Response to John Hare

My thanks to John Hare, first, for a succinct, pithy and remarkably wide-ranging overview of the problems and opportunities that Christian theology and philosophy face today in coming into a productive, but non-reductive, discussion with the evolutionary sciences over matters of ethics and value. We have specially come to Christ’s, Darwin’s own college, for this discussion, to focus our minds on how theological ethics can go forward in the particular light of Darwin’s challenge—which may, of course, not be the same thing at all as the challenge presented by some of Darwin’s more dogmatic contemporary atheistical successors. Darwin’s work was actually haunted by theology all his life (and arguably his evolutionary theory would have been impossible without that backcloth of biblical/providential thinking), even as he finally lost his own faith for rather different reasons: the tragic death of his beloved daughter Annie. In my view, evolutionary theory and theology have always been profoundly and intrinsically entwined—which in turn also ironically explains the extraordinarily emotive forcefulness of atheistical renditions of evolution today: this is merely an inverse manifestation of the same rule. If I am right here, then theology and evolutionary theory belong together, even when they compete: they are both stories of the whole of life, which is why the stakes are so high, morally and theologically. ¹

Now as Professor Hare already knows, I think, I share with him many of the presumptions with which he approaches the issue of evolutionary theory and theological ethics, and in particular his central insistence that ‘when the resources of philosophy and theology are set aside, morality becomes much harder to understand and certain…errors of analysis creep in’. But perhaps I do not share quite all of his assumptions; which is why I venture now to make three very brief critical responsive comments.

These three points, then:

1. The Neo-Privatization of Theology and its Supposed Redundancy to Scientific, Evolutionary Thinking: Let’s recall that our task in this conference is to re-consider the future of theological ethics, and especially as it might go forward at Cambridge in a way which makes significant interdisciplinary impact on the study of natural science—in which Cambridge of course is a world leader. There are formidable difficulties here, however, which I fear Prof. Hare underestimates, especially where the relation between the evolutionary sciences and theology are concerned. To persuade scientific colleagues that they should get on with the business of working together with philosophers and theologians on these issues, as was Prof. Hare’s hope expressed at the end of his conference presentation, is going to be uphill and require some very sophisticated, if not devious, strategies. And I’m not sure that Prof. Hare has adequately grasped the most painful nettle here—the specific difficulty of persuading scientific colleagues that theological belief is any more than a funny little predilection that some people have as a private preference, and which in no way impacts on the public hegemony of secular evolutionary thinking.

Now in this matter, in my view, both Catholic and Protestant theologians have tragically colluded in their own intellectual downfall in the last generation ² : Catholics by short-sightedly embracing the ‘non-competing magisteria’ position of Stephen Jay Gould, even as they developed rich new intra-traditional views of rationality which happily let them off the hook in any continuing efforts in natural theology in the old style; and Protestants by either eschewing direct debate with secular scientists, tout court, for Barthian reasons, or—in more liberal mode—by adopting a weak form of perspectivalism which declared, in neo-Kantian fashion, that science can present the ‘facts’ and Christianity add an optional extra veneer of ‘interpretation’. ³ As several people have already commented in this symposium, the fashionable post-modern retreat into theologically sectarian options in theological ethics in the last part of the twentieth century has come with great cost to public theological credibility. Whereas evolutionary theory now seems to represent the shared, public story about the ‘whole’ of life (and herein, doubtless, its fascination), Christian theology and ethics have increasingly doomed themselves to optional noises off. The fatal distraction caused by the misguided last gasp of the ‘god of the gaps’ option represented by the Intelligent Design exponents, has—alas—only made matters worse.

So, what to do?, and here is my first critical point for Prof. Hare:

It’s not hard to show (though it’s certainly always worth doing it as well as Prof. Hare does it) that evolutionary neurologists like Joshua Greene are making almost farcically crude philosophical mistakes about metaphysical naturalism, and more particularly about basic issues in the philosophy of mind, in their own confident interpretations of scientific evidences. We might thereby, with luck, bloody-mindedness or persistence, convert them in the long run to a bracing bit of philosophical thinking. But it’s much harder to show that their subject matter intrinsically needs any theological assistance, or theological concepts, in order for them to continue to go about their business.

Prof. Hare does, I think, suggest the beginning of an answer to this dilemma in what he has said tonight, and—unsurprisingly, given his philosophical predilections—it moves in a Kantian direction. He implies, first, in response to Peter Singer, that we do need to ‘have a way to bring morality and happiness together, and [thereby] to have a justification for morality’; he then suggests some possible implicit support for a Kantian ethic in the work of Frans de Waal on primatology, and a more explicit support for it in Dominic Johnson’s work on hunter gatherers: Johnson’s hypothesis here that the idea of supernatural punishment brings about cooperative behaviour.

But the obvious objection to calling in Dominic Johnson as an ally to a Kantian position is that Johnson himself complacently assumes that such supernatural, punitive ‘high gods’ of the hunter gatherers are projective imaginations which we have gradually grown out of and can now do without; so here Hare lays himself open again to the obvious Feuerbacherian objection that in colluding with Johnson’s findings he is accepting that to divinise such a practical postulate is simply an act of comforting imagination—and that, too, can be a evolutionary, cultural inheritance—yet one which we ultimately outgrow. (Thus Kant, Feuerbach, Durkheim and Weber, note, can all go happily together, not least since they obviously share an intellectual heritage.) So it seems to me that we need some better arguments than these for getting God back into the Darwinian picture. If Johnson favours something that sounds like Kant, it’s only a seductive prelude to a reductive conclusion. Ergo, he’s a very dangerous ally for properly theological purposes.

2. The Hermeneutical Circularity of Evolutionary Theory: But here’s one idea, then, a first strategic step for a more robustly theological way forward, which at the same time will also reveal a second critique I have of Prof. Hare. I want to draw attention, as is rarely done, to the circular hermeneutics of science itself, of which Dominic Johnson is a good example. Hare likes Johnson’s work, as we’ve seen, because it chimes with the idea of a Kantian necessary postulate for the guaranteeing of rewards and punishments; but Johnson in turn likes this idea, I strongly suspect, because he already came to his work with certain Kantian notions more or less unconsciously inscribed in his own educational heritage. Now this circularity isn’t necessarily vicious. In fact what is good about the recognition of this hermenuetic circularity is that it begins to break down the neo-Kantian presumption usually assumed by atheistical science (and often, alas, shared by leading theological commentators) that science deals with ‘facts’ and theologians deal with quite optional ‘interpretations’. But this neo-Kantian disjunction of fact and interpretation, as I’ve already intimated, won’t stand up to methodological scrutiny; and instead we need, first, to probe the semi-buried theological, or more often anti-theological, presumptions that evolutionary theorists often bring to their own work, and then show how these do, or do not, genuinely inform and sustain their scientific ‘advances’. But that’s only the first step; for then there’s the infinitely harder one of convincing them that a theological idea of this sort that may be animating their research isn’t merely a heuristic prop that we can throw away when we’re no longer talking about unsophisticated hunter gatherers and now talking about us—which of course brings us straight back to our first criticism and problem. Nonetheless, there is food for thought here, and potential for further exploration. For what if it proves to be the necessary condition of disclosive, breakthrough evolutionary thinking to bring certain theological, or quasi-theological, webs of meaning to bear on the scientific evidences in ways which are evidently pragmatically efficacious in scientific terms? Such has indeed been true of the recent work of my Harvard collaborator, Martin Nowak, who has asked—under the impact of certain theological intuitions—questions of the place and importance of sacrificial cooperation in the evolutionary process which were simply suppressed dogmatically by a whole generation of evolutionary theorists committed, a priori, to the notion of primary selfishness. If what is happening here, in Nowak’s recent discoveries, is an instance of non-vicious hermeneutical circularity which produces new and first-rate scientific conclusions from a primary theological intuition, then we are into a fascinating new realm of discussion which by definition cannot rule out theological insights from the outset as an entirely optional intra-Christian predilection. On the contrary, ideas of ‘forgiveness’, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘hope’ serve as fundamental ‘intuition pumps’ in some of Nowak’s most intriguing new departures in game-theoretical analyses of evolutionary dynamics. ⁴

3. On Not Giving Up on ‘Natural Theology’. As we have seen, Prof. Hare’s eminent work on Kant and his moral gap ⁵ makes him interested in any evidences from evolutionary work which might suggest some support for a Kantian ethics and meta-ethic. There is nothing wrong with that as such, though I am pressing him to bolster the argument for it with more clarity and conviction! But I think it’s important to note that such evidences of evolutionary development cannot in and of themselves solve our meta-ethical and ethical choices without much further debate, both philosophical and theological. Indeed, any number of different ethical positions might plausibly appeal to evolutionary evidences in support of themselves (natural law positions, especially), so we cannot shirk the costly business of adjudicating between meta-ethical options in a complex contestation with evolutionary science. ⁶ My main concern, in closing, is to underscore—as I do not think Prof. Hare quite dares to do—that the deeply unfashionable project of ‘natural theology’, in some new form or another, is one that simply cannot be shirked if theological ethics is to engage with real impact in the shared, public realm of scientific discovery and meaning-making. I cannot quite discern from his current paper whether Prof. Hare is explicitly willing to join that game along the lines of a Kantian moral argument for God, ⁷ or whether—more in the spirit of non-foundationalism and proper-basicality moves which have gripped his own Calvinist tradition in the last decades—he remains somewhat squeamish about ‘natural theology’, tout court. For what it is worth, I believe that the new discoveries, by Nowak and others, about the deep and thorough-goingly significant structures of cooperation in evolution mark the end of our mandatorily secular and cynical stories of evolution’s selfishness which have characterised the period of the late twentieth-century economic boom and bust, and the concomitant ecological blindness that attended them. We now know that teleological structures of sacrificial cooperation are writ large in evolution, and indeed provide the productive matrix without which evolutionary advances to new forms of life could not occur at all. So perhaps the time is ripe for what we might call a new moral-teleological argument for God’s existence—a return to serious consideration of the structured beauty and order of the natural world and its nascent moral capacities which even Kant continued to think worthy of some positive reflection. Even E. O. Wilson, the veteran Harvard social biologist, has recently averred that, without the motivational impetus coming from specifically theological belief, it is unlikely that we shall summon the will to save the planet from ecological disaster at all. ⁸ That is a rather significant concession from a biologist who long ago announced that he had lost his faith, and perhaps another sign that the theoretical worm is turning in evolutionary thinking. The big question that I leave Prof. Hare with, then, is this: can it turn in a way that could make significant theological, as well as philosophical, discussion of the implications of evolutionary discovery a new possibility, even despite the blows Kant himself rained on arguments for God’s existence? I hope so. A lot hangs on this for the future credibility of theological ethics in the academy of arts and sciences. ⁹