Did Augustine and Aquinas Believe In A Literal Interpretation of Genesis

We got a new comment on a very old post, which I thought I'd respond to with a post in order to make it more likely that people more knowledgeable than I would weigh in. The question is:

Hello,

I see that this is an older post, but some of the comments are recent, so hopefully the OP will see this comment.

Can you provide any sources to document this claim:

"Aquinas and Augustine both seem to agree that it is not only possible but indeed likely that the history and cosmology of Genesis are not literally true."

Thank you and God bless.

On of the reasons that I'm a less interesting blogger these days is that I've gotten more cautious about making big statements without being really, really sure I know what I'm doing. However, pulling together what I think I had in mind, here are a couple notes.

A key phrase in what I said is "the history and cosmology of Genesis are not literally true." Augustine and Aquinas were learned in the natural philosophy of the ancient world, and according to this the cosmology in Genesis was far more obviously primitive than its history. Genesis seems to indicate a basically flat world with a domed sky overhead: God separates the waters and the waters above are called the sky. Ancient natural philosophy had determined that the earth was spherical and developed a detailed model of the orbits of the heavenly bodies around the earth which allowed them to make highly accurate calculations of eclipses, conjunctions, etc.

Augustine is probably the easier call here. In his Confessions, Augustine talks about how he was originally turned off from Christianity by what he saw as the Bible's bad cosmology and by scientific claims put forward by Christians:

In Confessions Book 5, Ch 3-5 he talks about his early flirtation with the Manichees. One of the things that he says consistently held him back was that the Manichees consistently made claims about astronomy which Augustine knew to be untrue. He struggled with how he could believe them in deeper things when they didn't even know this, and he hopes that when one of the famous Manichee teachers comes to town, this fellow will be able to explain it all, but the teacher turns out to be a clever speaker but as ignorant as the rest.

This leads Augustine to make the general observation:

Whenever I hear a brother Christian talk in such a way as to show that he is ignorant of these scientific matters and confuses one thing with another, I listen with patience to his theories and think it no harm to him that he does not know the true facts about material things, provided that he holds no beliefs unworthy of you, O Lord, who are the Creator of them all. The danger lies in thinking that such knowledge is part and parcel of what he must believe to save his soul and in presuming to make obstinate declarations about things of which he knows nothing.

Much of the interesting stuff the Augustine has to say on the topic of reconciling Genesis and science is in his Commentary on the Literal Meaning of Genesis, which is not entirely available online, though here's a good chunk of it. Galileo quoted extensively from this in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina. From that we get:

It is likewise commonly asked what we may believe about the form and shape of the heavens according to the Scriptures, for many contend much about these matters. But with superior prudence our authors have forborne to speak of this, as in no way furthering the student with respect to a blessed life-and, more important still, as taking up much of that time which should be spent in holy exercises. What is it to me whether heaven, like a sphere surrounds the earth on all sides as a mass balanced in the center of the universe, or whether like a dish it merely covers and overcasts the earth? Belief in Scripture is urged rather for the reason we have often mentioned; that is, in order that no one, through ignorance of divine passages, finding anything in our Bibles or hearing anything cited from them of such a nature as may seem to oppose manifest conclusions, should be induced to suspect their truth when they teach, relate, and deliver more profitable matters. Hence let it be said briefly, touching the form of heaven, that our authors knew the truth but the Holy Spirit did not desire that men should learn things that are useful to no one for salvation.

This, I think, basically amounts to saying that the literal cosmology in Genesis is inaccurate, but that that's not the important message, which is what I'd say in regards to the chronology as well.

I haven't read all of Augustine's commentary on Genesis, but he does think through some interesting things that immediate proposed themselves to the ancient mind such as:

How can God create light before he creates a source of light?
How can he create something, yet have it be formless?

He also seems to take an overall approach of "if the description turns out to contradict science, then it was obviously never meant to be taken literally". For example:

38. Let us suppose that in explaining the words, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and light was made,” one man thinks that it was material light that was made, and another that it was spiritual. As to the actual existence of “spiritual light”65 in a spiritual creature, our faith leaves no doubt; as to the existence of material light, celestial or supercelestial, even existing before the heavens, a light which could have been followed by night, there will be nothing in such a supposition contrary to the faith until un-erring truth gives the lie to it. And if that should happen, this teaching was never in Holy Scripture but was an opinion pro-posed by man in his ignorance. On the other hand, if reason should prove that this opinion is unquestionably true, it will still be uncertain whether this sense was intended by the sacred writer when he used the words quoted above, or whether he meant something else no less true. And if the general drift of the passage shows that the sacred writer did not intend this teaching, the other, which he did intend, will not thereby be false; indeed, it will be true and more worth knowing. On the other hand, if the tenor of the words of Scripture does not militate against our taking this teaching as the mind of the writer, we shall still have to enquire whether he could not have meant something else besides.

He also comes back to his point about ignorance of science creating scandal:

39. Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

(Needless to say, I'm kind of a fan of this line of thinking.)

Aquinas is a bit harder to pin down. Obviously, he sees the world as spherical, etc., that was simply a given at his time. But he seems to me less eager to step quickly away from traditional interpretations of scripture than Augustine. (I'd appreciate thought from more accomplished readers of Aquinas than myself.) So, for instance, in Summa I 74.2 he discusses the question of whether the seven days of creation were seven days or one (he describes Augustine as holding that the seven days were actually one day with seven aspects.) He seems to make the case that both of these positions are possible to hold, but perhaps to lean more towards the seven day idea than Augustine's.

In discussing creation in Summa I 65-74, it seems to me that Aquinas is at least open to some level in creativity in how he takes the Genesis creation account to be true. For instance, in Summa 1, Q97 he holds that it was in the nature of man's unfallen body to die (on the theory that mortality is a part of a creature nature and humanity's nature did not change) but that the effect of the unfallen soul upon the body was such that it kept it from dying. In Summa I, Q96, Art. 1 he argues that even before the fall predators still ate meat, killing other animals in order to do so, because the fall would not have changed the nature of predators.

The big philosophical issue which was in play as to the age of the universe in Aquinas's time was whether the material world was without beginning, which Aristotle had held. Obviously, Christianity teaches that the world was created by God, but some Christians argued that the world having always existed was not inconsistent with God having created it, since God is, after all, constantly holding the world in existence through the active exercise of His will. Aquinas did not accept that argument, so in that sense he sided with an account of world history more like that in Genesis, though I'm not clear whether he had a strong opinion as to the age of the world (or whether that mattered.)

I hope that helps and I would strongly encourage those more knowledgeable than me to weight in.

Evolution, Sex and God's Creative Power

One of the things that seems to really unsettle people about the idea of evolution is that they imagine is sidelines God's creative power. Did God create the world directly, people ask, or did He simply stand aside and guide some process of evolution which did it?

One problem here is that we tend to fall into thinking of God as rather like us, and God's creation as rather like our "creations" of art or engineering. As creatures within creation, it's reasonable to ask "Did you create that or did someone else or did it just happen naturally?" If I paint a picture of a sunset, one can refer to the paining as my "creation", but the horizon and the sunset are clearly not my creation. They "just happened naturally". If I were to set up a giant frame through which you could see a distant vista and say, "Look what I made!" you would reasonably reply, "You didn't make that. That's nature."

However, God is not a creature within creation. God is the creator of all of creation. He holds it in existence by His constant act of the will. The natural laws that we observe are the product of His ordering will. God is the answer to the question, "Why does anything exist?"

As such, it makes no sense to say that if something happens "naturally" that it is not God's creation. Imagining again that giant frame set up so that one could, through it, view some distant vista, one would not tell God, "Oh, you didn't make that, that's just nature," since, of course, nature is God's creation.

Even our knowledge that there are natural processes that shape the things around us does not change this. We know, for instance, that a mountain is the result of tectonic pressures that push up the rocks of the earth, and erosion that wears them down into their current shapes. Glaciers, wind, water and plants leave their marks upon the landscape. But this doesn't make them less God's creation, because all of these, and the ways that they act, are in turn part of God's creation.

And yet, somehow the idea of biological evolution throws many people off. If humans are the result of some long ancestry of proto humans, if we somehow share common ancestors millions of years ago with the great apes, how can we be really made in the image of God? How can we really have a divinely created soul? Doesn't it take away from the belief in God's creation to hold that we were created by a natural process?

I think the scale of the question tends to throw us off. After all, each one of us was created by a natural process. Via a natural process, a man and a woman have sexual intercourse. The man's sperm comes in contact with the woman's egg. The egg is fertilized. DNA from the two parents joins to form a unique, new set of DNA and that first cell of that new human being splits and then splits again. There is a continuity of being between me and the joining of an egg and sperm 35 years ago. I was formed by this natural process, a process which the biological sciences have managed to come to understand in great detail over the last few centuries.

And yet, we don't consider God to be "sidelined" by the fact that his creatures can, through their act of intercourse, cooperate in the creation of a new human being. That we have a detailed biological understanding of how I descended from my parents does not mean that God did not create me, that I do not have a soul, or that I am somehow "only a natural process" and not a product of God's will.

We accept, as Catholics, both that a new human being is the product of the natural process of conception, and also that a new human being is the creation of God. We accept that the natural process in which the bodies of the parents take part is also a part of God's creative power. We accept both that we can have a complete biological understanding of the natural process of conception, and also that that biological understanding does not mean that humans are nothing more than cells -- that explaining the biological does not mean explaining the whole of reality.

What we need to remember, then, is that evolution is nothing more than the repetition of that process (reproduction) over many individual over a great deal of time. If my natural descent from my parents is no threat to our belief, then our natural descent with modifications due to variation and selection over thousands and millions of generations can be no more of a threat to our belief in God's creative power and providence.

Charles Darwin's Great, Great Great Granddaughter Becomes Catholic Apologist

Laura Keynes is a descendant of both biologist Charles Darwin and economist John Maynard Keynes. She's also now a Catholic apologist. The UK's Catholic Herald has her story:

‘Are you related to the economist?” People sometimes ask when they see my surname. I explain that, yes, John Maynard Keynes is my great-great-uncle – his brother Geoffrey married Margaret Darwin, my great-grandmother. “So you’re related to Darwin too?” Yes, he’s my great-great-great grandfather. Eyes might fall on the cross around my neck: “And you’re a Christian?” Yes, a Catholic. “How does a Darwin end up Catholic?”

The question genuinely seems to puzzle people. After all, Darwin ushered in a new era of doubt with his theory of evolution, and the Bloomsbury Group, of which Keynes was a part, influenced modern attitudes to feminism and sexuality. How can I be a product of this culture, and yet Catholic? The implication is that simple exposure to my ancestors’ life work should have shaken me out of my backwards error.
...
Among my family members religion is seen as an anachronism at best, a pernicious form of tyranny at worst. So where do I get it from?

Mum converted to Catholicism shortly after I was born, having been Anglican prior to that. My parents’ marriage was a mismatch of personalities and values. It was annulled soon after I came along. Mum worked full-time as a single mother, while raising my brother and me in the Faith, attending Mass at Blackfriars in Cambridge. Fortunately, she remained on terms with my father and the extended Keynes family. If there was any sense in which they saw my Catholic upbringing as indoctrination, or “child abuse” in the way Richard Dawkins has characterised it, I had no inkling of that, except perhaps once when my father asked me what sins a 10-year-old could possibly have to confess. He was a near contemporary of Christopher Hitchens at the Leys School, and a product of the same cultural forces that formed Hitchens’s brand of atheism.

By the time I was in my teens Mum had become a Buddhist. My brother rejected any form of organised religion that contravened his ethic of autonomy. My only link to the Church came through school, St Mary’s, Cambridge, which I left at 16 for college. Away from any contact with the Church, secular values prevailed and I drifted into agnosticism. It wasn’t until my mid to late 20s, while studying for a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford University, that life gave me cause to reassess those values. Relationships, feminism, moral relativism, the sanctity and dignity of human life: experience put them all under my scrutiny.

By this point Dawkins had sparked “the God debate” with The God Delusion, and my great-great-great grandfather’s theory of natural selection by evolution was being used to support New Atheism. Aware that Darwin himself said “Agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind” and “It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist”, I followed the debate carefully. Did evidence for evolution necessarily imply atheism?
...I read central texts on both sides of the debate and found more to convince me in the thoughtful and measured responses of Alister McGrath and John Cornwell, among others, than in the impassioned prose of Hitchens et al. New Atheism seemed to harbour a germ of intolerance and contempt for people of faith that could only undermine secular Humanist claims to liberalism. Moreover, it could not adequately account for the problem of morality, discussed by C S Lewis in Mere Christianity, without recourse to an inherently contradictory argument.

Read the whole piece here.

I used to blog more about evolution, though I eventually left it off because I felt like I'd said most of what I had to say, and the whole "do Christianity and evolution contradict each other" debate seems to go in circles rather than progress. However, soon-to-be-family-member apparently thought of me first when it came to commenting on the story, and so I ended up doing a brief radio interview the other day for the Son Rise Morning Show on Sacred Heart Radio dealing with Laura Keynes' reversion to the faith. If you have any interest in hearing it, I'm told the interview will play tomorrow (Wednesday June 19th) morning at 6:35AM Eastern. You can hear it online here. The piece may re re-run on Thursday the 20th at 7:45AM Eastern.

Prepping for the discussion, I had occasion to go back over my old evolution posts and realized that since they were mostly written to respond to specific posts or questions, they were kind of spotty and disorganized when it comes to presenting an overall discussion of the issue. Maybe it's time to revisit the topic with a more mature eye.

Why the Age of the Earth Matters

Senator Marco Rubio got some publicity of a kind he probably didn't want this week with the publication of an interview in GQ in which he was asked about the age of the Earth:

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?
Marco Rubio: I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.

Since it is one of the most essential functions of the news media to catch Republican politicians saying dumb things and then discuss the sheer dumbness of what was said for as long as possible, we'll be hearing about this for a while. I'm not clear from Rubio's answer whether he thinks is something of a Young Earth creationist, and he's trying to sound less scary about it, or whether he just wants to avoid offending the sensibilities of those who are Young Earth creationists by not flatly disagreeing with them. Either way it's a bit dispiriting.

Rubio makes the argument that the age of the universe doesn't actually have anything to do with the sort of everyday concerns that a Senator deals with. Over at Forbes, Alex Knapp points out that the age of the universe actually does have huge implications for the kind of science we deal with in our everyday lives.

The emphasis in Rubio’s statement is mine. I say that because the age of the universe has a lot to do with how our economy is going to grow. That’s because large parts of the economy absolutely depend on scientists being right about either the age of the Universe or the laws of the Universe that allow scientists to determine its age. For example, astronomers recently discovered a galaxy that is over 13 billion light years away from Earth. That is, at its distance, it took the light from the Galaxy over 13 billion years to reach us.

Now, Marco Rubio’s Republican colleague Representative Paul Broun, who sits on the House Committee on Science and Technology, recently stated that it was his belief that the Universe is only 9,000 years old. Well, if Broun is right and physicists are wrong, then we have a real problem. Virtually all modern technology relies on optics in some way, shape or form. And in the science of optics, the fact that the speed of light is constant in a vacuum is taken for granted. But the speed of light must not be constant if the universe is only 9,000 years old. It must be capable of being much, much faster. That means that the fundamental physics underlying the Internet, DVDs, laser surgery, and many many more critical parts of the economy are based on bad science. The consequences of that could be drastic, given our dependence on optics for our economic growth.

Here’s an even more disturbing thought – scientists currently believe that the Earth is about 4.54 billion years old because radioactive substances decay at generally stable rates. Accordingly, by observing how much of a radioactive substance has decayed, scientists are able to determine how old that substance is. However, if the Earth is only 9,000 years old, then radioactive decay rates are unstable and subject to rapid acceleration under completely unknown circumstances. This poses an enormous danger to the country’s nuclear power plants, which could undergo an unanticipated meltdown at any time due to currently unpredictable circumstances. Likewise, accelerated decay could lead to the detonation of our nuclear weapons, and cause injuries and death to people undergoing radioactive treatments in hospitals. Any of these circumstances would obviously have a large economic impact.

Knapp does a good job of pointing out that issues like the age of the universe are not simple trivia from a scientific point of view. If someone were really serious about believing that the universe was only 9,000 years old, it would imply that a lot of the physical laws we take for granted at the moment (a lot of our paradigms) are wrong. I think it's important that people have an understanding of how seemingly separate areas of scientific knowledge are in fact intimately tied together, so this is a very useful reminder.

That said, I think this misses something about the way in which most people who say that they think the Earth is only a few thousand years old actually use that belief. I've read explanations by Creationists that attempt to put together some story as to how we see light from objects more than 10,000 light years away, how radioactive decay could have been faster in the past, etc. in order to explain how the world looks the way it is while being less than 10,000 years old. However, these explanations invariably seem to be focused on coming up with an explanation as to how things used to be different for a while in the past -- they never attempt to make any predictions about the world behaving in strange and unexpected ways in the future. This is, of course, one of the several reasons that "creation science" can't really be considered a science, it's not predictive. Creation science is the attempt to use scientific language to explain how two seemingly incompatible things could be true: the world could look and act the way it does now (far away objects, radio isotope dating, fossils, etc.) and yet be very young. However, now and in the future, "creation science" is comfortable assuming that the world will continue to work exactly the way it does now -- not in the crazy ways it allegedly did for a couple days 9,000 years ago.

One can simply see that as being very bad science, and I think that's certainly appropriate. But as I think about Rubio's comments in particular, it strikes me that part of what's going on in many cases when people express doubts as to the age of the universe is that they're effectively walling off the question of the age of the universe and choosing to think of that in a context other than a scientific one. Sen. Rubio's expressed doubts as the the Earth's age and Rep. Broun's expressed belief that it's only 9,000 years old don't actually have any implications for science and technology applications in the present because they don't think about the age of the universe as a scientific question. I doubt very much that they expect the laws of physics to suddenly start acting differently any more than any other person does. Like anyone else making the leap from inductive knowledge to general laws, they are quite happy to act as if the speed of light and the breakdown of radioactive elements is constant. They just don't want to apply those practical beliefs to the question of the age of the universe.

In one sense, this isn't that odd. There are lots of areas of life where we don't attempt to apply science as a way of answering questions because science is incompetent to answer them. Examples of such questions would include: What is the meaning of life? Does my wife love me? Is Brahms better than Shostakovich? Should I become an academic or go into business?

What is odd is that those who believe in or hold open the possibility of a young earth are choosing to take a topic which science would appear to be well suited to "How old is the Earth?" and choosing to hold that out as an area where they do not apply science.

UPDATE: Of course, it's not just the Right that has its science problems. As a friend quipped on Facebook: "Rubio says he doesn't know the earth's age. Obama says he doesn't know when life begins." One of those is more likely than the other to result in making bad decisions.

Has Rome Overreacted to the LCRW?

So, you think you're a calm and balanced guy, and you read all these news stories about how the nuns are just "stunned" that Rome would investigate them. I mean, "stunned". How could the mean old Vatican investigate nuns?

Well, Thomas L. McDonald of God and the Machine gives us a little bit of an idea. He takes a look at the upcoming LCWR Assembly 2012 (to be held in August), and notes the keynote topic: "Mystery Unfolding: Leading in the Evolutionary Now" which will be delivered by Barbara Marx Hubbard. He takes a look at Barbara Marx Hubbard's site and finds the following:

It has become obvious that a creative minority of humanity is undergoing a profound inner mutation or transformation. Evolutionary ideas are not only serving to make sense of this change, but also acting to catalyze the potential within us to transform. (Thought creates; specific thought creates specifically.)

It is the planetary crisis into which we were born that is awakening our sleeping potential for transformation. Planet Earth has given birth to a species capable of choosing whether to consciously evolve ourselves and our social forms, or to continue the course we have set toward our own extinction. And the choice is clear.

All great spiritual paths lead us to this threshold of our own consciousness, but none can guide us across the great divide — from the creature human to the cocreative human. None can guide us in managing the vast new powers given us by science and technology. None of us have been there yet.

What we can envision

The enriched noosphere, the thinking layer of Earth, is now replete with evolutionary technologies that can transform the material world. Within the next 30 to 50 years, we could transform our physical bodies, our minds, our social structures, and set in motion the emergence of a new civilization.

Science: It is said that the power of quantum computing may increase exponentially in the next 50 years bordering on silicon-based life. At the same time biologists studying aging, cloning, and stem cells tell us we may reverse aging and gain a sort of immortality. One scientist writes, “We may live 600 years and only die by accident.”

Moving deeply into the nature of matter, students of zero point energy believe that we can tap into and use the infinite sea of energy that underlies everything. Furthermore, with nanotechnology we can build as nature does—atom by atom.

Expanding beyond the earth itself, space engineers envision the formation of an extraterrestrial sphere, much as hundreds of millions of years ago the biosphere was formed. We can live in an integrated Earth/Space environment restoring the Earth, freeing ourselves from hunger and poverty, exploring the vast untapped potential of human cocreativity.

Social systems: As we shift from maximum procreation to cocreation, the Feminine would be liberated from its restrictive roles, as men and women cocreate in a balanced way for the good of the larger human family. The Masculine would be released from its long-standing roles of patriarch and protector to discover the peace and ease of true relationship and cocreation.

Patterns of unification are set in motion already, as nonprofit, corporate, and governmental alliances are built around countless initiatives. Those that are successful are already witnessing the melting of borders and boundaries that have prevented successful compromise and negotiation in the past. Political events, like the fall of the Berlin wall, are foreshadowing the possibility of unification around the globe, and creating the hope that seemingly insurmountable problems may find yet find solutions.

Spiritual grounding: Jesus said, “These and even greater works shall you do.” We may actually be on the threshold of those abilities that Christ was able to do and that He foresaw as possibilities for us all. Specifically, the ability to use conscious intent, perhaps in conjunction with scientific and technological capacities, will allow us to create bodies sensitive to thought. We may find ourselves transforming the human body from its physical, animal, degenerating phase to a regenerating and evolving phase.

This capability would be the fulfillment of the words of St. Paul: “Behold I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in the twinkling of an eye at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound. This corruptible will become incorruptible. This mortal will put on immortality and death shall be swallowed up in victory.”

This would also be the emergence of what Alan Lithman calls, psyche materialis, and what the Bible calls, Adam of the quickening Spirit. [And so it was written: the first Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. (1 Cor. 15:45).]

Sri Aurobindo named the human being with this ability, the gnostic being; Teilhard de Chardin called it the ultra person; and I have selected the name, universal human and universal humanity. This type of human is a quantum jump beyond the species Homo sapiens. It is a new species that is incubating in millions now.

This is a Naissance; this is new for Earth — but it is not new for the universe. The name universal human is good because it connotes the reality that we are entering the phase of universal life.

Although we may never know what really happened, we do know that the story told in the Gospels is that Jesus’ resurrection was a first demonstration of what I call the post-human universal person. We are told that he did not die. He made his transition, released his animal body, and reappeared in a new body at the next level of physicality to tell all of us that we would do what he did. The new person that he became had continuity of consciousness with his life as Jesus of Nazareth, an earthly life in which he had become fully human and fully divine. Jesus' life stands as a model of the transition from Homo sapiens to Homo universalis.

Summary

Now millions of earthly humans from every spiritual tradition, from many social movements and scientific lineages of human inquiry, are evolving to the stage at which they recognize their soul, their higher self. They are becoming willing, even passionately desire, to be one with that Self. And as a critical mass of humans evolving toward their new capacities arise, humanity will undergo an unprecedented shifting in our entire way of being on this planet.

We are the generations born into this moment in history. Our powers are immense. We can destroy the earth as we know it, or alternatively, transform the material and societal limits of human life. We or our children may actually live to experience either the destruction of our life support systems (with unimaginable consequences for billions of people), or the literal transformation of our bodies from creature human life cycle to cocreative human life cycle. The choice is ours. [emphasis added]

That is what I would call some crazy-ass shit. But Thomas McDonald is classier, so he says "that’s not merely crazy: that’s weapons-grade crazy". I concur.

So. Is Rome over-reacting in thinking that there may be a few screws loose over at the LCWR? Nope. Not a bit.

There's Something To This DarwinCatholic Thing

Razib pulls some data from the General Social Survey and find that not only are Catholics more likely to consider the theory of evolution to be correct than Protestants, conservative Catholics are more likely to consider it correct than liberal Protestants. 58% of Catholics who also identify as politically conservative (and 71% of those who identify as politically liberal) agreed with the statement, "Humans beings developed from animals". However, only 26% of Protestants who identify as politically conservative and 53% of those who identify as politically liberal agreed with that statement.

It turns out, however, that race is a significant factor in the results. Many Protestants who are Black are politically liberal by reject evolution. If you filter the results on non-Hispanic whites, 65% of politically liberal Protestants consider evolution to be correct.

I'm a little surprised that so many Catholics actually doubt evolution, given that the Catholic Church has never been explicitly against the theory of evolution and Pope Pius XII specifically stated there was no conflict between the faith and evolution back in his encyclical Humani Generis back in 1950, something John Paul II echoed in his letter Truth Cannot Contradict Truth in 1996. However, since concern about evolution is fairly common among religious people in the US overall, it's probably not hugely surprising.

Evolution Creates No Break

I'd been holding onto this link waiting till I came up with some clever post expanding on it, but really James Chastek of Just Thomism covers the topic so well there's little to add:

we’re wasting all of our time talking about evolution when in fact our problem is more general. The Christian objection to evolution is identical in all relevant details to an objection against generation or reproduction. There’s no difference between the claim “our species arose from descent with modification, and therefore not from an act of special creation” and saying “I arose from the sexual activity of my parents, and therefore not from an act of special creation”. We know this is the case since Christians have had such an argument before, namely over traductionism, that is, the idea that since human being arose from the sexual activity of his parents, there was no need for an act of special creation to explain them. St Thomas treated this question at considerable length – there was a good deal of dispute about it in his day, and again in the Reformation period, and it was still a live topic during the Enlightenment – and all that’s changed in moving from traductionism to evolution is that gone from asking about any old person being generated from purely natural causes to asking about whether the first member(s) of some population arose from purely natural causes.

The objections that Christians legitimately have to evolution don’t concern evolution as such. We can flip this around and point out that an attempt show how theism and evolution are compatible also doesn’t concern evolution as such. Darwin’s theory and its various developments are not the problem: the problem of compatibility would be no different if Darwin, upon sailing to the Galapagos Islands, didn’t end up finding various lengths of finch beaks but instead found a large tree that grew new plant and animal species out of giant seed pods. The fundamental problem remains irrespective of whether nature generates the first member of some new population by seeds or by chance or by aliens. For that matter, the same problem would remain if all species have existed for an infinite time. The fundamental problem is whether natural science suffices to explain human beings.

This is just spot on. Somehow when people start worrying about evolution they seem to get the idea into their heads that there's something magical about species, such that it's okay for each individual creature to be the result of reproduction on the part of its parents, but it's not okay for speciation to be the result of reproduction within a population of creatures.

Clearly, we long ago came to the conclusion that we are God's creatures despite the fact that we are also the direct biological result of our parents having sex. Evolution really doesn't change this picture at all in any substantial way.

Many Parents, One Sin

This started out as a comment on Kyle Cupp's post, in which he asks about original sin in light of polygenism, however it quickly became clear I was writing too much for it to be a comment, and I haven't written a good post on the intersection of evolution and theology in a while, so I decided to turn it into a response post instead.

Just to frame up the question briefly, let me quote the same passage Kyle did from Pius XII's 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, in which Pius addresses the question of the Church's understanding of human origins in light of modern (evolutionary) science. In summary, Pius sees no conflict between a Catholic understanding of humanity and evolutionary science, but he does lay out one possible area of conflict:

When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

So while Pius XII is quite comfortable with the evolutionary account of human origins so long as there is one clear ancestral couple who were first infused by God with a soul, and who are described in the Bible in the story of Adam and Eve, he expresses grave reservations as to whether we can accept a view of human history in which not all humans are descended from a single ancestral couple, who fell and thus bequethed us original sin. However, as Kyle points out, modern evolutionary science (sixty years further down the road from Pius XII's encyclical) suggests with near certainty that there was at any given point in time a population of humans from whom the subsequent generation was descended -- there never was a population bottleneck after which all subsequent humans were descended from one ancestral couple. (There are single ancestors, and doubtless single ancestral couples, whom all modern humans share as an ancestors, "Mitochondrial Eve" and "Y-Chromosomal Adam" for example, but in the generations immediately after these individuals there were many humans who were not related to them. It was only over tens of thousands of years of genetic mixing that we reached a point where all humans shared those single ancestors.) Further, there is very strong genetic evidence that on a few (rare) occasions, archaic human populations in various parts of the world interbred with the ancestral modern human population which spread out of Africa and which all humans share. Thus, those of European descent have a tiny genetic contribution which appears likely to have derived from Neandertals, but people who no European ancestry do not share this genetic heritage. Thus, mixing with Neandertals clearly came at some point after the otherwise common origin of all humans.

Let me see if I can step back to the basic question here (whether our understanding of original sin is modified if we accept a scientific understanding that we are descended not just from one unique pair of original humans, but rather from a population of original humans) and take a run at it, because this is something which has always seemed pretty straight-forward to me whereas many people find it rather worrying. (Whether this means I have any particular insight on the matter, or if it simply means I'm theologically tone deaf, you shall have to tell me. I hesitate to find little difficulty where a recent pope found much -- but perhaps there are some areas in which the passage of time is helpful.)

If I were to summarize the doctrine of Original Sin as I undertand it, leaving all questions of evolution aside, I would say: Original Sin is a stain, defect, or corruption which marks the soul of every human born since the fall. We are born with it, and it inclines us to sin. All humans (Mary aside) have been born with Original Sin since the sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve.

Now, let us bring into mind the apparent scientific truth that there was never a single "first" human couple (at least in the biological sense) from whom all modern humans are descended, but rather that there was a small population of humans who are the ancestors of all of us, some descendants of whom on a few subsequent rare occasions appear to have mixed with some regional archaic human populations elsewhere in the world as they spread out.

What of the above definition of original sin would we need to change in light of this? To think about it, I'd like to break the definition into two parts:

a) Original Sin is a stain, defect, or corruption which marks the soul of every human born since the fall. We are born with it, and it inclines us to sin. All humans (Mary aside) have been born with Original Sin

b) since the sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve.

First let us address a). It seems to me that within a Catholic understanding of God's revelation to us, we probably do not need to see any problem with a) as a result of accepting a scientific account of the history of humanity in which there was never a single original couple whose children made up all the rest of humanity.

On the face of it, one might ask, "But if our understanding of original sin is derived from thinking that the story of Adam and Eve was a basically historical account, doesn't that mean that with Adam and Eve removed, we must revise our understanding of what original sin is, or if it exists at all?"

I think, however, if we take a Catholic approach to scripture and to Church teaching, this is not the case. First, we understand that the Bible consists of a number of genres and that they contain several levels of meaning. I would propose that the opening chapters of genesis belong to the genre of mythology. This does not mean (as some people seem to take the word to mean) that they are nice stories to read to children under the age of ten but are essentially false and of no relation to "reality". Rather, mythology is a way of expressing deep truths about ourselves and the world through a narrative which may well not be historically true. However, myths are not "just a story", nor are they "false". They're simply not meant to be true in the same way that a history book or a newspaper story is meant to be true.

While many in the history of the Church may have assumed (for lack of any reason to think otherwise) that the story of Adam and Eve (and other Genesis stories such as the story of Cain and Able and the story of Noah) was historically true -- our understanding of what scripture is does not require that we believe so. Further, as Catholics we believe that Christ instituted the Church in order to safeguard His teachings, and sent the Holy Spirit to guide the Church and protect her from teaching error.

Now, if original sin were just some theological gloss which people had proposed in order to explain certain elements of the Genesis story, then I could see proposing that it needed to be revised or abandoned given a change in our understanding of the genre and historical accuracy of parts of Genesis. However, original sin is clearly a doctrine of the Church which has been taught authoritatively since the time of the Church Fathers. If we believe at all that the Holy Spirit prevents the Church from teaching error, then clearly we can accept the Church's basic account of original sin as correct -- even if it was in part arrived as through taking a mythological narrative to be more historically accurate than it now appears to have been.

Because of this, it seems to me that everything contained in a) can be taken as true, regardless of whether one takes the story of Adam and Eve literally or mythologically.

Now as to b), here it seems that we have several possible ways we can consider the story of Adam and Eve as presented in Genesis in light of what we currently believe we understand about the history of the human species due to the discoveries of modern science.

1) We could hold that at some point in the distant past, God chose a single pair of humans and made them like himself by infusing them with immortal, rational and moral souls. These first parents fell in some way which was best described to God's chosen people through the Genesis story. Their children all had souls, and at some points interbred with the rest of the early human population, with the result that at some point in the still quite distant past all humans had "Adam and Eve" as one of their ancestors and possessed a soul.

2) We could hold that at some point in time God infused the entire population of humans with souls, and one couple from among them were tested and fell. Given this eventuality, one could hold either that 2.a) as a result of the sin of the representative couple, all humans were stained with original sin at once or 2.b) only the descendants of this fallen couple had original sin, but through some sequence of events, all of us are direct descendants of them. (It strikes me that this leaves the most room for a really fascinating set of fantasy novel plots.)

3) One could hold that they may well never have been a single couple who went through a fall, but that this mythological story was inspired or guided in development by the Holy Spirit in order to describe to the Israelites (and eventually to us) the fallen nature of humanity and the nature of humanities relationship with God. In this way of thinking, we pretty much have to admit that while there was clearly some "fall" at some point after humans came to have souls and be able to have a moral consciousness and awareness of God, and after which humanity possessed original sin and all that that entails, we really have no idea what it was that happened other than that God chose to describe it and its results to us via the story of Adam and Eve.

To the extent that I have an opinion on the matter, I might lean towards 3), but honestly I'm a bit hesitant to even pick one. This is in part because, given the stance outlined by Pius XII above, I don't want to head off in directions which are in any way incompatible with our Church, but more so because I really don't think that it matters. What we do have in Genesis is the story that God chose to place (or allow to develop, depending on how you want to look at it) in the sacred writings of His chosen people. As such, I'm fairly confident that it tells us what we need to know about our nature and our relationship with Him. And given that we, at this remove, have no way of actually finding out "what really happened", I can't see that it's worth speculating much over or putting deep thought into. After all, the best we could do is build our own "just so" story, based on what we think most likely, and unlike God, we don't have the benefit of having been there.

Ardi: Looking at the Latest Missing Link

Virtually everyone with any access to news last week probably heard about Ardi, a 4.4 million year old skeleton of a human ancestor found in Ethiopia. However, given the tendency of the mainstream media to cover every ancient primate discovery as "Scientists discover 'missing link' which 'changes everything'" those who don't track these things can easily become confused, or even rather suspicious of the whole thing.

So, what is Ardi, and why is this discovery a big deal?

Ardi is a 45% complete skeleton of a female individual from the hominin species Ardipithecus ramidus. This is not a new species: we've known about Ardipithecus ramidus since a small number of bones from a member of the species was found in 1992 and formally described and named in 1994. Living about 4.4 million years ago, Ardipithecus ramidus is also not the oldest human ancestor known or a common ancestor between humans and our apparent closest genetic living relatives, the chimps. However, the excitement about Ardi (found along with less complete remains of a number of other Ardipithecus ramidus individuals and also fossil evidence about the plants and animals present in their environment) is not just hype. It is a very important find. Here's why:

Very Complete, Very Old
Invariably, Ardi has been compared to the other famous hominid find, Lucy who made headlines back in the 70s. However, Ardi is both more complete than Lucy and also over a million years older. Lucy was a 40% complete skeleton, about 3.2 million years old, belonging to the species Australopithecus afarensis.

We have a few fossil finds from hominid species which are older than Ardi, but we don't know nearly as much about these species because the finds are much more fragmentary. Sahelanthropus tschadensis lived 6-7 million years ago, but the only fossils found so far of it are a partial skull. Orrorin tugenensis lived 6 million years ago, but all we have is a leg bone and a few fragments. So while basically all we know about these earlier species is that we have a few scraps of bone from a creature that looks to be a hominid and doesn't belong to any other known species, we now have a very clear idea of what Ardipithecus ramidus looked like, and thus what hominids living 4.4 million years ago were like.

A Missing Link
Is Ardi a "missing link"? Well, she (and the other remains found in the same place -- much more partial remains of 35 other individuals) is certainly a missing link in the sense that these fossils provide us with a lot of fascinating information about a certain stage in hominid evolution. But there is no single "missing link" in the hominid ancestry chain. Fossils of primates in general are so rare that piecing together the more distant periods of human ancestry is very, very hard. While the charts we see in books and articles suggest seamless lines of descent, the actual evidence we have is often quite fragmentary, and even the links of the chain that we do have are often only partial. One stage or even a whole species may be represented by only a partial skull or most of a leg -- enough to tell it's different from known species, but not enough to have a very complete picture of the species. The below chart (excuse my poor freehand drawing skills) shows the problem, and why there's often dispute among biologists as to where the actual branches are, and whether we're descendants or cousins of some hominid species.

What is often referred to as "the missing link" is the hope of finding a species which appears to be a direct ancestor of both modern chimps and modern humans. Ardipithecus ramidus is not such a link, and indeed, some researchers are suggesting that Ardi points to that common ancestor being more ancient that previously believed.

What Ardi Tells Us
One of the most interesting things about Ardi is what she seems to indicate about human/chimp divergence. It had been widely assumed at one point that the common ancestor between humans and primates probably looked a lot like a chimp. Our DNA shows that we're closely related to chimps, and because we often have difficulty not thinking about evolution in terms of "progress" (especially when we're talking about ourselves) it's natural to think of chimps as the "ancient" form and to talk about "humans evolving from chimps".

Lucy knocked a bit of a hole in this thinking back in the 70s by showing that upright posture went back to Australopithecus afarensis 3+ million years ago, putting to rest the already crumbling idea that hominids prior to Homo erectus had been "knuckle draggers".

Now we have Ardi, who despite having a big toe that would have allowed her to grip things thing her feet, has a pelvis and legs which are clearly adapted to walking upright 4.4 million years ago. Even the leg bones we have from Orrorin tugenensis 6 million years ago appear to suggest a bi-pedal posture (though it's harder to know from such incomplete remains). So with Ardi's well preserved skeleton for confirmation, it's starting to look very much like human ancestors have been bipedal for a very long time. Large brains and other adaptations are later, but it would appear that it may have been the chimps and gorillas who developed adaptations for arboreal life, and in the process shifted to walking on all fours and putting weight on the knuckles of their hands -- rather than these being features that our ancestors shed.

Ardi did have proportionally much longer arms than more modern human ancestors, and her fingers were long for gripping branches. Her feet could still grip better than ours can (though not as well as modern great apes). Her brain was about the same size as that of a chimp, and she stood about four feet tall (the height of my seven-year-old.) But while she probably did not possess any of the traits that we see as uniquely human (language, higher consciousness, reason, complex tool-making, etc.) she looked less "like an ape" than expectations would have been in the past.

For more detailed information, the following are interesting links:

At long last, meet Ardipithecus ramidus

Ardipithecus: We Meet At Last

And if you really want the mother lode, the journal Science (which put out a special issue with all the original research papers on Ardi) has taken the unprecedented step of making all of the papers available on their site if you fill out a free registration. The Science Magazine Ardipithecus site is here.

Well, Good Luck With That

I have the feeling that readers have emailed me about this site a couple times before, and I left it without comment because some topics seem like shooting fish in a barrel for a blog with the tagline "Because most philosophies that frown on reproduction don't survive." However there comes a point when fish who choose to live in barrels deserve to come under fire.

Meet the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It's a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. We're not just a bunch of misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster strikes humans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Voluntary human extinction is the humanitarian alternative to human disasters.

We don't carry on about how the human race has shown itself to be a greedy, amoral parasite on the once-healthy face of this planet. That type of negativity offers no solution to the inexorable horrors which human activity is causing.

Rather, The Movement presents an encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth's ecology.

As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens... us.

Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom.

When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth's biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Nature's "experiments" have done throughout the eons.

Now, VHEMT does indeed answer my question of whether their ideas will just die out:

Q: Won’t VHEMT die out when all its members die off?

If an idea lacks enough merit to be passed on without being force-fed from an early age, it probably deserves to be forgotten.

Awareness isn’t passed along in our genes. Every VHEMT Volunteer or Supporter is the result of a breeding couple, and yet we have all decided to stop reproducing. Often, we arrived at this conclusion independently and without support from friends and family.

The concept of voluntary human extinction has a life of its own. It’s an idea whose time has come, though it may be a little late.

I suppose the only way to settle this matter definitively is through a very long term empirical experiment that none of us would live to see the end up, but this strikes me as being in conflict with the basic nature of the human creature. I'm going to intentionally leave any religious angle out of this discussion (from the deeply klutzy attempts on the VHEMT site to justify their position based on all major world religions, it's pretty clear they don't "get" religion to any real degree) and just speak naturalistically -- which for Catholics can be a stand-in for natural law.

Ironically, in an age in which materialism (in the sense of the belief that the physical world is "all there is") is increasingly common, people seem quite often to hold beliefs about the human person which ignore our fundamental nature as a biological species, albeit a aware and rational one. So for instance, VHEMT provides the following FAQ and response:

Q: What about the human instinct to breed?

Humans, like all creatures, have urges which lead to reproduction. Our biological urge is to have sex, not to make babies. Our "instinct to breed" is the same as a squirrel's instinct to plant trees: the urge is to store food, trees are a natural result. If sex is an urge to procreate, then hunger's an urge to defecate.

Culturally-induced desires can be so strong that they seem to be biological, but no evolutionary mechanism for an instinct to breed exists. Why do we stop breeding after we've had as many as we want? If the instinct is to reproduce, how are so many of us able to over ride it? There are too many who have never felt that urge: mutations don't occur in this high a percentage of a population.

Looking to our evolutionary roots, imagine Homo erectus feeling the urge to create a new human. He then has to understand that a cavewoman is needed, sexual intercourse must be engaged in, and they will have to wait nine months.

Um, no. Squirrels and nuts have a symbiotic relationship, but animals do not have a symbiotic relationship with themselves that happens to result in procreation. The entire purpose of a biological species is to perpetuate itself. The reason that we have sexual organs is that this is how we produce descendants. Not only to human beings have a natural urge to reproduce, that is, from a biological point of view, our sole purpose.

One of the fatal problems with this "voluntary extinction" idea from a strictly naturalistic point of view is that it asks humans to do something which no species is meant to do, something which cries out against any species' reason for being. Telling people as a group not a reproduce is like telling people to kill themselves by holding their breath -- it's something we're naturally designed not to do. The idea doesn't just violate our moral notions, it violates the several billion years of evolutions since sexual reproduction first appeared.

As rational creatures with an understanding of the long range implications of our actions, and an appreciation for the beauty of nature, it's appropriate and necessary for us to consider the impact of our civilization on the planet. While other species may have no other option than to follow nature's boom and bust cycle of eating everything available until famine hits and the population dies down to sustainable levels, we rightly seek to make use of our reason to avoid needless destruction and suffering.

However, whether one looks at us from a religious perspective as made in the image and likeness of God, from a philosophical perspective as being unique creatures on the Earth in our capacity to reason, or from a biological perspective as simply another species of large-brained vertebrates, it is the natural purpose of human being to strive to preserve our species and assure it's flourishing -- not in a way that wrecks havoc on the planet (though I think our planet is much more elastic in its ability to survive change than many of its would be protectors give it credit for), both out of an anthropomorphic desire to see other creatures flourish as we do and because we are in the end dependant on the flourishing of our planet, but nonetheless our flourishing as a species is clearly one of our central purposes as a species, and any attempt to act contrary to that is a fundamental denial of what we are. It stems, I suspect, from a tendency to treat human persons as minds, rather than as the full combination of self-aware mind and natural, biological creature. This allows people to think of humans as something which is out of step with the rest of nature -- an alien influence which should voluntarily purge itself so that things can go back to "normal". The thing is, extraordinary though we may be, we are part of Earth's "normal", the result of its history and a species seeking to assure our flourishing just like any other.

Ida and the Missing Link

If you follow science headlines at all, you have doubtless heard about Ida, the diminutive 40 million year old primate who was unveiled to the world this week with nearly unprecedented publicity. Google even got into the excitement with an Ida-themed Google header.

So, what's so special about this find? Is it the "missing link" in human evolutionary history as many mainstream news headlines have suggested?

Well, to the extent that "the missing link" is coloqually used to refer to the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimps, not even close. Ida is more than four times older. Any most paleontologists still aren't sure that the species she belongs to is in our line of ancestry at all. This graphic from the New Scientist shows visually what's being argued about here. What is very much news here is that Ida may help answer some questions about the very, very early history of primates, when the ancestors of modern apes, monkeys and humans were diverging from those of modern lorises and lemurs. However, that's not as exciting a story, so the media seems to be blunding about in the fashion they often do in reporting any specialized field.

The other thing that's incredibly exciting about Ida is that she is an unusually well-preserved fossil, which among early primates is especially rare. (Given that good fossilization requires being quickly covered in fine sediment somewhere like a gentle river, you can see why tree dwelling creatures wouldn't get the treatment very often.) Ida was covered, immediately after her untimely demise, by solf volcanic ash which left a fossil which is 95% complete, fully articulated, and includes prints of her fur and organs.

The precise composition of the volcanic deposits in which Ida was found even allowed preservation of her soft tissue. “You can see the fur, the ears, all of the gut contents [leaves and a fruit], all the fingertips and toes,” Smith says.

Smith and her colleagues were able to guess Ida’s age based on the fossil’s teeth. “She was just turning over and replacing her baby teeth in the front of her face, and the molars were coming in the back,” Smith says. Because Ida had many teeth forming at the same time, Smith thinks the primate must have grown up fast, developing much quicker than a human would. Ida died before she was 1 year old, Smith and her colleagues suggest. Comparisons with a similar animal, the squirrel monkey, led the researchers to guess that Ida might have lived for 15 or 20 years had she not met an early demise.

This has allowed us to get an unusually accurate view of what this early primate looked like. She's rather fetching, really.

The full paper on her (from which that sketch comes) can be found here.

Children of the Corn

Here to the north of Austin, we live in an odd patchwork of new neighborhood, business parks and shopping malls interspersed with open fields. Cattle graze in the field next to our supermarket, and corn grows cross the street from our bank.

Seeing the orderly fields of corn, I'd never realized that corn represents an intriguing mystery in regards to plant evolution and the history of humanity's interaction with the plants we live off of. First domesticated in Central America around 7000 years ago, corn as we find it today is a domestic-only plant in that it is virtually incapable of reproducing in the wild.

One of the characteristics of corn that makes it such a useful crop is the incredibly high return of kernels harvested to kernels planted. Biologically, one of the reasons for this abundance is that unlike other grasses which have been domesticated as agricultural grains, the corn cob forms halfway down on the plan, closer to sources of water and nutrients, and thus the plant is able to put more energy into seed growth. In other cereals, the seeds are at the very top of the stalk, at the plant's farthest extremety.

Another great feature of corn is that the cob is covered by a husk, which largely protects the grain from pests. It pretty much requires a creature with opposable thumbs to get the husk off, which means you loose less of the grain prior to harvest. Plus, the kernels are well-rooted into the cob, as compared to grains like wheat where the ripe seeds can easily fall from the ear of grain.

However, all of this -- particularly the firmness of the kernels in the cob and the husk covering it -- means that if there are no humans to harvest the corn, very, very little of it will succeed in naturally reseeding. If a cornfield were abandoned before harvest and you returned in five years to see if any wild corn was left growing, you would probably find few to no corn plants.

This means that corn as we find it today must be biologically fairly different from the corn ancestor which Central Americans first found in the wild and domesticated. The predominant theory out there is that corn is descended from the grass called teosinte which is found in Mexico even today, but the differences between the two plants are extensive, though there is enough genetic similarity to make it pretty clear they are related. Teosinte grains is far out on the extremities of a banching stalk, the grains are covered by hard outer covering (like the chaff of wheat), the grains are not strongly rooted in a cob-like structure, and they are not covered by a husk that remains closed.

The National Science Foundation has a nice comparison here:


The prevailing theory at the moment is apparently that teosinte underwent a series of major mutations during a very short period of time which resulted in the corn we see today. I find that a bit unsatisfying, since series of major, conventient, stable mutations are hard to come by. Thus I was interested to find this article about Prof. Mary Eubanks of Duke University, who has been working on the theory that corn as we know it today is the result of multiple hybridizations between teosinte and another wild grass called tripsacum. She's developed a hybrid of tripsacum and modern corn which exhibits many of the properties of the ancient ears of corn dating back 5000+ years that have been found in caves in Mexico. Apparently she has pretty decent genetic evidence for this as well by now.

While I'm not remotely an expert, I must admit to finding the hybridization explanation somewhat more convincing on the face of it than the sudden large mutation explanation. And I had never realized that corn was so interesting.

Catholics and Evolution

This was originally intended to be a comment on the post below regarding "folk science", responding to Karie's request for books dealing with evolution from a Catholic perspective. However, it was getting so long I figured it might as well be a post instead.

I have not, as of yet, read the books that Geoffrey recommends, though several of them are ones that I am eager to read -- notably the collection of papers from the conference on evolution and creation which Benedict XVI sponsored last year (and now available in English from Ignatius.)

There is, in my opinion, a dearth of good material on "evolution from a Catholic perspective" which is accessible to the average reader. The reason for this is, so far as I can tell, that for many of those with a solid understanding of the topic, it does not seem like much of a controversy for Catholics, while many of those who are most urgent to frame the debate for other Catholics are those who are concerned that evolution represents some particular threat to the faith.

At the risk of being pedantic (a risk to which I am all too prone) I'd like to try to sketch very briefly how it seems to me the issue should be viewed by Catholics before listing off a couple of books.

There are, so far as I can tell, three reasons that people worry about evolution from a religious perspective:

1) Scriptural -- For those with a certain approach to biblical exegesis, it seems necessary to believe that all plants and animals were created within a short period of time and that nothing ever died before Adam's fall. For these folks, the billion year plus history of life presented by evolution is a major problem.

2) Philosophical -- Many Catholic thinkers look at terms used by modern biologists such as "undirected evolution" and "random mutation" and take it that evolution as a biological theory requires a philosophical stance that denies God's knowledge and creative power. They have no problem in principle with an ancient earth or with common descent, but they fear that evolutionary theory requires an acceptance of radically materialistic philosophy. This is also fed by:

3) Guilt by Association -- Many of the most well known biologists of the last 150 years have been atheists, and some of the most outspoken attackers of religion today (e.g. Richard Dawkins) are professional biologists. Given point two above, this tends to make people even more concerned that there is something fundamentally dangerous about evolutionary theory.

Point one has never been a great Catholic hang up because it is based on an approach to biblical interpretation which is generally not ours. However, if one wants to look at the question of how Catholics should deal with the creation account in Genesis, you won't get much better than Pope Benedict's commentary on the Creation Account. Catholics have long held that the Bible and science are eminently compatible -- a point on which Galileo extensively quotes St. Augustine in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina.

Point two is where the most worry goes on these days, fueled to a great degree by point three. (Guilt by association is not, of course, a valid reason to take anything to be false in the realm of science, but it's an easy enough worry to get into given that so many apologists for atheism are running around loudly claiming that evolution has proved that there is no God.)

Perhaps the most famous example in regards to point two is some Cardinal Schonborn's writing, including his famous NY Times editorial, and several articles in First Things. Now, I agree with nearly everything that Schonborn says, except that he at time seems to suggest (and I don't know if this is just a matter of translation or a confusion that sometimes creeps into his writing) that the modern "neo-Darwinian" synthesis in biology somehow contains (or can contain) philosophical assumptions of randomness and lack of direction which are contrary to the faith.

Now, certainly, many individual scientists base their claims that the world is random and without direction (in the philosophical sense of the terms) on their understanding of biology, but in my opinion (and Cardinal Schonborn expresses this as well in some other parts of his writing) it is not in fact possible for science to produce or support philosophical positions such as these, except to the degree it may make one feel they are plausible.

People often think of science as telling us how the world actually is, but in fact, the scientific method is simply designed to allow us to make accurate predictive models of how physical systems governed by physical laws will act in the future. As such, it is fundamentally incapable of speaking to issues like whether the universe has a purpose, is moving in some intended direction, or is "random" in the philosophical sense of the term.

All that said, I don't currently have any books that deal with issues two and three from a Catholic perspective. I would, however, strongly recommend anything written in First Things about evolution by either Stephen M. Barr or Fr. Edward T. Oakes.

Stephen M. Barr's book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith deals with the relationship between modern science and a proper Catholic understanding of God's role in providing order in the universe (and the inability of materialist philosophies to explain this on their own) but it's primarily about physics and astronomy in that regard, not biology.

Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God presents some good critiques of the science that goes into "Intelligent Design", but I didn't find it fully satisfying at a theological level. (Miller is a Catholic biologist.)

My own approach tends to be that one doesn't really need a Catholic book on evolution, so long as one had a proper Catholic understanding of the place of the physical sciences in the overall hierarchy of knowledge. If one has a clear idea of what science can and can't do, evolution as a theory doesn't present any particular worry from a Catholic point of view.

Folk Science and Self Deception

SF Matheson of Quintessence of Dust had an interesting post up last week about what he terms "folk science".

Months ago, I was worrying about how to characterize creationist statements that are untrue or misleading. The claims in question are not merely false (mistakes of various kinds can generate falsehood) and are not statements of opinion with which I disagree. They are claims that are demonstrably false but have been asserted by people who are certain (or likely) to know this. In other words, they bear the marks of duplicity. I said:

As a Christian, I am scandalized and sickened by nearly all creationist commentary on evolution. But I'm not a misanthrope, and so I find it hard to believe that so many people could be so overtly dishonest.

So I proposed the term 'folk science' as a way to refer to belief-supporting statements that sound scientific but do not seek to communicate scientific truth. I have two goals in my practice of using this phrase: 1) I recognize folk science as a particular type of argumentation, and I want to be able to accurately identify it as such; and 2) I want to create space within which I can identify falsehood, and especially falsehood that seeks to mislead, without making unwarranted accusations.

Part of the problem that Matheson is trying to grapple with is that, as a Christian who knows something about science, reading creationist or ID "science" often leaves you wondering how such egregious errors or ommissions could be passed off so blithely if not through clear intent to deceive. Matheson is hesitant to use the word "lying", because he suspects that these people are not being intentionally dishonest. And yet, many of them are at least moderately well educated in their fields and are peddling interpretations and claims which can be disproved with only a few minutes worth of research with decent sources.

If these people aren't lying, and they're stating things so obviously wrong, what exactly is going on?

I think the root problem here is that very often when dealing with issues surrounding evolution, creationism/ID apologists are coming to the table with a preconceived answer and simply looking for evidence to support that answer. With creationism, the answer is biblically derived. With ID, it's built into the "if we can throw doubt on how a system evolved, that proves it was designed" false dichotomy which is at the root of the whole ID claim.

Either way, however, the apologist has a structure already clearly built in his head for which he merely has to pick up a few supportied pieces of evidence -- rather like the undergraduate paper-writer who first writes his text and then does some "research" in order to pull in three footnotes per paragraph supporting his thesis.

Of course, practitioners of all disciplines are subject to this affliction. If one is searching history for proof that the Church is a force or repression or that women are smarter than men or that all of Western knowledge was stollen from Africa, one of course finds it. A sufficient degree of certainty as to result allows one to only notice the evidence the supports your thesis, and to discard everything else as either irrelevant or probably the result of one's ideological opponents dishonesty.

Apparent dishonesty of the sort that Matheson highlights among creationsts (if you want to see examples of just a few howlers, click through to his article above, he's quite concrete) is, thus, a result not of an explicit attempt to decieve, but rather of a set of preconceived notions so strongly held do that one can easily deceive oneself -- finding only supporting evidence and ignoring all evidence to the contrary.

My own favorite anecdote in this regard (and my apologies if I've trotted this out here before -- I fear I may well have) dates from my time at Steubenville, when I found myself in debate with a part time Classics lecturer who'd written several articles for Catholic magazines advocating Intelligent Design theory. (He's since gone on to become a fellow at the Discovery Institute and a prolific writer.) He asserted that the fossil record contained absolutely no evidence for evolution, and refered, if memory serves, to gaps like that between whales and their land-dwelling ancestors. Species were always so different, he asserted, it was impossible to imagine one was descended from another.

I pointed out that in less exciting (and far more frequently preserved) species such as mollusks, the sequential species in the fossil record were so closely and clearly similar that the species divisions seemed almost arbitrary. Without missing a beat he responded, "Maybe, but no one cares about mollusks."

At the time, this struck me as a clear disregard for facts and an interest only in scoring rhetorical wins based on the famous "gaps", and there may well have been some of that involved, but looking back based on Matheson's take (and a the calmness of past years) I think it was more simply that the whale gap fit with the worldview he was already totally committed to, and since the mollusks didn't, he assumed that they must not be very important.

When Creationism, Faith and Reality Collide

Stephen Matheson of Quintessence of Dust has a thoughtful post up about the painful process that Christians raised with creationism as a central faith tenet often go through as they realize that the "evidence" for young earth creationism is false.

Pinker & Morality

Stephen Pinker graced last Sunday's New York Times Magazine with a lengthy article titled "The Moral Instinct". In it, he seeks to explain (and applaud) recent research by psychologists, "evolutionary psychologists" (a term I use with roughly the same appreciation as Stephen Jay Gould did) and neuroscientists into the origins of morality.

(Many thanks to the reader who sent the article along and went a couple rounds of discussion on it with me via email.)

Working from the basic assumption that morality consists of a set of emotional/psychological urgings and repugnances which find their origin in humanity's evolutionary past, those investigating the moral instinct have tried to classify sets of moral reactions and speculate on how these might have come to be. Though lengthy, Pinker keeps things spiced up with illustrations and dilemmas. However, many of these seem to assume a very un-reflected view of morality -- on where moral "thought" is basically a matter of gut urgings which one is at a loss to explain. For instance, when talking about taboos Pinkers provides the following examples:

Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with her brother Mark. One night they decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. Julie was already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel closer to each other. What do you think about that — was it O.K. for them to make love?

A woman is cleaning out her closet and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.

A family’s dog is killed by a car in front of their house. They heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cook it and eat it for dinner.

Most people immediately declare that these acts are wrong and then grope to justify why they are wrong. It’s not so easy. In the case of Julie and Mark, people raise the possibility of children with birth defects, but they are reminded that the couple were diligent about contraception. They suggest that the siblings will be emotionally hurt, but the story makes it clear that they weren’t. They submit that the act would offend the community, but then recall that it was kept a secret. Eventually many people admit, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.” People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.

Two things strike me in this set of examples:

First, Pinker assumes that any rationale behind moral prohibitions must be pragmatic. All possible reasons provided for disapproving of incest are pragmatic, and the example is formulated in order to foil these sorts of objections. From his overall tone, I think this reflects an assumption (indeed, probably a deeply held belief) on Pinker's part that moral objections to something must, at root, be pragmatic and physical in their repercussions. If he'd posed the incest question to me, my response would have been something along the lines of, "It was wrong because their action violated the inherent meanings both of the relationship between siblings and the meaning of sex/relationship between lovers." I have a feeling that Pinker would see that as just being a fancy way of saying, "I don't like it", but that simply serves to underscore the fact that we'd be talking about different things in regards to morality.

Second, he doesn't seem to take into account any difference between inherent meaning and cultural meaning. Using the flag as a dustcloth and eating the family pet are both violate senses of respect and meaning which are cultural in nature. The flag does not have an inherent meaning. However, using it as a dustrag is offensive because of certain cultural understandings both of what the flag means and what using a piece of cloth as a dustrag means. Similarly, the relationship of family to pet and the prohibition of eating pets are cultural. Incest and sex outside of marriage, however, violate inherent relationship types which cross cultural bounds. (This is not to say that all cultures necessarily share a prohibition against incest, though certainly most do, but rather that the relationship of "siblings" is something inherent to the human person, and that relationship inherently does not include "someone you have sex with".)

Pinker realizes he's playing with fire here, and concedes that many may see trying to develop an evolutionary understanding of morality as explaining it away:

And “morally corrosive” is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them. Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested — to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.

However, he goes on to try to argue that discerning the evolutionary origins of morality will in fact reveal certain very real norms:

In his classic 1971 article, Trivers, the biologist, showed how natural selection could push in the direction of true selflessness. The emergence of tit-for-tat reciprocity, which lets organisms trade favors without being cheated, is just a first step. A favor-giver not only has to avoid blatant cheaters (those who would accept a favor but not return it) but also prefer generous reciprocators (those who return the biggest favor they can afford) over stingy ones (those who return the smallest favor they can get away with). Since it’s good to be chosen as a recipient of favors, a competition arises to be the most generous partner around. More accurately, a competition arises to appear to be the most generous partner around, since the favor-giver can’t literally read minds or see into the future. A reputation for fairness and generosity becomes an asset.

He goes on to argue that both the necessity of cooperation suggested by the iterative variation of the prisoner's dilemma and the golden rule as a means to persuading others to treat you nicely are moral norms that have been hardwired into humanity by evolution.

Many may find that they want something a bit more, when it comes to morality. Sure, in a society with certain assumptions (notably an idea that people are inherently or functionally equal) it may be the case that most people will benefit most of the time by treating others as they want to be treated and cooperating rather than betraying, but "most people most of the time" is not exactly what the majority of people seek when they look to "morality".

Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. They certainly aren’t in the physical world like wavelength or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.

Moral realism, as this idea is called, is too rich for many philosophers’ blood. Yet a diluted version of the idea — if not a list of cosmically inscribed Thou-Shalts, then at least a few If-Thens — is not crazy. Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.

Will all due respect, Pinker was sleeping through his Plato class. Plato didn't argue that morality couldn't come from God, rather he argued that "the Good" must always be singular. It can't simply be "what pleases the gods"; especially when you have a bunch of bickering gods who often do things ever their devotees regard as immoral. This is one of the reasons that Christians so readily embraced Plato, because they saw his singular "the Good" which remained untouched and eternal above the strife of the pagan deities as being a close approximation to the one, good and eternal God of Jewish/Christian revelation.

But sticking to the realm of human reason -- does he present a good reason for rejecting a Platonic approach to morality? Well, it's "too rich for many philosophers’ blood". Are we to take that as much of anything more than, "They don't like it"? This certainly seems to underline the idea that faith is an act of the will as much as the intellect.

Plato held that we often know truths without recognizing it, until those truths are drawn out of us. Pinker seems to be suffering from something of a lack of drawing out in his reactions to morality.

On the one hand, he wants to see morality as a biological/psychological phenomenon: a set of basic rules for how primates best get along together which has been programmed into us through countless generations of human social interaction. He boils these down to rules basic enough to be acceptable to modern culture "be fair to other people", "treat others as you want them to treat you", etc. But then in his closing he attempts to use this to make all sorts of absolute assertions: Being against human cloning is irrational. Homosexual relationships are okay. Racism is bad.

And yet, none of these can be conclusively derived from the rules which he has decided to keep. And indeed, nothing can be conclusively derived from them, since the very nature which he assigns to morality is one of "society functions best if most people do X" rather than "everyone must do X".

The fact is, Pinker himself is not comfortable with certain things he despises (racism, genocide, sexism, homophobia) being only wrong some of the time, or only wrong for some people, and yet in the end he cannot come up with an explanation of strictly psychological/biological morality which shows that it always and everywhere wrong to violate his preferred norms of behavior. The understanding of morality he puts forth allows him to discard those norms that he doesn't like, but it doesn't allow him to retain those that he does.