Explainer

Belief

Creed

16 March 2023

4 min read

Hold or cut the golden thread?

There's a ‘mysteriously beautiful’ vision threaded through our world, writes Stephen Cottrell. In an extract from his Dear England book, the Archbishop of York considers the Beatitudes.

Stephen Cottrell

Stephen Cottrell is Primate of England and Archbishop of York. He has authored 20 books.

A CGI render of a grid of golden lines receding into the perspective

The golden thread.

Joshua Sortino on Unsplash.

The heart of Jesus’ teaching is found in the longest teaching passage in the Gospels, it is known as the Sermon on the Mount.

It begins with a mysteriously beautiful passage known as the Beatitudes.

Here Jesus sets out a series of maxims that at first sight seem to be his equivalent of the Ten Commandments. Like Moses, the Old Testament prophet who received the latter, when Jesus receives the Beatitudes he has gone up a mountain.

And like Moses he has a series of short, pithy things to say that will then need a lifetime to work out.

However, the Beatitudes are not a moral code. They are not things you can either do or not do. They are attitudes to which we can aspire. Rather than describing the moral life, a code by which we can justly live alongside each other in society, they describe what it looks like to 'go the second mile’. They describe what perfect love in action looks like.

Here they are:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

I don't propose to spend ages unpacking these. But alongside the Ten Commandments themselves, the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, the Beatitudes have become one of the central documents of the Church.

Living by them is the work of a lifetime.

They are the centre of Jesus' teaching. Their meaning, however, isn't always self-evident. Like his stories, they need inhabiting.

They are very challenging. It isn't easy to be merciful. It isn't easy to make peace. Especially if the likely outcome is the persecution we usually make efforts to avoid. Not that there is anything good about persecution. As we know, mockery and ridicule hurt. How much more hurtful is it to be hunted down because of your witness to peace? Nevertheless, it is witnesses to peace that Jesus is recruiting here. His own life, and everything that he teaches, led this way: to the peace that is beyond the world's understanding and is about a wholeness and totality of giving and receiving love.

Jesus is inviting us to live with a different set of attitudes. And he does not baulk from acknowledging that these attitudes will bring us into conflict with the carefully protected interests of those who secure power and influence for themselves at the expense of peace. They exchange it for what is little more than a truce. At best, an absence of war, what we live in our jealously guarded siloes and forcibly protect our borders, repelling intruders and stamping on those who even dream differently.

In our own society, thankfully, we enjoy freedoms of speech and action. This means that we rarely meet with much opposition beyond people's unreflective apathy or polished disdain. But these freedoms we enjoy should not be taken for granted. They have been hard won. They could easily be lost. Especially if we fail to see where they have come from; precisely this realisation of the dignity and worth of every person and our responsibilities to each other that arose through Christ.

Unfortunately, these things that underpin what is best in our society are not self-evidently the best. We've got so used to them that we easily imagine they are. But actually, we don't observe them in the world around us. Nature, for instance, is not democratic. Nor particularly caring. The weakest usually die first. The fittest survive. Nor is it much different in human communities. Our history - always written by those who win - is one bloody story of conquest after another.

Empires rise and fall, and there is very little to suggest that there might be another kingdom where a different set of values prevails, and where the king turns out to be the servant of all. But that is precisely the Christian narrative. It is a golden thread running through human history. In every age it can either be held on to, or cut away; left to our own devices, especially when our backs are to the wall, we find that the human compass is usually set towards self-preservation. Our empires and systems are usually designed to keep others out. Or at least in their place, so that they can serve us. In this so-called ‘real world’, shepherds do not go in search of one lost sheep, as Jesus suggested God does, in one of his parables. That would be uneconomic. Like the rest of us, they play a percentages game, and for the sake of the ninety-nine, we accept the loss of the one. The strongest and the wiliest prevail. That's just how it is, we say. If we can help the weak, we will. But if we can't, or if it affects us badly, we won't and we don't.

This is why the world needs a set of values - and a story - that will save us from ourselves, and our worst instincts. This is why we need a set of values that are rooted in a tradition whose stories and whose very heart are, gloriously, the life and teaching of a person who is himself the revelation of God's love and purposes for the world he made and loves - who even laid down his life to search out those who are lost: the very image of the invisible God. More than that: someone who loves us and knows what it is like to be us, who has experienced from the inside just what it is like to inhabit a divided and compromised world.

Therefore, the Beatitudes are a set of values and attitudes by which we can inhabit the world differently and through which we can begin to see what matters in the world and what must be done.

Dear England: Finding Hope, Taking Heart and Changing the World is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Column

Biology

Creed

17 May 2023

7 min read

Not just red in tooth and claw: biology's big debates

In the second of a series, biologist and priest, Andrew Davison, examines why it’s important to keep up with biology’s big debates.

Andrew Davison

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

An osprey, in flight, holds a fish in its claws.

‘Wherever there’s water or air to navigate, the laws of fluid dynamics are bound to throw up wings, and bodies shaped like fish.’

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash.

There’s hardly been a livelier time for evolutionary science than today; indeed, passions can run high. It’s not that Darwin’s vision of evolution is fundamentally in doubt: species adapt by natural selection, there’s variation between individuals, and those better adapted for their environment survive more often, passing on their genes to their children. In that, the theory of evolution stands, but many other parts of the evolutionary picture from the second half of the twentieth century are coming under criticism. That includes the following maxims:

‘the only significant form of inheritance involves genetic code’,

‘nothing that happens to an organism during its lifetime is passed on to its progeny’,

‘we agree what we mean by “species”’,

‘genes pass down the branches of the tree of life, not between them’,

and ‘evolution is fundamentally all about competition, not cooperation’.

Among the excellent crop of writers on these themes, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb stand out for their elegant prose, and a gift for communicating complex ideas clearly. As they recognise, the standard mid-twentieth century model of evolution might be worth criticising, but it’s also landed all sorts of important basic points. (They list ten.) The shortfall of the earlier, dominant theory was in being too narrow, with each insight too quickly eclipsing others.

Here are two examples. First, the classic twentieth century picture saw inheritance in terms of DNA and genes, passed on by ‘germline’ cells, such sperm and pollen. That’s all true, but it shouldn’t restrict our wider view of inheritance to that. Today, writers such as Jablonka and Lamb stress that organisms inherit from their parents (or parent) in all sorts of ways.

A second plank of the twentieth century picture is that evolution involves descent from a common ancestor. Again, that says something vital, even central, accepted by evolutionist old and new. The twentieth century position, however, added a restriction: that’s all that’s important on this score. The newer perspective recognises that while genes are – of course – central, and passed on from parent to child, organisms also swap genes between themselves (between branches of the tree of life, not just along those branches), even between very different species.

If we’re not careful, what’s written and taught (not least by theologians), even with the best will in the world, will be thirty or even fifty years out of date.

There’s a lot of excitement around these sorts of claims (and, remember, Jablonka and Lamb make eight more), and that can get quite noisy. Defenders of the older, narrower picture typically say that the newer themes are simply fuss over minor points. Advocates of the newer perspective disagree, saying that the twentieth century picture risks missing some important features of biology, which are now coming into better focus.

Why such debates matters

Why might this ferment among biologists matter for a site like this one, and for theologians, and discussions of religious matters? Well, for one thing, as I pointed out in my previous article, nothing quite dissolves the supposed animosity between science and religion (which is, after all, a relatively recent invention) like theologians and religious people getting excited about biology. It’s also important that any humanities scholar, the theologian among them, who’s engaging with science should keep up to date. If we’re not careful, what’s written and taught (not least by theologians), even with the best will in the world, will be thirty or even fifty years out of date.

But there’s more at stake. As we have seen, the twentieth century picture, for all it brought an admirable clarity to evolutionary thought, was reductionistic. We see that in Jablonka and Lamb’s exhortation to scientists: ‘yes, stress x, but don’t think that means you have to deny y.’ A religious vision tends to be an expansive one. It wants to recognise the reality and value of all sorts of things. Yes, there’s matter, atoms, molecules, and genes, but there’s also organisms, agents, cultures, groups, economies, hopes, loves. They’re all real. We can’t reduce one to the other: not organisms to genes, or agents to economies. A turn from reduction is welcome.

More than that, almost everything in the emerging twenty-first century view of evolution is fascinating from a theological perspective.

Take convergence, for instance. It turns out that evolution isn’t just driven by randomness, or by the demands of the surroundings. Also important are various features of physics, or mathematics – the contours of reality – that throw up elegant solutions to evolutionary problems, which are adopted by evolution time and again. Wherever you need to sturdy and space-efficient packing of cells (as in a honey comb, or a a wasp’s nest), the hexagon is ready and waiting. Wherever there’s water or air to navigate, the laws of fluid dynamics are bound to throw up wings, and bodies shaped like fish, dolphins, and penguins (which are all quite similar in shape).

How do we know this? Because evolution has converged on wings and that body shape independently, many times, as also on eyes, and everything else that Simon Conway Morris lists in the nine closely printed columns of convergences in the index to his book Life’s Solution. Evolution certainly involves randomness and need, but alongside them is something more like Plato’s forms: timeless realities, there to be discovered and put to work. Among the more theological of these eternal verities, covered in Conway Morris’s book, are perception, intelligence, community, communication, cooperation, altruism, farming, or construction

Exceeding a zero-sum game

Then there’s cooperation. Ever since Darwin’s Origin was published, and, even more, ever since Tennyson wrote about nature ‘red in tooth and claw’, theologians have been embarrassed about the place of cooperation in their vision of the world. Now, however, it turns out, competition isn’t the only force at work in biology or evolution after all. One of the features of reality that evolution discovers and puts to work again and again is cooperation, and ways to exceed a ‘zero-sum’ game. We see that in cooperation within a species, but also in cooperation between species, which is ubiquitous in nature: called mutualism, it’s found everywhere. As a rule, once two species stick around in proximity for the long run, down many generations, their relationship will turn to mutual benefit.

Ethicists are often wary of the suggestion that we can look at the way things are, and read a moral code there (getting an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’), but it’s an unusual person whose vision of right and wrong isn’t shaped, to some degree, by a sense of what the world is like. Well, it turns out that nature bears witness to the enduring worth of cooperation, and not only to competition.

In the first of these articles on biology, I pointed out the significance of ethics in thinking about biology, and about evolution in particular. For better or worse, and often for worse, thinking about evolution has been an ethical, social, political story. The evolutionary has been put to work for immoral, ends. It turns out to be wrong twice over to suppose evolution commends only competition. It’s wrong, first of all, because we are rational creatures, who can aspire to an understanding of good and evil that transcends the realm of nature. But also, as we now see, it’s wrong even to suppose the nature is only red in tooth and claw. There’s competition, but there’s also a lot of cooperation.

Suggested further reading

Archibald, John. 2014. One Plus One Equals One: Symbiosis and the Evolution of Complex Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. An accessible introduction to biological mutualism, with an emphasis on the role of hybrid organisms (one living inside another) in major evolutionary transitions.

Bronstein, Judith L., ed. 2015. Mutualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The new standard treatment of biological mutualism.

Morris, Simon Conway. 2008. Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A comprehensive discussion of convergence in evolution.

Day, Troy, and Russell Bonduriansky. 2018. Extended Heredity: A New Understanding of Inheritance and Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. An engaging introduction to a broadened picture of inheritance.

Davison, Andrew. 2020a. Biological Mutualism: A Scientific Survey. Theology and Science 18 (2): 190–210. An accessible survey of some of the science of biological mutualism.

———. 2020b. Christian Doctrine and Biological Mutualism: Some Explorations in Systematic and Philosophical Theology. Theology and Science 18 (2): 258–78. A foray into some of the significance of mutualism for Christian theology.

Jablonka, Eva, and Marion Lamb. 2020. Inheritance Systems and the Extended Synthesis. Cambridge University Press. A short discussion of many of the more expansive aspects proposed for contemporary evolutionary thought.

Jablonka, Eva, Marion J. Lamb, and Anna Zeligowski. 2014. Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. One of the most substantial discussions of the new perspective.

Laland, Kevin, Tobias Uller, arc Feldman, Kim Sterelny, Gerd B. Müller, Armin Moczek, Eva Jablonka, et al. 2014. Does Evolutionary Theory Need a Rethink? Nature 514 (7521): 161–64. MA short two-sided piece, asking whether a transformation in evolutionary thinking is under way.