From Play to Purpose | How Culture and Faith Made and Make Us Human

Stump: 

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump. 

Hoogerwerf: 

And I’m Colin Hoogerwerf. 

Stump: 

One of the topics we’re interested in around here is what it means to be human. We did a whole series on that a few years ago.

Hoogerwerf: 

Uniquely Unique. And even after 6 episodes, we still didn’t come up with a nice clear answer to the question.

Stump: 

I suppose that means we can keep doing episodes about it. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Is that what we’re doing now? 

Stump: 

Well kind of. It’s very closely related. 

Hoogerwerf: 

So what are we doing? 

Stump: 

Well some friends of BioLogos have been working on a big academic project that is directly related to what it means to be human, and they asked if we’d be up for talking about it in a way that might interest people who aren’t reading academic journals as their night-time reading. And we thought it was a really cool project so we talked to all the researchers involved and we’re going to try to distill their work down into some of the most interesting and important themes. 

Hoogerwerf: 

So this project has a bit of a mouthful of a name: biocultural evolution and theological anthropology. 

Stump: 

Yes, but that makes a very cool acronym: BETA (I’m a sucker for a good acronym)

Hoogerwerf: 

I guess that works pretty well as a sequel to our series on what it means to be human. Is this BETA the 2.0? Break that title down a bit and say a little more of what it’s all about. 

Stump: 

Well we’ll talk a lot more about what it means when we get into the details of the project, specifically that first part, biocultural evolution, but very simply biocultural evolution is the field of study about how culture contributes to biological evolution. For example, how did the development of language or farming contribute to the success of our ancestors?

Hoogerwerf: 

Yeah, so farming is an example I’ve heard before. For that, how does a person learning to grow food instead of just hunting and gathering change their offspring?

Stump: 

Well, at the most general, evolution says that different kinds of people are going to flourish in different environments, and an agricultural environment is different from a hunter-gatherer one. So we could speculate about the kinds of attitudes or habits of mind that are rewarded in one environment vs. the other. But then even at the more basic biological level, when you start cultivating wheat and domesticating cows for milk, there are different genes that are going to make populations more successful. If you can metabolize gluten and dairy, there is going to be a lot more calories available to you, and you’ll tend to have more offspring who also have those genes.

Hoogerwerf: 

We talked about that a little bit about this specific example in our series on food—the cultural ways we’ve changed our eating has led to us being biologically different creatures and that biology gets passed down to offspring. So that’s biocultural evolution. Then what about the second part, theological anthropology?

Stump: 

Anthropology literally means the study of humans (anthropos is the Greek word for human), and that can be done a lot of different ways. We could give an account of what a human is from the perspective of chemistry (turns out we’re mostly oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen), or from the perspective of economics (where the most important thing seems to be that we are consumers). So theological anthropology is going to involve studying humans from the perspective of theology: who are we in relationship to God? What does it mean to be God’s image bearers? That sort of thing. So the BETA project is putting biocultural evolution and theological anthropology into conversation. They’re looking at a bunch of ways that theological ideas about who we are as human beings might contribute to our own evolutionary story. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Ok that’s a little bit about the “what” and the “why”. What about the “who”? Who are these people doing the research?

Stump: 

Well, we talked to five people who live on 3 different continents, which challenged our normal working hours, but they were fun conversations. Let’s let them introduce themselves.

Burdett: 

Hi, I’m Michael Burdett. I’m an associate professor of Christian Theology at the University of Nottingham. And I teach Christian theology to undergraduates and postgraduates here in the United Kingdom.

Loumagne Ulishney

I’m Megan Loumagne Ulishney. I’m in the position of transitioning into a new role at Boston College, as Assistant Professor of systematic theology.

Lorrimar: 

I’m Vicki Lorrimar. And I’m a senior research fellow with the University of Notre Dame in Australia, in the School of Philosophy and Theology.

Lyons: 

Hello, I’m Nathan Lyons and I’m a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in Australia. 

Jackson: 

Hi, I’m Andrew Jackson. I’m Honorary Research Fellow at University of Nottingham. A recent graduate under Michael. I’ve a PhD on Maximus the Confessor and evolutionary biology.

Stump: 

All of them have professional training in theology, but they’re interested in trying to understand theology from within a perspective that takes evolution seriously. 

Hoogerwerf: 

But the thing that makes this really interesting is that taking evolution seriously means staying in touch with some of the developments in evolutionary science, which the theological world has not always been very good at. Over the last several decades scientists have discovered many more mechanisms for how evolution happens that are becoming more and more appreciated, even as they are still being debated.  

Stump: 

And these new discoveries ask us to go back and look at the theological assumptions we make about the world. 

Hoogerwerf: 

That can sound a little like we’re letting the science drive our theological understandings…

Stump: 

That’s a common charge against people like us, but I’d suggest it is overly simplistic. I don’t want scientists telling us what to think theologically, just like I don’t want theologians to tell us what to think scientifically. But for those of us who want a big and coherent picture of reality, we need scientists and theologians to be in dialogue. What we believe about the world affects what we believe about God, just like what we believe about God affects what we believe about the world. 

Hoogerwerf: 

That’s a good general point about science and theology. What about this more specific instance?

Stump: 

Well the developments we’re talking about in the science of evolution aren’t calling into question what we already know about evolution. Common ancestry is not threatened to be overturned. But there have been some really fascinating discoveries about the mechanisms by which common ancestry occurs, and some of those have actually challenged the oft-heard claim that evolution is just blind, random, chance. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Ok, well let’s start with some of these new evolutionary ideas. Which leads us to a big sciency sounding term at the heart of this conversation: 

Various Guests: 

Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.

Stump: 

Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. Sometimes shortened to EES, which isn’t quite as cool of an acronym as BETA but… As you might guess, before the extension of the evolutionary synthesis, there was just the evolutionary synthesis, or what is usually called the modern synthesis of evolution. Let’s start there. 

Hoogerwerf: 

So synthesis, bringing things together…so the modern evolutionary synthesis starts with what Darwin and some others figured out in the 19th century—

Lyons: 

Which is that animals and species change over time and by some mechanism, changes are inherited, and there was uncertainty or ambiguity about how the inheritance happened, but however that inheritance happened, there was this process called natural selection where the fittest organisms, the fittest, meaning the biological traits that are most likely to lead to flourishing, and reproduction, those organisms were selected. That is how we have species over time changing. 

Stump: 

That at least is the first half of the modern synthesis, that’s how you get change in species over the long term. But what Darwin didn’t know was the source of variation for individual members of a species, why offspring are always a little bit different than their parents, and how those little changes can be inherited or passed on to others. So then, in the 20th century, modern genetics comes along. This idea of evolutionary changes gets put together—

Hoogerwerf: 

That’s the synthesis.

Stump: 

Right, gets synthesized with the knowledge of genetic variation and inheritance. And we have the modern synthesis. 

Hoogerwerf: 

So the modern synthesis is natural selection with 20th century genetics. 

Loumagne Ulishney 

And so we’ve noticed there’s this really big shift happening. 

Hoogerwerf: 

So the shift is not exactly that we had things wrong with the modern synthesis, but that it was incomplete—there is more going on than we had accounted for. 

Loumagne Ulishney

A move away from what we call a gene-centric view of evolution to something looking more at interactions between genes and environments and other types of factors. And so we noticed this happening in the sciences and then at the same time noticed that it’s not always, this hasn’t really been incorporated well into theology yet.

Lorrimar: 

Really, what these kind of more recent trajectories in evolutionary theory are doing just acknowledging that this is not an entirely passive process, that organisms are not entirely carried along with an evolutionary process that’s solely determined by the fitness of their particular genes for the environment they find themselves in, but there is a degree of reciprocity there, that they’re acting on their own environments, constructing niches that then kind of feed into an interactive kind of feedback loop of evolutionary change.

Nate: 

It’s not just environments that determine genes and organisms, but in some measure, there’s some back and forth. And this means that the picture of evolutionary change in the long run is not just or ultimately or deep down about genes. If we want to put it sort of provocatively, like, deep down, it’s about organisms. And genes are just a part of organisms.

Hoogerwerf: 

So the very basic recap here is that over the last few decades, we’ve started to understand that the things that drive evolution are more complex than only random mutation of genes driving variation in species. Again, not that that isn’t happening, just that’s not the only thing that’s happening. And of course that first way of thinking about evolution caused a bit of a stir in the theological world. BioLogos was born out of helping Christians to understand that evolution and Christian faith could work together. I’ve even heard some people say that understanding evolution could deepen Christian faith. Seems like I’ve seen a book about that recently. 

Stump: 

Ha. Thanks for the plug. My new book, The Sacred Chain, is about how understanding these ideas deepened my Christian faith. 

Hoogerwerf:

But what do we do now with these extensions?  

Stump: 

Yeah. I can see how the theological world could be a little cautious about this. There are some Christian groups who have tried to leverage the EES developments to claim that evolutionary theory in general is in crisis. And that’s just blatant misrepresentation of the field. But here we are still working on sorting out the divisions within church and culture that arose along with the science of evolution. And along come scientists coming along to tell us there are a bunch of new things we have to consider, making the science even more complicated. But there’s nothing in these ideas that need to make us worried that we’ve got the picture all wrong. In fact, this shift toward thinking about organisms and the back and forth between culture and biology, these seem to me to fit very well with theological claims about who God is and how God creates. They seem to make the science of evolution less mechanistic, and might even—here’s the really controversial claim—they might even allow for purpose or teleology in evolution.

Hoogerwerf: 

We’ll make our way to talk more about that. So each of the researchers took this kind of main idea of looking at developments in evolutionary theory and explored particular ways that human culture and theology come into relationship with our biological evolution and how we became the kind of creatures we are today. So we’re going to have four chapters. Play. Imagination. Morality and Purpose. 

Stump: 

First up is Megan Loumagne Ulishney. 

Hoogerwerf: 

She’s a theologian who has been studying the effects of play. 

Stump: 

Play? I’m not sure there are many chapters about play in the systematic theology books I’ve read.

Hoogerwerf: 

Yeah, well this is one of these cultural activities we were talking about in “biocultural evolution” that might have a surprising effect on the populations of creatures that practice it.

Stump: 

You mean like professional football players who have a shockingly lower life expectancy than the rest of us??

Hoogerwerf: 

I mean, that is definitely a cultural practice that has a biological effect. I’m not sure how heritable that is. But football itself is an example that highlights just how far we have developed this human cultural phenomenon of play, where we have institutionalized play into organized sports. And football and other sports can be traced back to this thing humans have been doing for a really, really long time. 

Stump: 

It might be surprising that engaging in this kind of behavior that maybe isn’t really functional for survival—right, it doesn’t contribute immediately to some important biological need, and maybe even a little bit dangerous—It might be surprising that that kind of behavior is something that is a part of the evolutionary story of our species. 

Hoogerwerf: 

Yeah, and not even just our own species. There are instances of play in lots of other non-human animals, and not just the ones really closely related to us. 

Loumagne Ulishney 

I always tell my students, like if you’re having a bad day, just look up like bumblebees playing.

Stump: 

And of course there are lots of examples with mammals. One example Megan gave comes from the research of the Primatologist Isabel Behncke.

Loumagne Ulishney 

As a mom I could see maybe a bonobo mom finding this really scary, but basically an adult bonobo grasps the arm or the leg of a juvenile—and this can be really anywhere from like 15 feet to 100 feet above the ground up in a tree somewhere—and sort of the adult is swinging the juvenile back and forth. And it’s interesting because it is sort of dangerous. And it’s also the juvenile is totally vulnerable to the adult bonobo, you know, holding on to them. Like they’re totally dependent on this adult bonobo hanging on. So it does have this element of risk taking for the juvenile and but also this development of trust between the adult and the juvenile. And so this also being a really important way of developing bonds within the group. And then there’s this great phrase that the researchers use where they say they’ve seen the young bonobos and these playing the hanging game and expressing what the researchers called “open mouth play face”. And this is one way that researchers can use to tell that bonobos, the young bonobos, are really enjoying it actually. It’s pretty scary and would be bad for them, obviously, if they fell 100 feet, but they seem to be enjoying this.

Hoogerwerf: 

You can pretty easily tell a story about how this kind of behavior would have developed. Play creates situations where individuals can learn how to respond to risks and other challenges in their environments, without having to take on all the danger of it. It allows them to practice. And you can see how creatures that evolved this kind of play behavior might be better able to survive. 

Stump: 

And we can bring this to humans. There is a well documented and serious mental health crisis for children. One of the causes that has been suggested is the lack of social embodied play for children. We heard Jonathan Haidt talk about this in his interview with Francis Collins this spring. Play seems to have some pretty important functions for our development. 

Hoogerwerf: 

But that kind of explanation of how a behavior came about because it had some adaptive function, can sometimes reduce that behavior to being only some random effect. 

Loumagne Ulishney 

Just because something is functional, it doesn’t have to, at the same time, steal the kind of like beauty from that or the meaning from that. But actually, it reveals all the more the kind of brilliance of evolution and I would say, the brilliance of how God has designed evolution to be: that the things that bring us the most pleasure are really good for us also.

Stump: 

OK, so this is our first example of a cultural activity that has evolved, and may in turn have evolutionary benefits for the populations that engage in it. But we’re not just doing science here, but also trying to bring that into conversation with theology. What’s the theological application of play?

Hoogerwerf:  

There might be a couple. Megan cited Hugo Rahner who wrote about how the Christian practice of worship is a form of play. 

Loumagne Ulishney 

And he talks about the play of the church as this kind of rehearsal for the great festival of heaven. And that this is what we’re doing, really, is kind of imitating the playfulness or connecting with the playfulness of the Divine, but in this collective way. We have this big play mini play-festival every Sunday, if you’re a Christian, and that this is—I love this idea of this rehearsal for the great play and great festival of heaven.

Hoogerwerf: 

And another way that we might think about play theologically is to realize that God’s act of creation might be considered a form of play. 

Loumagne Ulishney 

For most of my life, I wouldn’t have attributed playfulness, I wouldn’t have thought of playfulness as like a primary trait of God. I guess I would have thought of maybe creativity, that God creates beautiful things. But I guess I’ve always thought of God as pretty serious. But I’ve found in getting into the theological literature on play, there’s actually really interesting history in the theological tradition of describing God in terms of playfulness, going all the way back to people like Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nazianzus as well, that they say that—Maximus talks about that God, the divine, sort of plays in all sorts of places in the world mingling with his creatures here and there as he so desires.

Stump: 

Maybe that comes out in God’s response to Job: Hey, have you seen these amazing things I’ve created? Almost sounds like God’s bragging about his performance in a game. Did you see that amazing goal I made in the Euro Cup finals?

Hoogerwerf: 

Did you see how fast I rode my bike up that mountain in the Tour de France?

Stump: 

Right. And Megan thinks this idea of God’s playfulness might change some of the ways we relate to God and to each other as God’s people:

Loumagne Ulishney 

That’s changed the way that I relate to God and the way that I also understand the importance of playfulness for myself as a person and as a theologian and as a parent. So Hugo Rahner, in his book, as well talks about, you know, looking at all of creation as part of a result of God’s playfulness, that God created this world purely out of gratuity or out of joy. And so I think that’s a place where we might say there’s a difference between the play of creatures and the play of the Divine. That there’s nothing necessary about divine play. But that it is a sort of gratuitous overflow of the love of God and the grace of God. 

Hoogerwerf: 

So we can tell a story about how play might be a good trait to have to survive well because it teaches important skills and develops good physical and emotional health. But the fact that we play also changes the way we are in the world, changes the way we think about the world and the way we think about God. 

Stump: 

Play also changes the world itself. We build soccer fields and huge stadiums all over, for example, and roads up mountains for people to ride their bikes on. And all of those changes feed back into culture and into the environments in which certain kinds of people flourish. That isn’t too controversial, that creatures can change their environments (think of beavers building dams), but I think what Megan is pointing toward, and our next guest will too, is that it doesn’t have to be only physical creations in the world that affect our ongoing evolution; for humans in particular it can also be certain ideas that have arisen out of our evolutionary development, which in turn can affect future developments.

Hoogerwerf: 

This brings us nicely into our next chapter. Imagination.

Lorrimar: 

So a lot of my work has been interested in the human imagination. I’m interested in the way the imagination is involved in reasoning, the way we build worlds and the way the imagination comes into our conceptualizing our moral formation even, and how it might relate to different aspects of human cognition.

Hoogerwerf: 

This is Vicki Lorrimar. We are creatures that have imaginations. This is pretty amazing and maybe something that’s under-appreciated. And we can say that imagination is a trait that came out of the evolutionary process that created us, just like play. There must have been a time before our ancestors were able to imagine, and then it developed somehow. 

Stump: 

And Vicki makes the point that imagination has a pretty important role to play in how we relate to God, how we have the capacity to even think about and understand God. It would be pretty hard to develop religious rituals, and maybe to be God’s image bearers, without an imagination.

Hoogerwerf: 

Maybe it’s helpful here to define imagination. 

Lorrimar: 

From a philosophical and theological perspective, when we’re talking about the imagination, we usually mean this really sort of capacious ability to build worlds, tell stories, do very kind of high level, higher order cognition in terms of your future thinking and memory and all kinds of things, which, from a purely kind of biological, evolutionary perspective, seem really costly.

Stump: 

Costly in terms of, we spend a lot of energy in doing things that don’t seem to have a big part to play in our day to day survival. Like play, we’re engaged in these activities within a culture — writing stories, creating art, etc.—that don’t seem to have an immediate payoff in terms of survival.

Hoogerwerf: 

It would be pretty interesting to investigate—and I’m sure many have and are—how these things have contributed to our evolutionary survival. But for the case of this project, we’re more interested in how imagination is a part of the reciprocal process we’ve been talking about, how imagination shapes us and our conceptions which then feed back into our biological story. 

Lorrimar: 

In this project, I was really interested then in thinking about what is the status of contemporary scientific research on the imagination, in terms of its evolutionary origins, its functions, its development over time in humans, its development over single human lifestyles. These are all kinds of different levels of analysis that we see in the biological side of studying animal traits and behaviors. And I’ve kind of adopted some of these frameworks to try and make sense of what is the scientific understanding of what the human imagination is, as a capacity. And that’s where I kind of come up against a real tension in terms of how do we define what is the imagination? Because, as I already mentioned, if we’re taking a philosophical or theological or a broad humanities perspective on the imagination is this very sophisticated, composite ability.

Hoogerwerf: 

The ways that science would go about studying these things is by breaking them down. To study something in a lab we have to look at a very particular mental process. We can study specific instances of imagination, like problem solving, but that’s a long way from the kind of comprehensive idea of imagination that Vicki wants to understand. So the challenge is to build up from those things which science can study to get at that broader understanding of imagination. 

Lorrimar: 

I’m really interested in how evolution itself has shaped how we imagine what it is to be human, and then how that might actually, again, go on to influence our evolution in this kind of ongoing feedback loop that’s almost an iterative process there.

Stump: 

It’s pretty clear that science has done a lot to shape our imagination. Science helps to build our knowledge about the world. But a lot of what we know about the world is not the result of what we see or sense directly—think about the structure of an atom, or electromagnetic waves, or our genes. And even for the things we can see, when we learn something new, like the fact that trees communicate, it might change how we see them or fit them into a bigger worldview. And so imagination here is really important in building the world that we live in. And often scientific concepts cause a shift in how we imagine our world, or even what it means to be human. Let’s give an example.

Lorrimar: 

And one of the examples that I drawn in my paper, really straightforward, is the idea of skin, and what skin is. So we’ve been accustomed, I think, to thinking of the skin as a barrier. It’s the boundary between us and the external world, the environment that we’re in. But more and more we are finding from microbial genetics and the study of the microbiome and all the various kinds of micro organisms that make up our skin, that skin is not really a barrier so much as an interface. Like it’s the place of exchange, rather than a firm boundary. So, even that kind of imagery then shifts our understanding of what is the human relationship with non-human species, because actually, we find that there is no neat place where we can kind of carve out or in biological selves out as entirely distinct.

Hoogerwerf: 

So in this case, as we gain scientific knowledge, like knowledge about the function of our skin or the extent that microbes play important roles in our bodies, we have to reform our imagination of what it means to be a human. 

Stump: 

And to bring this all the way back around, this re-imagining of what it means to be human is not only a change that goes in one direction, from the biological science that leads to a cultural change, a change in how we imagine ourselves, but that shift in our imagination can also go on to shape the biological world. 

Lorrimar: 

I think we act very differently in the world if we conceive of our relationship to non-human organisms differently. And then that is going to necessarily feed into again, in evolutionary terms, the niches we’re constructing, which will necessarily change us, biologically and culturally as time goes on.

Hoogerwerf: 

I’ve often thought about imagination in terms of what needs to happen in response to the climate crisis. We need to do a better job of imagining a different future or many different possible futures where we are able to solve the problems of resource extraction and energy use and live more sustainability. I think we need to imagine what that life might look like before we can bring it about. If we were to do that, our world could change drastically and it would affect a lot of life on earth. There would be major evolutionary impacts. Think, the fact that maybe some species wouldn’t go extinct. So that’s one way that imagination is not only a result of evolution, but could be a driver of it. 

Stump: 

That sounds like something we ought to do, perhaps that we have a moral obligation to do… which brings us to the next topic.

Hoogerwerf: 

Right. Chapter Three. Morality. 

Stump: 

So like play and imagination, morality is another trait that humans have the capacity for, one that I have proposed that we alone have among the creatures. We are moral creatures, we have moral responsibility for our actions in a way that other creatures do not. And so we might ask, where did that come from? Could it come out of evolution? 

Lyons:

So I’m very sympathetic to that thought, that morality not only emerges from evolution, which in a sense, I think, is just obvious. Like, once upon a time, there was not moral organisms on planet Earth. Today, there are a lot of them, all these human beings being moral. So we will go from step a to step b and the mechanism just in a very basic way is evolution. So we can say, in some sense, morality emerges through an evolutionary process. 

Hoogerwerf: 

That’s Nathan Lyons. So if morality did come out of the human evolutionary process do we see proto-morality in other animals like we do with play? 

Stump: 

I like to say hints and precursors. There are some fascinating studies with primates that seem to show some hints of fairness and reciprocity. I’ll say that I don’t think any other creatures today have full blown moral responsibility for their actions the way we do. But again, our capacities didn’t spring from nowhere. It’s plausible that our evolutionary ancestors were developing this. We see clear evidence even in our Neanderthal cousins that they cared for the injured and diseased, even when that would have been a significant drain on the mobility and resources of their community. Lots of other organisms today show cooperation, and some would even say self-sacrifice for the good of the community. These are at least building blocks for morality.

Hoogerwerf: 

Ok, so it seems like we can trace a bit of where morality comes from. But it’s not only a consequence of evolution, the cause and effect also goes the other direction.

Lyons: 

So it’s not just that we are rational animals and we have a human nature and a characteristic of that is to be moral. It’s also that in our distant, distant, evolutionary past, proto-moral and like, eventually, fully moral activities, shaped the genetic trajectory that our species has taken. And in a sense, has made us biologically what we are.

Hoogerwerf: 

So it’s not just that we are moral because we evolved to be moral. It’s also that we evolved to be what we are because we were moral. You just gave the example of neanderthals caring for each other as an early sign of morality. And that kind of behavior led to a society where people lived longer and a culture developed around that behavior which allowed for different kinds of creatures to thrive. That’s the kind of thing Nathan is talking about with morality shaping our genetic trajectory.

Stump: 

Yeah, it’s pretty obviously the case with modern medicine, which has allowed many of us to live much longer and pass along our genes than would have been possible previously. Taking care of the sick or injured is very straightforwardly moral act for us today. So the question is whether that has led to biological changes in our species. There’s a pretty dramatic and sudden example of this that comes from C-section deliveries in pregnant women. Our babies’ heads are already right on the borderline for being able to fit through the birth canal that goes through a woman’s pelvis. Those heads that were just a little too big very often resulted in the death of both mom and baby in generations past. Now that we care for them both by successfully performing C-sections, we are preserving the genes for small pelvis and big head sizes that otherwise wouldn’t have been passed on so easily. And the result is a measurable biological effect, and the average size of a woman’s pelvis has gone down over the last generations in women in the developed world where C-sections are routinely performed. That might seem like a trivial example, but you can see how other moral actions over much longer time periods might lead to bigger differences in the kind of people who would flourish in a given environment.

Hoogerwerf: 

So we can trace back the development of morality through evolutionary changes, and see how what emerges also feeds back into the evolutionary process and continues to do so. Morality often seems like a trait we hold up to show how different humans are from everything, how it separates us from nature. Does this story that Nathan is telling about morality being a part of biocultural evolution help us think any differently about morality in that way? 

Stump: 

Yeah, I think there has been almost a default position from some people of faith that morality is so different from what all other creatures are capable of, that it couldn’t have been part of the evolutionary process. Nathan’s work here is helpful in placing even our moral development into an evolutionary context. And it’s important to note that that doesn’t somehow imply that we aren’t really morally responsible creatures. Think of it by analogy with our language. We write poetry and produce podcasts with lots of talking. The fact that other creatures don’t do that doesn’t mean that language couldn’t have evolved. And the fact that it did evolve in us, ought to make us think more highly of the capacity of nature to produce things like this. 

Lyons: 

All of these things that we might call culture, I think the general lesson is, these cultural phenomena are at home in nature. That’s, I think, the message that we can get. And maybe that has a moral implication, namely, we need to treat nature in a way that might be different to if we thought of our culture as an escape from nature, which there are plenty of thinkers in the past and today who think of us in that way: what it is to be human is to transcend nature.

Stump: 

So I guess there are two ways of going about this: one that says we humans are so different from the purely mechanical nature that we must transcend it. The other is to say that maybe we ought to have a higher view of nature, that we are not transcending it with our impressive capabilities, but that nature is capable of producing some really impressive things.

Lyons: 

We can recognize our cultural practices present in some measure—different, less, greater, more—in other species, but that we’re not leaving behind animality when we do this stuff. We’re being animals.

Hoogerwerf: 

And it’s ok that we are animals. That will bring about some tensions with the theology, which, I think doesn’t have anything against us being animals, but we are humans, which means we do have a very particular role to play as a creature. 

Stump: 

So our final chapter: Purpose. Micheal Burdett and Andrew Jackson will help us with this one.

Hoogerwerf: 

So play, imagination, and even morality, I can see as traits that are evolved. But I need a little help in thinking about purpose. Purpose isn’t really a trait. 

Stump: 

No, in this section we’re not starting by talking about traits of individual organisms so much as what evolution as a whole is capable of. One question you might want to ask is whether there is some purpose behind the process of evolution itself and what it’s producing. Is it going in some specific direction? There are many different opinions on that ranging from the idea that evolution is a totally blind and random process to the idea that there is a grand designer behind it all. Many religious people will obviously be drawn to the second idea there. And some of the new evolutionary concepts we’ve talked about support the idea that evolution is not just a totally blind process. And it might be helpful to bring in the idea of agency here. As we’ve learned, creatures play a role in determining the direction of the evolutionary process through behavioral choices? 

Jackson: 

You know, an insect might choose a slightly different food plant than normal, and end up that being the very beginning of a speciation event. But in no way could you say it has any grand foresight. It’s an entirely serendipitous behavioral choice.

Hoogerwerf: 

So in that case, the butterfly who switches its food source is not a free agent? 

Burdett: 

Certain kinds of organisms might not have any kind of purposes in the same kind of way, we would want to say human beings have purposes as agents. So something can be an agent without conscious intention, or any kind of intention. And yet, we want to say that there might be a kind of directionality still. That is inherent, I guess, in those organisms, even that don’t have intentional consciousness or purposes in mind that are aimed at.

Stump: 

But when we get to humans, we clearly do act with purpose and do have foresight. We use our imagination and our morality toward some end. We act with intention. We create things. We’ve gone so far as to tinker with the very building blocks of life, to engineer genes and these kinds of actions often have very clear goals behind them. 

Hoogerwerf: 

And I can clearly see the biocultural evolution side of this. Your example last time about c-sections might fit here. We’ve decided there is a kind of direction that we want to go, which hopefully follows moral codes. We work to eradicate genetic diseases and lengthen the span of human life. And genetic engineering brings this to an extreme level.

Burdett: 

This is a new power. This is a new volitional activity that opens up vistas for the human being that just have not really been around before. And I think what we wanted to say was biocultural evolution, in some sense, cracks the door quite open already for kind of all organisms, saying that the goal directedness of certainly human beings or other purposeful agents are going to have some kind of influence on evolutionary change. But human beings in particular, the last, you know, since the genetic revolution, have an even more fine-grained power when it comes to influencing the trajectories of all biological life, which includes us, or as we say, in this article, the creation of new ones.

Stump: 

I think this is really fruitful to think about the constraints from the science itself, and that perhaps evolution produces creatures, who make choices or decisions, and these end up driving evolution further. In the case of nonhuman animals, they might not be acting with intentions or long term goals, but they are still acting in ways that reliably bring about certain changes. If this isn’t a totally random process, then perhaps it could function as the vehicle by which or through which God brings about the things God intended, but does so through the agency of other creatures.

Burdett:  

So, we look around the world, and creation is not static. But it’s developing. There’s a history to it, whether we’re talking about natural history, creative history, we’re talking about salvation history. It’s clear that God is not just ordering but developing creatures. We are developing. And that is part of God’s love for us is to bring about us as fully mature and perfect creatures before God. So he orders his creation, because God is the divine logos, the one who himself is supreme order and wisdom and love. 

Hoogerwerf: 

There’s a good theological term that is often used for this: providence. Of course there are differences in theological traditions with just how we understand God’s providence to work. I think most Christians would say that God acts to bring about good in the world.

Stump: 

We’ll find less agreement on the details of how we understand that to take place alongside something like evolution. But these new developments in the science, seem to me to make things less problematic to think about God acting providentially through natural causes, like evolution.

Hoogerwerf: 

So then we have to ask about whether humans can act providentially? 

Stump: 

Humans have long been called co-creators along with God. Micheal and Andrew coin a new term and ask whether we can also be co-providentors.

Burdett: 

Providented co-provindetors [laughs] if we’re going to shift the Neologism which comes from Philip Hefner makes us realize that God does more as a creator than just bringing something into being.

Hoogerwerf: 

They gave a few conditions for acting providentially.

Burdett: 

So we have to know what it is the thing that we’re trying to bring about, we have to have a goal or a particular purpose in mind. Then we have to be able to know what is required to reach that particular goal or purpose.

Stump: 

It also has to be within our power to actually do the thing. You might want to stop a car crash that’s about to happen as you’re walking down the sidewalk, but you probably don’t have superhuman strength or speed needed to do that. 

Burdett: 

It also has to be benevolent. And I think that that’s, that’s the key thing here. 

Stump: 

For example: based on these conditions, is our relatively recent ability to genetically engineer other creatures and even ourselves, are we acting as co-providentors in this?

Hoogerwerf: 

So that first condition, we do have foresight. We have a very clear goal in mind. 

Stump: 

And with this example, do we have the power to do it? 

Burdett: 

We can literally go into the genome and snip DNA, and you know, put new ones in which can change phenotypes, morphology and if one does this in the germline, then it means all future progeny, will have that kind of change.

Hoogerwerf: 

And then the final one. Is it benevolent? 

Stump: 

Yeah, so I guess it depends what we’re talking about. The genetic engineering that cures Sickle Cell disease sure seems to be a good use of our power and knowledge. But there is still so much we don’t know about changing the genome. So much we don’t know about how genes work. So particularly when we get to “creating” new things through our own genetic engineering, acting with providence requires some sort of knowledge that we don’t have. 

Jackson: 

However, when it comes to what we call ontological providence, that is to say, creating new beings, we lack the understanding, we lack the power. And so by definition, it’s not going to be providential. It will be creative. But I think we’ve lost the connection between God’s creativity and our creativity. The implication of goodness has been lost. So we can create in any way we like, you know, destruction is a form of creation even. So, that’s not reflecting how God creates. Everything God creates is good. So when God created beavers, and bowerbirds, and earthworms, he knew exactly what he was doing. He had the power to accomplish it without any difficulty. And the end was good. If we try and do the same thing, creating a new enhanced species, there’s absolutely no guarantee indeed every likelihood that something’s gonna go wrong.

Burdett: 

It’s not up to us because it’s not our creation, or each creature is not our creation. But we have been invited into his providential activity. But I think it has to be a chastened prudential one.

Stump: 

We’re very new on the scene in terms of these capabilities. It took God millions of years to bring about the organisms that are living today; it’s more than a tad of hubris to think we can do it in one generation.

Jackson: 

The normal way that God has exercised his providence and goodness in creation is through very long processes of developing ramified relationships. And so if we had to take that seriously, that empirical fact, then we ought to exercise a bit of caution, if we can think we can hugely accelerate that, and generate a new ontology very quickly, and for it to fit in with everything else.

Stump: 

What do we make of all of this? What should our listeners take away? 

Hoogerwerf: 

Well for one thing, we can start to expand our idea of how evolution works. There are more inputs than simply random gene mutation. Some of those inputs come from human culture. And so it might have us think differently about the kinds of things we do, even the kinds of beings we are, and how that might affect our evolutionary future. 

Stump: 

That’s the biocultural evolution part of the BETA project. We also need to think about the theological anthropology side, and what we as humans are from the perspective of theology. How are we the same, and how are we different from other creatures — not just in terms of capability, but maybe in terms of obligations? All God’s creatures are creative agents to some degree, and can affect their environments, but I’m struck by the fact that we have moral responsibility for the things we do. It is appropriate to ask of us (and I think us alone), should we do those things? Has God gifted us with moral obligations?

Hoogerwerf: 

And perhaps less distinctively for humans, we are also creatures that play. And understanding ourselves as image bearers, we might start to see God a little differently, as playful.

Stump: 

And finally, the point Vicki made was that imagining ourselves differently can lead to a different future.

Hoogerwerf:

Thanks to Micheal Burdett, Andrew Jackson, Vicki Lorrimar, Nathan Lyons, Megan Loumagne Ulishney for talking to us for this project.  

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations who are applying spiritual solutions to society’s toughest problems. Get involved at fetzer.org. And by the John Templeton Foundation, which funds research and catalyzes conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder. And BioLogos is also supported by individual donors and listeners alike you contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Brakemaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode, find the link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum. Or visit our website biologos.org, where you’ll find articles, videos, and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening