Here's what Matthew Parris gets wrong on science disproving religion

Religion is not a by-product of evolutionary goals. Andrew Davison argues that our mental lives are more than a maelstrom of urges.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A man covered in dried and caked mud stands and looks to the side, a steel chain is draped from his shoulders.

Man, experimental.

Mahdi Bafande on Unsplash.

In a provocative recent column, the opinion writer Matthew Parris tells us that science has disproved religion. That’s quite a claim to make in 1,100 words, settling a debate that goes back decades. (‘Decades’, I write, not ‘centuries’, as historians have discredited the idea of some perennial conflict between science and religion.)

Parris’s argument is admirably clear: evolution has given us brains, which leaves them hardwired for evolutionary goals, and religion is simply a by-product. Evolution made us servile and grateful, so we imagine a God to thank and obey. ‘A driving need has always been felt by millions for a God-related hypothesis’, he writes. However, ‘today in the 21st century there’s an answer’: one that Charles Darwin ‘could have begun’ and which ‘we can complete’, thanks to the science of genetics.

If our mental lives were really no more than a maelstrom of evolutionary urges, we couldn’t have a sensible conversation about brains and evolution, never mind religion and gratitude.

I happily agree that our minds evolved; I don’t concede that means we can only think evolutionary thoughts. According to Parris, ‘once you accept that survival, procreation and teamwork are what natural selection has equipped us for, every human impulse is explicable in those terms.’ But are they? Take the example of procreation. Nothing about my life has been particularly geared in that direction, nor perhaps has that of Parris, but we both live using the brains evolution gave us.

That’s because the evolutionary advantage comes from having flexible, ambidextrous minds. Natural selection has given us brains like Swiss Army knives, instruments that can do many things. Not just one. We survive better because we can think about many things in many different ways.

It also seems that evolution has given us minds that are free. That’s somewhat disputed among philosophers and neuroscientists, and we certainly don’t know how freedom might emerge, but it’s not obviously false that it has.

Evolution has given us minds that can track reality, minds that can respond to what we find around us broadly and freely. There’s no denying the role of desires and drives in shaping our thoughts and decisions. It’s just that neither drives nor desires necessarily overthrow our reason, at least not most of the time. The history of thought – especially at its most impressive moments – shows us people trying to think as clearly as they can, whether as philosophers, scientists, theologians, historians, or whatever. By and large, they succeeded.

In fact, the claims that Parris makes requires us to believe that evolution has given us brains that are reasonably good at latching onto reality, brains that can think about all sorts of things in a generally accurate way. If our mental lives were really no more than a maelstrom of evolutionary urges, we couldn’t have a sensible conversation about brains and evolution, never mind religion and gratitude.

Attempts to reduce our mental and social lives to evolutionary forces are also challenged by the slow pace of evolution. Widespread disbelief in God is a recent phenomenon, even then only in the West, and even there not overwhelmingly. It’s all very new by evolutionary standards. Our recent ancestors were generally devout, our contemporaries less so. That can’t be about genes, since genes hardly change at all over the span of mere centuries.

Nor, to take up a couple of other points from Parris’, does recent history make it so clear that we’re genetically programmed to be grateful or obedient, given how quickly attitudes have changed on those matters of late: far faster than any genetic change would allow. ‘Natural selection has designed us to seek and serve structures of authority, to command and be commanded’, he writes, ‘and to find meaning, purpose and satisfaction in service to something (or someone) greater than ourselves. We are bred to bend the knee.’ If so, our genes have started doing a remarkably poor job of that, all of a sudden.

Perhaps the most we can say is something like this: (1) our genes (allegedly) predispose us to belief in God, as some sort of irrational urge, (2) this enthralled such unfortunate figures such as Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Edith Stein and Elizabeth Anscombe, but (3) newspaper columnists and other public intellectuals are now, by Herculean effort, suddenly able to break free from those unconscious genetic forces and see clearly for the first time. Perhaps, but I’m not convinced.

There’s little that isn’t enriched when explored in an evolutionary light. But we do evolution no favours, nor science more generally, by taking it as the arbiter of truth in every realm of thought.

Parris brings his column round to the theme of gratitude, writing that ‘not believing in a God to thank does not blunt my regular and strong feelings of generalised gratitude… I say “thank you”, knowing perfectly well there’s nobody to whom my thanks are directed.’ He thinks that we are hard-wired for gratitude, which leads to religiosity, as an invalid assumption.

G. K. Chesterton followed a similar line of thought in his book Orthodoxy, but I found it more convincing than Parris does, writing that the world bears the character of a gift, and a gift implies a giver. What Chesterton wrote towards the beginning of the twentieth century burst out again in French philosophy at the century’s end.

There’s a school of philosophy (phenomenology) that likes to start its thinking from what it is like to perceive phenomena, and for the world to ‘appear’ to us. In France, phenomenologists started saying that one of the most fundamental characteristics of how reality appears is as something given to us. Along Chesterton’s lines, that made some of these writers really quite religious. I’m not saying that Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, or Jean-Yves Lacoste automatically trump Matthew Parris, but they do suggest that an argument from givenness to gratitude to God isn’t simply foolish.

Evolution is fascinating and important. There’s little that isn’t enriched when explored in an evolutionary light. But we do evolution no favours, nor science more generally, by taking it as the arbiter of truth in every realm of thought.

Evolution can tell us a great deal about nature and humanity, but there is growing resistance among scientists towards doing that in a way that elides detail or simplifies into oblivion. Moving from explaining to explaining away is a good sign that science is no longer being used responsibly.

There is an evolutionary dimension to religion. But supposing that evolution explains religion, so that you no longer have to think about religious claims on their own terms, is no more rigorous that supposing that the evolutionary basis for smell means that nothing has a scent.

Article

Christmas culture

Creed

18 December 2023

4 min read

For the knowing of the how: creating at Christmas

Learning a new craft unfolds the layers of meaning Christmas is clothed in.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A white crocheted angel decoration against a dark background.

Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash.

Childhood Christmas was for me a time of craft and productivity, of baking and decorating, of paper chains and printing cards with dissected potatoes. Christmas was all about making, so homemade presents outshone everything else.

That was fine if you were a painter, knitter, sculptor, seamstress, or woodworker, and each member of my family was at least one of those things. I was the odd one out: at least until the autumn before last, when I took up crochet.

My inspiration came from John Milbank: theologian, philosopher, political theorist, poet, and general ruffler of feathers. Not, I have to say, because he sets example with hook and yarn. Rather, he’d written an essay, an essay that spoke to me, as someone often in art galleries but rarely making. We get so invested in fine art, he wrote, that we forget the priority of applied art, of craft and decoration. That’s the foundation. The art we go to see in museums is great only if it succeeds in ‘intensifying this art which is proper to humanity as such.’ So, I took up crochet.

Crochet, as I hoped, is rather like playing the recorder. It’s not too difficult, even at the beginning, but has plenty of scope for complexity and skill. I’m now three blankets in, plus six cushion covers and a hat. Even my first efforts were gratefully received as presents, and I some of my recent work is much more intricate, and not half bad.

I’ve finally joined the ‘Christmas is about making’ project: and Christmas really is about making. John Donne put it like this, addressing the Virgin Mary:

… yea thou art now
Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother;
Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room,
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.

Mary becomes her ‘Maker’s maker’. In a further twist, which Donne would appreciate, Mary’s child grew up to be a carpenter, or – as the Greek would better be translated – an all-round, general purpose village maker: from hearths to homes, from shelves to structures.

In thinking about how God took up a human life, writers have often turned to the language of making. In the same poem, Donne has God weaving himself a kind of garment in Mary’s womb: ‘He will wear, / Taken from thence, flesh’. Thomas Pestel (1586–1667) opens an unjustly forgotten Christmas hymn like this:

Behold, the great Creator makes
Himself a house of clay,
a robe of virgin flesh He takes
which He will wear for aye.

More familiar still is Charles Wesley’s ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, with its lines:

‘Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, / Hail the incarnate Deity!’

The language of wearing, of robes and veils, hasn’t always fared well among theologians. I heard of one stern tutor in doctrine who would look round the chapel whenever Wesley’s carol was sung, reserving a stern word for any student who failed to fall silent at that line. He didn’t like the implication that God was merely draped in humanity, making only an outward show of being human.

Thomas Aquinas saw that worry, writing in the thirteenth century, but argued for charity. The language of clothing isn’t perfect, but we shouldn’t expect it to be. Illustrations gesture towards the truth, they aren’t identical with it, and all the more when we’re talking about God. As long as we don’t think expect the clothing image to say all that needs to be said, there’s mileage to it. For one thing, clothing can make someone visible (as the late Queen knew very well): ‘veiled in flesh, the Godhead see’. Moreover, Christ’s humanity was shaped by his divinity, like a garment is shaped by the body of the one who wears it, yet the body remains unchanged (and so does the garment), just as God became human without becoming any less divine.

Alongside clothing, Pestel also suggested God working with clay:

‘Behold, the great Creator makes / Himself a house of clay’.

That takes up, and reworks, another textile image. John’s Gospel gets to the heart of the Christmas message with a line so solemn that Christians have been accustomed to drop to their right knee on hearing it read: ‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us’. That’s how we know it, but a more accurate translation is that the Divine Word ‘pitched his tent among us’. The houses that Pestel knew, however, were made of bricks not cloth, which is to say of clay, so he adapted the image. Or, just as likely, with that clay, he had the ‘house’ of the human body in mind. That would recall lines in Genesis, where God makes Adam out of clay, or ‘the dust of the ground’. In fact, the Hebrew word ‘Adam’ means just that – something like ‘earthling’ – just as ‘human’ is related to the Latin ‘humus’, meaning soil.

Whether weaving and wearing, or building, or sculpting, or potato printing, this is the message to stop us in our tracks at Christmas: that the Maker made himself human. There is something beautiful that we greet that with homemade presents, with printing cards, with decorating and baking, with craft and productivity, with paint and cloth, paper, wood, and yarn, and with that sublime sort of making that is music. As Pestel puts it, in closing ‘Behold, the great Creator makes’