Acts 15. [120]

David Lahti has also called Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount an ‘adaptive adjustment to a new social environment’ consistent with the ‘Darwinian account of the evolution and biological function of morality’. He notes that there was a shift in context from the Israelites being a self-identified ethnically homogenous group repeatedly threatened by foreign powers from the 8th century BCE to one that has spread geographically across a vast region with increasing ethnic diversity and widely adopted Hellenistic cultural practices by the first century CE, such that ‘in biological terms, attitudes and behaviors adaptive in an earlier era were becoming less effective in furthering their interests’. Isolationist policies would no longer be adaptive in this socially fluid and multi-ethnic society. Consequently, he writes that ‘the in-group, delineated primarily on the basis of [ethnic] kin-ship, is recast in the Sermon on the Mount on the basis of shared values’. [121] He points out that there is a repeated emphasis on these new stipulations superseding and fulfilling the old תורה, with the phrasal form

Pκοúσατε oτι ερρεθη τοǐς áρχαíοις· […] ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν

repeated several times indicating this as well. [122] He also argues that ‘human propensities that evolved in a nepotistic social environment may lead to problems with aggression and dominance in a society with greater anonymity, mobility, and diversity. […] Accordingly, nearly every moral prescription in the Sermon fosters suppression of competition either directly or indirectly’. Furthermore, in line with a shift from an isolationist to an accommodationist evolutionary strategy, Jesus’ call for a universal proselytizing attitude would enlarge and benefit the in-group indefinitely. Lahti concludes that

a Christian interpretation of this finding is that Jesus’ life and teachings existed at a time when they would have maximal societal impact. This is consistent with the conventional theological position that God accommodates himself to human limitations and particular states of development. [123]

It seems therefore that, contra Wilson, there is no necessary incompatibility between empirical moral thinking informed by evolution and Christian moral thinking. Furthermore, there is much in common between what the ESS and sin propose about human nature. Two of which, free will and altruism, will be explored presently.

Concerning the accusations of biological determinism and reductionism leveled at sociobiology from left leaning academics in the “sociobiology wars” and again by postmodern thinkers in the “science wars” decades later, one may recall that they were unfounded. In agreement with Wilson, none of the ESS univocally hold to a crude biological determinism. While the focus on adaptationism in the early years of this broad research project may have relegated other interesting possibilities for the development of human behavior or cognitive function to the background, many researchers have been clear that their adoption of methodological adaptationism, as opposed to empirical adaptationism, was merely because it was the most efficient heuristic tool available at the time given the discovery and explanatory power of MCTH from the early 20th century. [124] However, in the 1980s and 90s, there was an increasing discovery of similar regulatory genes that governed the development of almost all metazoa, spawning the field of evolutionary developmental biology, with its relevant focus on how genes develop during the course of life, and how those changes – epigenetic tags – are inherited. [125] This has been the cornerstone of Wilson and Lumsden’s flavour of gene-culture co-evolution. [126] The other co-evolutionary approaches which give significant weight to cultural processes, [127] also deny any form of biological determinism while retaining the primary proposition in all of the ESS that human behaviours and psychological mechanisms have evolutionary histories that constrain and direct their present and future trajectories.

While broad Christian theology has affirmed free will in some form, especially when it is causally connected to moral culpability, it has also affirmed that sin has binding effects on human beings, which, with the aid of science, can be described as caused by both biological and cultural factors. For example, it was noted in the previous section that sin is accorded an active and enslaving power by Paul, seen especially in Romans 5-7 wherever αµαρτια is not the subject of a conjugation of εíµι. [128] Green also writes that in I Peter, sin is depicted as a sculptor. However

this perspective does not spell the loss of freedom to choose, but it does suggest the degree to which choices are circumscribed already by communities of formation, even formation along evil lines. For this reason Peter urges his audience no longer to be “shaped by the desires that marked your former time of ignorance” (1:14) and claims for them that “you were liberated from the emptiness of your inherited way of life” (1:18).

However, he also points out that both the scriptures and the neurosciences afford the possibility for change and ‘reformation of our selves – along these biblical-theological lines’. [129] Echoing this line of thought, Gregory Peterson has written that while theology affirms moral culpability, nevertheless ‘all too often we find ourselves constrained by both biology and culture, unwilling and sometimes simply unable to do the good’. [130] Philip Clayton has also connected the neuroscientific notion that habits can shape future behaviours with the way sin is understood. [131] Likewise, McFadyen has shown how the pathological and jingoistic distortions of healthy ecological relations in the effects of child abuse and the Holocaust cohere with the theological picture of original sin as corporate, relational, and transgenerational. [132]

Some theologians have argued that the bleak picture of altruism afforded by evolution is incompatible with that which is espoused and commanded in the New Testament, since kin selection, inclusive fitness, and reciprocal altruism presupposed in the ESS all paint a picture of altruism as an action or disposition that reduces the agent’s fitness in the short term but only with an expectation of potential long term benefit. [133] Some evolutionary psychologists have gone further and made a distinction between biological altruism defined above, and psychological altruism, in which the agent genuinely believes that her actions are entirely other-benefiting. They posit that this self-deception is an evolutionary strategy that effectively convinces others that one has genuinely altruistic intentions and would therefore yield the rewards of a good reputation and its accompanying benefits. [134] While this rather cynical theory has been disputed by some, it is important to note that altruism presented in the New Testament and mature Christian theology is not self-denying either but is ultimately self-fulfilling. [135] Philip Rolnick points out that from ‘Jesus’ command to love the neighbor as oneself, we can infer that it is God’s will that the self flourish and be fulfilled with the deepest sort of happiness’. He rightly mentions that

rather than removing the self, or destroying it, these Christian views teach eternal self survival and enjoyment, and they demand that this survival be attended to, for the self and for others. By absurd contrast, imagine a universe where no self sought its own good. Not only biologically, but also spiritually, such a universe is simply incoherent. [136]

Furthermore, Lahti shows that parts of the Sermon on the Mount concerning cheats and cheater detection in Matthew 5.16-20 and 7.15-23 cohere with the evolutionary axiom ‘that giving greater priority to critical awareness of the actions and attitudes of others would be adaptive’. [137] Accordingly, a completely self-dissolving construal of altruism finds no traction in either evolutionary science or Christian theology and practice. These similarities open up the possibility of exploring how sin within Christian anthropology and the ESS within the framework of Wilson’s consilience can benefit each other.

The convergence of an understanding of sin as at heart associated with relationships by contemporary thinkers in all the great Christian traditions, and which is rooted in the assumptions of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, finds much in common with the relational understanding of human nature and behavior uncovered by the ESS and biology in general. [138] If both these approaches to understanding human nature and behaviour profess to have a corresponding basis in testable reality, then there is little reason not to allow them to dialogue with and refine each other. [139]

In the case of theology, science can help align its understanding of sin along more empirical lines. Patricia Williams has argued that ‘science says the claim liberal theology has retained from literalism, that we are alienated and exiled, is false. Humanity evolved here on Earth. This is our native habitation’. [140] Consequently, a complete lack of personal moral volition and culpability for sin, present in some liberal theologies, is inconsistent with the picture of social organization and responsibility drawn by the ESS wherein group fitness has required the necessity for individual cooperation. Conversely, the ESS also reject a disproportionate focus on individual guilt and shame upon the failure to adhere to arbitrary commands cherry-picked from the Bible and enforced by Charismatic church authorities for their ends. [141] This is because the ESS agree with the notion that sin, or maladaptive behaviour, is caused by and also results in an unhealthy ecology of broken relationships, be they interpersonal, economic, intergenerational, or ecological. In the words of Thomas Jay Oord, ‘the essential relatedness of all existing beings implies no individual is wholly independent or isolated’. [142] Therefore, sin should not be understood primarily as the contravention of arbitrary and immutable law, [143] rightly castigated by Wilson in the second section of this dissertation, but as ‘the desire to have everything for oneself, the centering of everything on ourselves’, [144] precipitated by the curse of death. Sinning is never a personal matter, but is always something that is bound up in community in the way that it is inherited, the way it perpetuates, and the way it becomes a collective responsibility and guilt. [145]

This dialogue also calls for a rejection of moral dualism. It was considered a heresy in its various forms by the Church Fathers in the patristic age and continues to rear its head in contemporary fundamentalism when it conceives of a transcendental morality as fundamentally self-denying (but in practice only enforced on the lower status members of the community), and, like Wilson, denies a mutually enriching relationship between evolved and transcendent sources of morality. Jeff Astley has pointed out that humanity’s evolved solidarity with animals and the rest of creation means that ‘we are never wholly self-made human beings in the economy of morality. Both our genes and our environment […] contribute to what we are and do’. [146] This supposition has led Philip Clayton and Jeffrey Schloss to also reject ‘what amounts to the ancient error of Gnosticism, and affirm the notion that human moral understanding must take account of human biological embodiment’. They go on to write that ‘religious indifference to the very real constraints of biological embodiment in the name of moral transcendence is an intellectual presumption that subverts – rather than advances – love and genuine spirituality’. [147] The logical extension of this enrichment is the fact that ‘the truth which, according to the Fourth Gospel, shall make us free is truth enfleshed; […] not truth sought elsewhere or somehow found inflight from the circumstances and predicaments and responsibilities and darkness of the world’. [148] Consequently, in the battle against sin, theology advocates an honest recognition and concession of the human contribution to the current ecological crisis and a push for change consistent with the scriptural call for stewardship in patient expectation of its transformation. [149] This rejection of a crude dualism which also dichotomizes the pure soul and the unstable body and its attendant focus on personal salvation, present in some theologies, including Luther’s, [150] also entails a critique of all forms of societal and structural sins present in the world. Finally, both Jesus of the Gospels and science agree that the appropriate human relation to creation is an adaptive and enriching accommodation, not a self-focused isolation obsessed with the circumscription of perceived purity. The ESS has revealed that this latter position is really a manifestation of humankind’s maladaptive evolutionary past, and therefore should not be confused with an expression of genuine Christ-centred faith.

One may also recall that Wilson understands consilience – which ‘gives ultimate purpose to intellect’ [151] – to be a metaphysical assertion unprovable by science. Consequently, since the subject matter of theology is everything, and the pertinent application of theological thinking in today’s world entails an honest interaction with science, then the goals of contemporary theology and consilience have much in common. Consequently, theology’s account of sin, which is in essence something that God does not wish to be, [152] can offer objective moral accountability and value judgement to Wilson’s project, which includes his love of nature, and affirm that it is an objectively worthwhile endeavour. However, unlike dualism, this synthetic approach strives to make a helpful distinction between moral ontology (i.e., the metaphysical ground for objective moral norms that justifies Wilson’s project) and moral epistemology (i.e., how humans come to know these moral norms). Wilson saw a world threatened with overpopulation, climate change, and tribalism still embedded in human nature, expressing itself in a variety of fundamentalisms and extremisms of secular and religious flavours in this age and no doubt in ages to come. [153] However, this dissertation has affirmed that ‘Christianity celebrates dependence, mutuality. Its emblem is neither lion nor eagle, but the sheep’, [154] and is primarily enabled by the fact that

relation with Christ is not an exclusive zero sum game. No one has less of it because another has more. And Christ is risen above us, on a level beyond rivalry. We are no threat to Christ for the divine position and Christ is no rival to us for the benefits we may seek. […] Christ is a paradoxical model. The desires that we catch from Jesus are wishes to be a servant, to love the lost. [155]

Therefore, Christian moral epistemology is also compatible with Wilson’s project. [156]

Theology can also provide the ESS with much-needed teleology. Some philosophers of science have pointed out the problem of grounding function and teleological statements in biology. Rosenberg has noted that the conventional definition of fitness, that is, ‘the claim that those organisms with higher rates of reproduction leave more offspring is an empty, unfalsifiable tautology bereft of explanatory power’. [157] He has argued that many other re-definitions, including Dennett’s where

x is fitter than y if and only if x’s traits enable it to solve the “design-problems” set by the environment more fully than y’s traits do

tend to be bereft of any definitional clarity or predictive power and consequently trivialize the theory of natural selection. [158] Justin Garson has made similar remarks about function statements in general and the problem of “backwards causation” they pose. He writes that statements like ‘the function of myelin sheathing is to promote the efficient conduction of action potentials in the nervous system […] appear to violate the principle that temporally posterior events cannot figure into causal explanations for temporally prior events’. In other words, ‘how can a kidney’s capacity to filter blood explain why the kidney is there, unless the future is assumed to have some causal influence over the present’. He writes that these kinds of statements are ubiquitous in biology. Philosophers of science have since offered a frighteningly diverse and linguistically precise array of models to explain the nature of function statements. Within etiological theories and representationalist theories within that lies the oft ignored theological account of function. [159] This dissertation has hoped to propose the viability of its revival in the specific case of human epigenetic behavioural progress, affirming that ‘a metaphysics of the future allows us to interpret the contingent occurrences in evolution as the in-breaking of a freshness whose depth and meaning, by definition cannot, be unfolded in terms of any past or present scheme of understanding’. [160]

What this eschatological trust in the future wherein ‘the world is directed and called towards its own perfection through this relationship with God’ also entails is a refusal to be ‘threatened by the on rush of the future: by the possibility of future crop failure or of too-consuming love or of God’s forgiveness or of a falling brick. Sin as despair is that we set out to guarantee ourselves against such threats’. [161] One way that scientists have tried to control the threat of the future is to advocate modifications of the human genome, known as germline editing, which, as opposed to somatic therapy, is irreversible, to potentially safeguard future generations against genetic problems. [162] Wilson has himself toyed with this idea to improve human behaviour, but concedes that that may be too risky an endeavour. While the theology presented here advocates a radical critique of societal assumptions and sinful structures that perpetuate sin and harm the biosphere in the process, it also cautions against any attempt to safeguard the future by taking drastic measures to control human behaviour, and, in the process, denying the processes of relation by which God calls His creation to participate in its renewal. In the words of McFadyen,

pathology is at its most dangerous when it invites us to think that we have such power over it, that we are uninfected by or freed from it in our independently derived capacity to forgive, be moral, love, etc. Sin can only responsibly be faced through grace and only responsibly brought to speech in a language, the predominant modality of which is confession conjoined with thanks and praise offering all back to God. [163]

Endnotes

• [105] See also William Austin, ‘Evolutionary Explanations of Religion and Morality’, in Evolution and Creation, pp. 254-5; R. J. Berry and T. A. Noble, ‘Epilogue: the sea of faith – Darwin didn’t drain it’, in Darwin, Creation and the Fall, p. 201; and Jeffrey Schloss, ‘Evolutionary Ethics and Christian Morality: Surveying the Issues’, in Evolution and Ethics, p. 14.
• [106] Edward Wilson and Charles Lumsden, Genes, Mind, and Culture(London: World Scientific, 2005), p. 360.
• [107] Austin, ‘Evolutionary Explanations’, p. 270.
• [108] The growing majority Republican support for Donald Trump for president despite his racist, misogynistic, war mongering and jingoistic remarks is one example, see Robert Leahy, ‘Why Trump Appeals to People: Anxiety, Fear and Emotional Appeal’, in Psychology Today.
• [109] Sharon Street, ‘A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value’, Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 127 1 (2006), pp.110, 156.
• [110] This would also include Nazism and Totalitarian Communism. See also the moral nihilism described as a consequence of naturalism in Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012)
• [111] Wilson, Consilience, pp. 274, 278, 9.
• [112] Science can tell us something about physical reality, therefore physical reality is all there is. Does the conclusion really follow from the premise?
• [113] See Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth, pp. 39-40.
• [114] Wilson, Consilience, pp. 263, 286.
• [115] Holmes Rolston, Genes, Genesis, and God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),p. 347.
• [116] Alvin Plantinga has argued that it is theism, rather than naturalism, that actually provides epistemic warrant for believing in evolution, see Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley, Knowledge of God (Wiley- Blackwell, 2008)
• [117] Austin, ‘Evolutionary Explanations’, p. 267.
• [118] See David Lahti, ‘“You Have Heard … but I Tell You …”’ in Evolution and Ethics, p. 164.
• [119] See Mike Higton, Deciding Differently (Cambridge: Grove Books Limited, 2011), p. 12; and I Corinthians 8 and 10.
• [120] See Bowker, Is God a Virus?, pp. 253-259; he also quotes from John Wesley’s letter to William Wilberforce in which he supported the institution of slavery as part of the creational order presented in the scriptures, p. 243- 44; and I Corinthians 10.23.
• [121] See Matt. 12.50 and Mk. 3.34-5; Compare the ישראל שמע with Matt. 6.9-10; Lk. 10; Lahti also characterizes it as a movement from inclusive fitness to reciprocal altruism, Lahti, ‘“You Have Heard … but I Tell You …”’, p. 139.
• [122] See also Matt. 5.46-47and Mk. 2.21-22.
• [123] Lahti, ‘“YouHave Heard … but I Tell You …”’, pp. 140, 145, 138, 138, 143, 142, 140, 140, 143, 144, 146.
• [124] See Ron Amundson, ‘Development and Evolution’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, p. 260.
• [125] See Steven Orzackand Patrick Forber,‘Adaptationism’.
• [126] See Wilson, Genes, Mind, and Culture, p. 349.
• [127] See Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, ‘Five Misunderstandings about Cultural Evolution’, Human Nature, 19 (2008), p. 134.
• [128] See Sanders, ‘Sin’; see also Rom 5.12, 13, 21; 6.2-11, 12, 14, 16-18, 20; 7.4-6, 8, 11, 13, 17-23; 8.8; Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life, pp. 99-102.
• [129] Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life, pp. 91, 105.
• [130] Peterson, ‘FallingUp: Evolution and Original Sin’,p. 285.
• [131] See Clayton, Philip, ‘Biologyand Purpose’, in Evolution and Ethics, p. 331; see also Js. 1.15.
• [132] See McFadyen, Bound to Sin, pp. 31, 34, 36, 195, 248.
• [133] See Okasha, ‘Biological Altruism’.
• [134] See Okasha, ‘Biological Altruism’.
• [135] See Jensen, Systematic TheologyVol 2, p. 317.
• [136] Philip Rolnick, ‘Darwin’s Problems, Neo-Darwinian Solutions, and Jesus’ Love Commands’, in Evolution and Ethics, pp. 315, 311, 311; the New Testament promises reward: Matt. 5.12; Eph. 6.8; Col. 3.24; Heb. 10.35; 11.6, 26; 2 Jn. 1.8; Rev. 11.18; 22.12and fulfilment: Matt. 10.39; Jn. 12.25; see also McFadyen, Bound to Sin, pp. 211, 216.
• [137] Lahti, ‘“You Have Heard … but I Tell You …”’, pp. 144,144.
• [138] See Margulis, Microcosmos, p. 16; and Edwards, ‘Originalsin’, p. 388.
• [139] See MacFadyen, Bound to Sin, p. 43.
• [140] Blocher, ‘The theology of the Fall and the origins of evil’, p. 190-91.
• [141] These contemporary religious enclaves would tend to use sin as a ‘language of blame and condemnation […] to whip up artificial and disproportionate senses of personal guilt and shame’, McFadyen, Bound to Sin,p. 3.
• [142] Thomas Oord, ‘Morals, Love, and Relations in Evolutionary Theory’, in Evolution and Ethics, p. 298.
• [143] See for example,Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology(Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2011), p. 491.
• [144] Edwards, ‘Originalsin’, p. 381.
• [145] See McFadyen, Bound to Sin, p. 247.
• [146] Jeff Astley, ‘Evolution and Evil’, in Reading Genesis After Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 175.
• [147] Jeffrey Schloss,‘Evolutionary Ethics and Christian Morality’, in Evolution and Ethics, p. 3, 19.
• [148] Lash, The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’, p. 248.
• [149] See Edwards, ‘Original sin’,pp. 385, 385; and Rom. 8.18-25; I Cor. 15.56-58;Col. 1.15-20.
• [150] See Williams, Wound of Knowledge, p. 159-60.
• [151] Wilson, Consilience, p. 14.
• [152] See Jenson, Systematic Theology Vol 2,p. 133.
• [153] See Segerstrale, Defendersof the Truth, p. 365.
• [154] Lash, The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’, p. 228.
• [155] Mark Heim, ‘A Cross-Section of Sin’, in Evolution and Ethics, p. 265; see also Williams, Wound of Knowledge, 30; and Edwards, ‘Original sin’, p. 383.
• [156] Christian de Duve has pointed out the same thing about the cultural and epigenetic power of the Christian faith. However, he is also wary of the fact that the religious tend to deny science, be more interested in the afterlife and so welcome climate change as the ushering of the Armageddon, and are more obsessed with defining sexuality than with much more pressing human problems, see Christian de Duve, Genetics of Original Sin (London: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 173, 174, 175, 179.
• [157] Alexander Rosenberg and Frederic Bouchard, ‘Fitness’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta.
• [158] Rosenberg,‘Fitness’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• [159] See Justin Garson, ‘Function and Teleology’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, pp. 525, 525, 525, 527-8.
• [160] John Haught, ‘Darwin’s Gift to Theology’, in Evolutionary and Molecular Biology, p. 413; see also Clayton,‘Biology and Purpose’,p. 335.
• [161] Jensen, Systematic Theology Vol 2, p. 145; see Lk. 12.13-34.
• [162] See Ted Peters, ‘Playing God with our Evolutionary Future’, in Evolutionary and Molecular Biology, pp. 491, 498, 510; Chinese scientists have already used this CRISPR technology on human embryos, see David Cyranoski and Sara Reardon,‘ Chinese scientists genetically modify human embryos’, Nature.
• [163] McFadyen, Bound to Sin, p. 208, 249.