The Wisdom of the Liminal

Evolution and Other Animals in Human Becoming

Celia Deane-Drummond

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781467442084
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

A sophisticated theological anthropology that takes into account evolutionary theories and our relationships to other animals In this book Celia Deane-Drummond charts a new direction for theological anthropology in light of what is now known about the evolutionary trajectories of humans and other animals. She presents a case for human beings becoming fully themselves through their encounter with God, after the pattern of Christ, but also through their relationships with each other and with other animals. Drawing on classical sources, particularly the work of Thomas Aquinas, Deane-Drummond explores various facets of humans and other animals in terms of reason, freedom, language, and community. In probing and questioning how human distinctiveness has been defined using philosophical tools, she engages with a range of scientific disciplines, including evolutionary biology, biological anthropology, animal behavior, ethology, and cognitive psychology. The result is a novel, deeply nuanced interpretation of what it means to be distinctively human in the image of God.

Chapter One

Human Becoming and Being:
Theological Starting Points

What might be the possible starting points for a theological discussion of humanity? Given the plethora of possible approaches, and to clarify what this book is about, I will set forth the parameters limiting my discussion. In attempting a theological account of the human, it would be relatively easy to restrict attention to a purely religious or ecclesial context in which human beings are situated and work to flesh out what the particular vocation of humanity might be as those called to live in obedient relationship with God. Certainly, when understood in terms of Christian discipleship, a rich account of what human identity might mean cannot be situated apart from reflection on the Eucharist and the dynamic involvement of the Holy Spirit in the Christian community, and more specifically apart from an ecclesial setting. While I recognize the importance of such reflections, I prefer to consider such a development as an aspect of pneumatology, rather than a theological anthropology, simply because the former pneumatological account, it seems to me, depends on a prior consideration of the creaturely context in which human beings are situated.

Similarly, when reflecting on the significance of evolution for understanding humanity, one possible methodological approach would be to narrow attention to accounts of religious origins in evolutionary terms, rather than attempt a broader framework of creaturely becoming and being. In this chapter, I will set out the broad epistemological premise that I will assume in this book, while also situating the discussion in the context of current debates on the evolution of religion. I will argue that we need to be rather more self-­aware in acknowledging that theological anthropology depends on an analysis of those features that make up the human condition in a way that takes account of the particular cultural aspects that shape human self-­perception. Further, once cultural aspects of that condition permit inclusivity with respect to other animals, this raises questions about the exclusivity of an anthropological focus in theological terms.

Throughout this book, my working assumption is that theologians need to go beyond a rather stale appropriation of human evolution as simply “post-­neo-­Darwinian,” conceived in narrowly genetic terms, and engage more rigorously with some of the lively current debates and emerging paradigms in evolutionary anthropology. Such debates explore the fuzzy biological and social boundary in human becoming, thus resisting either extremes of social constructivist or genetic determinist models.1 But this also means that instead of viewing human becoming in terms of one trajectory related to the sociocultural or biological paradigms, characterized loosely as the nurture/nature divide, it is viewed in terms of “a myriad of entangled agents in the processes of human becoming.”2 This makes the interrogative task with evolutionary theory far more difficult than if one or another aspect was isolated to the exclusion of other factors. Such a technique of oversimplification has characteristically prevailed in those evolutionary psychological approaches that aim for an “optimal end point” in order to explain human becoming in evolutionary terms.3 Traditional evolutionary theories that focus, then, on “design” features that are crafted by natural selection are rapidly becoming outdated. Modern human bipedalism as an end point in identifying what “kind” human beings might be, for example, is being challenged by a recognition of a much slower process of change in upper-­ and lower-­body morphology in Miocene apes that spent considerable time in the trees.4 Optimal models assume “cultural” information as input and behavior as output, rather than taking proper account of the way behavior both shapes and is shaped by the ecological and social context, the bio-­sociocultural niche. Hence, in the first place, there are more evolutionary factors involved than genetic evolution alone; rather, what might be called multiple systems of inheritance are important, so that genetic, behavioral, epigenetic, and what might be termed symbolic inheritance pathways all contribute to evolutionary change.5 In the second place, bio-­sociocultural approaches stress the dynamic processes of becoming human in a way that is still ongoing, rather than assuming a static, universally evolved end point at some time in evolutionary history. These factors, I suggest, open the door for a more positive way to interpret the kind of symbolic becoming that is characteristic of theological interpretations of human beings in a way that does not require a genetic correlate. Moreover, this new way of perceiving human becoming places considerable significance on the importance of human agency.

So far, I have deliberately avoided use of the term “human nature,” not least because of the considerable philosophical confusion such terminology commonly elicits.6 As indicated above, most biologists, inasmuch as the species boundaries are becoming more fluid, especially in an evolutionary perspective, are reluctant to view “natures” in a hard or essentialist manner. This shift, combined with a closer recognition of human beings sharing in facets of animality, and even perhaps vice versa, means that the sharp boundaries between humans and other animals that have been constructed for theological and/or cultural reasons seem less necessary to maintain. Philosopher Mary Midgley recognized the importance of this boundary and the need to stress human continuities with other animals in her pioneer work first published over thirty-­five years ago in 1978, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature.7 In this book she makes a strong case for stressing continuities between humans and other animals rather than differences. The denial of the existence of human nature from social scientists and empiricist philosophers alongside equally vocal advocates from a biological perspective gave way to sociobiological forms that are still influential in current evolutionary theory. Midgley found it surprising that it was necessary to reissue her book nearly twenty years later in 1995. What would surprise her even further is that another twenty years later such debates continue. The difference, however, is that the environmental wave that stressed cooperation is now becoming integrated into evolutionary biology as such, and thus changing the shape of evolutionary biology. The sociobiological narrative of selfishness is not the only evolutionary narrative in contemporary discussion. The temptation for theologians might be to choose to ignore the complexity of evolutionary biology entirely and insist on a purely theological view of the human person in detachment from any scientific knowledge. Yet, while this solves one problem, it introduces another one, a bigger elephant in the room: it is in our ability to detach from our cultural context that one facet of human distinctiveness shows up, but we cannot deny our creaturely evolutionary origins and current shared interspecific dependencies because to do so would be to deny our God-­given creatureliness as such.

But all these questions focus on human uniqueness vis-­à-­vis other creatures, on the question, what is special and different about human beings? Another common trend among those interested in “human nature” is the search to find universal human social, behavioral, and physiological characteristics across different cultures and societies. As I indicated above, the attempt to find such human universals in terms of “design” features is becoming rapidly outdated; the complexity of variation within groups and individual variation as part of the matrix of natural selection means that even talk of “universal” characteristics among evolutionary scientific positivists is less convincing now than even a decade ago. In addition, characteristics that are distinctive for humans do not necessarily have to be expressed universally; so while discussions on uniqueness and universality meld into one another, the questions are somewhat distinct. This is an important point, since the claim that human beings are uniquely religious is not equivalent to saying that they are universally religious. Such a quest for universality is common among the more strident and arguably outdated theories of evolutionary psychologists who still tend to represent a troubling essentialist position on human nature. Unfortunately, such a perspective has the habit of persisting in the public sphere since it is relatively easy to understand. While for many theologians a stress on human universals is important in order to maintain a concrete basis for human rights, the way it is parsed out in strident versions of evolutionary psychology is highly ambiguous, since the explanation for human behavior in such evolutionary terms weakens belief in the possibility of genuine freedom and human responsibility. Of course, if the claim is made for finding such universals, it is then possible to ask ourselves how far and to what extent such characteristics are learned or not, and how this learning is related to their social or biological origin. The latter is often associated with the idea of “innateness,” but, rather like human “nature,” the term is loosely applied and not used very precisely.8

More positively, and as an exercise in constructive theology, overall this book should be viewed through the lens of an unfolding theo-­drama, one that pays careful attention to different facets of the human condition that are important to consider in allowing us to be active agents in that drama. Here I presuppose the existence of God and God’s active presence in the world that makes the language of theology possible at all. Yet, as theo-­drama, the most profound drama of all on the human, earthly stage is the incarnation of God in Christ, his passion narrative, and his dramatic resurrection.9 For Christians, therefore, humanity makes no sense apart from some reference to the God-­man, Jesus Christ, in acknowledgment of the God who is not simply Creator of all that is but also redeemer of humanity and the earth. However, as animals able to physically and symbolically construct our own worlds, we need to take particular care to recognize the ways in which we might be using not just evocative religious symbols...