Craig L. Nessan, Christian Faith in Dialogue with Darwin: Evolutionary Biology and the Meaning of the Fall, in outline Currents in Theology and Mission 29:2 (April 2002)
Review by Paul S. Chung
Prof. Craig L. Nessan tries here to demythologize the fall in order to reconceptualize as grounded in the human condition between our evolutionary inheritance of the reptilian brain and the capacity for transcendence belonging to reflective self-consciousness.
Filling the Gap, with a Critical Construction
Craig L. Nessan makes a critical attempt to bring Christian faith into dialogue with Darwinism, as it were, a critical comparative study of Eden and Darwin. There is no historical evidence of the fall in Eden, according to modern evolutionary biology. Biologists argue that there is no place called Eden, nor is there historical Adam; there is no Eve, no tree in the midst of the garden, with forbidden fruit.
On the other hand, theologians discard the modem synthesis of evolutionary conclusions, building the sinful nature of human existence upon “the fall,” which is accepted as a matter of fact taking place in the distant past. This theological legacy is attributed to St. Augustine, who conceptualized a story of the fall in the biological sense of inheritance through sexual propagation.
An original sin had entered the world with all its destructive consequences. Therefore, Nessan poses a sharp question about Karl Barth, interrogating whether Barth comes full circle to the point where his theology of theodicy would be based on the presupposition of a historical fall. In fact, Barth appropriates a narrative form of saga in his dialectical understanding of Urgeschichte against myth (Bultmann) as well as prepositional literalism or biblical inerrancy. The word of God is in becoming along with a novelty of emergence.
Subsequently, Barth grounds his theodicy upon God’s “good” to creation, not with an eternal “yes,” but recognizing limitation and contingency within an ecological theatre. Barth’s position is rather of aesthetical ecological character, following in the footsteps of W. A. Mozart. Nonetheless, there is no question of Job’s theodicy in St. Paul, who differs from Augustine’s idea of original sin.
Coming from the school of Paul Tillich, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Hans Schwarz, Nessan is quite ambitious in mediating the discrepancy between the evolutionary account of human origins and biblical narrative of a historical fall. Humans created in the image of God become a regime of interrogation or even incredibility to the camp of evolutionary biology.
Should public theology of science lose its explanatory power in the public sphere where sciences and religion are at war, even in the controversy between creationism and evolutionists? Nessan says no, paving an alternative to consonance between theological anthropology and evolutionary biology in a critical constructive manner.
An Argument from Evolution
Prof. Craig Nessan has an audacious mind instilled with intentionality of closing the gap between Eden and the emergence of homo sapiens in Africa, but with continual questioning. If Darwin is correct about the origin of the human species, in the beginning were “the replicators,” inorganic molecules with the capability of duplicating themselves and in so doing, extend evolutionary progress.
Over the course of the last 4 billion years, the arduous but inexorable process of mutation and natural selection occurred, followed by successful adaptation to a world of vigorous competition, where only the strongest and fittest survive. The long and serendipitous march of the gene within the cell had progressed toward the evolution of human beings, “survival machines.”
Nessan follows in the grand narrative of a neo-Darwinian view of gene selectionism, according to Richard Dawkins and Edward Wilson. But Nessan still holds another narrative of evolution and humans being grounded in the biblical witness. Two stories are not hostile to each other, but in complementarity. This complementarity characterizes Nessan’s integrative skill of unifying “distinction, but non-separation” in dealing with the hiatus between creation and evolution.
Evolutionary Research Programs in Competition
Nessan outlines the transition from Australopithecus to Homo according to Theodosius Dobzhansky, a father of modern synthesis of Darwinism, while an ardent reader of Teilhard de Chardin. Dobzhansky, a pious Christian with a Russian Orthodox background, stands as a pioneer for initiating to fill the discrepancy between evolution and religion, in whose footsteps most important biologists follow—such as Richard Lewontin, Stephen J. Gould, and Steven Rose among others.
This biologist group forms a different research program centered on organisms as the subject and object of biology, away from a genetically determinist view of evolution as progress and survival of the fittest. The former’s understanding of structure of evolutionary theory elaborates on a dialectics of punctuated equilibrium according to structure of conservation and innovation of novelty, as empirically deciphered and evidenced in fossils of Burges Shale (Gould’s Wonderful Life).
This structural theory of evolution emphasizes the emergence of novelty and diversification, reacting against Darwin’s functional theory based on natural selection and progress. Furthermore, it is refined in the study of conserved core processes (structure of conservation) and facilitated variation (innovative of emergent novelty) at the cellular level by recent biologists such as Marc Kirschner at Harvard Medical School and John Gerhart at UC Berkeley (see The Plausibility of Life).They seek to resolve Darwin’s dilemma of natural selection and progress (undermining variation and innovation of novelty) through a structure of conserved core processes and facilitated variation underlying emergence and diversification.
According to Imre Lakatos, there is a competition between research programs in the community of science, and the core program in that competition still remains until a final rupture occurs in the sense of a paradigm shift. This paradigm shift implies science as a cultural construct rather than representing objective value according to observation, experimentation, and tests in the laboratory. An observed objectified world is actually based on how scientists perceive the world within the spectrum of their own research program. Scientific validity is program-ridden, dependent upon social cultural contexts.
Given this, Nessan takes a genetically reductionist biology to be his interrogator for the implication of theological anthropology. This is a thought-provoking and creative attempt, beginning to ask “how does one account for the qualitative difference between the capability of animal minds and that of human minds?”
This sharp question is concerned with the relationship between the complex functioning of the brain and the experience of conscious thought. The anatomical change coincides with the transition from animal to human, since there is a significant increase in brain size and complexity, enabling humans to undertake greater learning ability and intelligence. In the successful response to the challenge, via natural selection, there occurs adaptability or evolvability, accelerating the tempo of the evolutionary change on the part of the organism.
A Theory of Hiatus
In human behavior, Nessan focuses on a theory of hiatus that modifies how humans may act upon their instincts. The structure of the human brain makes possible a level of learning unprecedented among other animals. Examination of the structure of the human brain gives evidence of its evolutionary history (sharing with reptiles and birds, for instance, the cardiovascular system, and instinctual behavior).
What features stand out in human beings, however, exist in the neocortex (outer layer), as it is a decisively different structure in higher mammals and human beings. The functioning of the neocortex accounts for the more complex forms of perception, cognition, communication, and consciousness, which are characteristic of human beings.
In fact, this mechanism can be seen in light of the structure of conservation, facilitated variation and evolvability, serving as a starting point in the evolutionary process for understanding an organismic view of structure and development of the human brain. This structural view goes beyond natural selection, but implies exaptation (Stephen Gould) and the emergence of dissipative structures as stated far from equilibrium (Ilya Prigogine).
As Nessan is aware, the most compelling theories hypothesize a gradual process of development. The observable anatomical changes include not only an increased brain size but a dramatic increase within the network of linkage, resulting in the complexity of neural circuits and functioning. The highly complex functioning of the human brain accords with the German philosopher Arnold Gehlen’s theory of a “hiatus” between instinct and action in human behavior.
Brain and Embodiment
A theory of hiatus makes possible the capacity for human beings to inhibit animal instincts and to delay the gratification of basic needs. With this theory in mind, Nessan concurs with Dennett, who argues against “Cartesian theater.” What exists is a pandemonium of parallel circuits simultaneously creating “multiple drafts” of experienced reality, playing a transitory role in facilitating immediate activity and variations. Dennett’s idea of multiple drafts discards the Cartesian principle of Cogito as the center of conscious thought.
According to Dennett, the consciousness of the self is made up of wordless images, articulating bits of language and ideas. These images and ideas take root in the circuitry of the brain, expressing the so called ‘self’. This self is in reality an abstraction, because it is “employed to describe the continuity of the impressions, feelings, images, and thoughts experienced by the brain.”
At this point, a question could arise. Could the brain itself experience emotional feelings, imagination, and intellectual thinking, without reference to perception, the body, and the world?
Sociologists of science are primarily concerned with the relation between brain and mind or cognition and life, and they advocate for the significance of the body as the site of cognition, through which we perceive the world. Cognitive function is influenced by the embodiment, expressed in language of communication within the life context. Meaning occurs in the intentionality of the consciousness engaged with life-world, by bringing forth the horizon of meaning.
Linguistic universals have arisen out of the life context, and linguistic conventions are shaped by situations to develop authentic speech, impelled by a deep drive for conceptual clarity. We are condemned to meaning and language beyond language instincts of mimesis (Merleau-Ponty and Francisco Valera’s cognitive science of embodiment).
Other than chimpanzees, human beings have an immense capacity for symbolic language as symbols within larger contextual units of culture which are polyvalent in meaning. The multilayered nuances of human language is called by Richard Dawkins “meme” in cultural heritability.
The functioning of human language is described in analogy to genes. Memes, derived from the Greek mimeme (imitation), refer to ideas whose explanatory power leads to their replication, as they are transmitted from brain to brain. Competition among memes also takes place, according to the logic of natural selection, in which successful memes survive and propagate, while others disappear from the meme pool.
Human culture might be interpreted as a competition among memes, as human consciousness with its capacity for complex use of language creates the occasion for a number of other human behaviors, such as play, art and aesthetics, and religion. This refers to the genetic construction of reality, which contrasts with sociology of multiple realities (Robert Bella), which involves a structural theory of evolution according to the dialectics between structure of conservation and innovative variation of novelty (hiatus).
Cultural meme in this regard cannot neatly be influential in a unilateral and deterministic way, but there is an aspect of unpredictability and indeterminacy in the life of organisms for evolvability to dynamically interact with the environment.
Learning from Symbol of Imago Dei
According to Nessan, the self can experience the other as an experiencing self. “Moreover, the self can apprehend the other as a self-reflecting on the self-experience of other selves. This characteristic of human thought is here referred to as reflective self-consciousness.” This interpretation is challenging, jumping beyond Dawkin’s genetic interpretation of cultural memes and human behavior.
To what extent would the self experience the other? How would the self apprehend the other as a self-reflecting on the self-experience of other selves? Within such dynamics of intersubjectivity remains a lack of conceptual clarity in evolutionary biology.
This said, Nessan turns to theological understanding of God, human beings, and environment. In particular, a biblical narrative (or historicized sage) of the fall is identified as the dislocation of the human animal. A story of the fall tells that with the crossing of the threshold human consciousness has emerged in the ecology of Eden, in which everything unfolds according to nature.
For Paul Tillich the meaning of the fall is symbolic of the transition from essence (non-actualized potentiality) to existence given the possibility of reflective self-acknowledges. The human condition is existentially experienced, such as alienated, anxious, and finite. It refers to the meaning of the existentialist hiatus between instinct and action with freedom.
More than that, Nessan argues that the human animal experienced the dislocation, since it implies an inherent consequence of the emergence of human consciousness. This emergent interpretation would make the case for an ecological understanding of human consciousness and new development far from equilibrium.
This perspective runs counter to Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, rather relocating the sin within human responsible action. We are all like Adam standing before God, exercising our freedom and responsibility. God still remains gracious not in rescinding a symbol of image of God, regardless of punishment. A sinful human being is a graced being, standing in the face of culture of life and culture of violence.
Human beings, imbued with ensouled body and spirit, are still caught between innate selfishness (our heritage as animals, since we are from earth, as creature within eco-system) and selfless love (our God-given potential as those who live with reflective self-consciousness, since God’s breath in our nostril).
The biblical symbol of the image of God is the foundation for human self-consciousness, reflection, and linguistic capacity in giving names to other animals. Dominium terrae is a cultural program instilled with care and service of the ecological life, nothing to do with ruler of the earth through the survival of the fittest.
On the other hand, “what is particular to human language is that it may even be employed in order to deceive.” Self-consciousness creates enormous problems for interpretation and meaning of life, in terms of authentic speech or faulty witness. The word of God does not cease along with human history, civilization, and society.
Emancipation and World-Openness
In Genesis the first words from the mouth of the serpent are “Did God say?” Words have been used to distort and twist. The dislocation in the fall signifies that human beings no longer know their own place in the world, listening to reality of powers and principalities.
Genesis narrative gives an account of emancipation of Israel from a mythological reality of Babylon’s powers and principalities (tohu wa bohu: Gen. 1:2). ‘Good’ creation reflects an emancipation of Israel from Babylonian captivity, deconstructing the mythical reality of Babylonian Tiamat and Bau in terms of utopian vision of creation as emancipation (F.W. Marquardt).
This emancipatory position would strengthen a theory of hiatus, which offers the human animal a choice between many alternative actions. Where selfishness was once a virtue in the quest for survival, selfishness now presents itself as an acute problem in asserting my self-interest and violating other’s integrity.
The Genesis narrative about Adam and Eve gives mythical (mytos implying the story) expression to the sense of profound dislocation, as experienced by human beings in the form of a historicized saga. The biblical narrative is layered in conceptual reflection, as embedded within a historical life context, especially espoused with prophetic rationality and praxis.
The mythic voice of the serpent designates the crossing of a threshold, making human beings disobedient to God, while the hiatus emerges, distinguishing human behavior from animals who do not disobey God. Breaking the ecology of Eden by virtue of the very form of self-consciousness and action, the harmony of natural existence is disrupted for the sake of the human creativity and freedom, as cast out of paradise.
With the fall into reflective self-consciousness, the meaning of the fall is reconsidered according to evolutionary categories, yet Nessan requires revision of these categories through a biblical symbol of human being created in the image of God (Jesus Christ according to St. Paul), along with proleptic hope.
In so doing, Nessan’s theory of hiatus is more involved in proleptic emancipation than Gehlen’s idea of hiatus and world-openness, which has a lack of utopian-prophetic vision and praxis. Indeed, world-openness originates from proleptic-prophetic awareness of new heaven and new earth, as heralded and embodied in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The world-openness, or bringing forth the world is primarily based on flesh (assumptio carnis), a pre-reflective ground of theologia crucis, which is proleptically actualized and transformed through the body of the resurrected. This perspective features the presence of corporeality, refining the theory of hiatus and the image of God in an integrative-emergent frame of reference.
For Nessan, “Image of God denotes not a lost historical reality but a yet-to-be-fully- realized potential.” Nessan’s emergent approach does not undermine a traumatic sense of dislocation along with the fall into reflective self-consciousness, but he argues for human beings to relate to the world with unprecedented freedom. “Self-consciousness is thus the source of both our misery and our glory as human beings.”
Nessan’s position can share something with Pannenberg, who conceptualizes the image of God as representative of what human beings are in the process of becoming. Image of God refers to the human potential for living with a self-transcendence and in an open attitude toward the world. In fact, Pannenberg’s ontological position is of apologetic character, emphasizing a significance of hiatus and transcendence in the fashion of Gehlen.
However, Nessan maintains that “Christianity envisions a future where human beings realize the fullness of the image of God as they locate themselves at home in God’s grace.” This is characteristic of Nessan’s public theology of the image of God holding an evolutionary-christological profile. “To become like Christ would be the equivalent of becoming fully human” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer).
Nessan’s proleptic-prophetic vision is grounded in theologia crucis (forgiveness and reconciliation), which gives new possibility for human beings to pursue God’s embodied transcendence in light of new heaven and new earth. Evolution finds its own place within this divine drama of original creation, continuing creation and final creation.
Craig L. Nessan: Sex, Aggression, And Pain: Sociobiological Implications for Theological Anthropology, Zygon, vol.33.no.3. Sep. 1998.
“With self-reflective consciousness we can either shape a culture to maximize our sociobiological impulses to self interest or we can construct a culture that fosters altruistic and the common good. Religion can do either, for example, Christian white nationalism or the Great Commandment for neighbor love.”—Craig L. Nessan
Prof. Craig L. Nessan engaged in in-depth research in his 1998 article on the sociobiological implications of sex drive, aggression, and pain for theological anthropology by way of critical comparison. He acknowledges that Wilson’s Sociobiology (1978) has emerged in recent decades in a comprehensive spectrum conceptualizing human behavior in a genetic evolutionary paradigm.
Nessan shows an audacious endeavor by bringing a theological view of human creation in the image of God (expressed in the biblical story of creation and fall in Gen. 1-3) to the atheistic scheme of explanation built in the sociobiology. Indeed, a sociobiological condition can be implied in a biblical witness to human being as formed out of the dust of the earth (Gen. 2:7).
In Nessan’s view, a biblical narrative implies that human beings are deeply imprinted in the evolutionary past and offers an insight in encountering with a scientific study of sociobiology. The latter makes the case for understanding human behavior according to the propagation of selfish gens (Richard Dawkins).
Aware of limitation and innovation in the program of sociobiology, Nessan brings its arguments about human behavior to dialogue with a theological understanding of human beings in a heuristic manner, without discarding the evolutionary, biological reductionism. He seeks to cut through the dilemma lying between sociobiological reductionism and theological sheer ignoring of its challenge.
What matters in Nessan’s major interest lies in appraising themes such as sex, aggression, and pain in dialogue with what evolutionary biology contributes considerably, because each stance is still quite important for theological discussion of human understanding.
To advance this topic, Nessan pays attention to the capacity of human brain for reflective self-consciousness, because neuroscience in the study of human brain would offer a new dimension to a biological direction, regarding its destructive or the redemptive possibilities.
For the redemptive assessment, it is significant for Nessan to undertake an integrative approach to brain/mind or consciousness, because “reflective self-consciousness refers not only to the human capacity for awareness of the self as one who knows.” But it also refers “to the capacity to appreciate another human being as a knowing self who has the same ability” as mine.
An integrative model of reflective self-consciousness is embedded within the intersubjectivity, which finds an expression in the human capacity for symbolic language communicating multilayers of gestures, nuances, and meaning. Reflective self- consciousness constructs the culture through language as embodied in human life.
The integrated theme of reflective self-consciousness, language, and the construction of culture remains crucial in Nessan’s argument challenging sociobiology, since the latter has not adequately managed to explain the complexity of human behavior and culture. It is certain that Dawkins’ notion of cultural “meme” seeks to describe the phenomenon of human self-transcendence through language and culture. But it is still fraught with a commanding role of genes occupied in driver’s seat. Genes hold human behavior and culture on a long leash (Wilson).
Other than that, Nessan is convinced of neuroscientific study of neocortex in its cognitive functioning and complexity, making a room for the meaning of life and the question of God. Differentiated from other animals based on instincts and drives, the human animal is capable of confronting an intense moral problem in terms of mutual knowing and affection.
For instance, defending territory, mating, killing prey for survival and self-propagation are fraught with moral responsibility and culpability in an earlier evolutionary stage. Moral capacity is seen in “negotiating the boundary between inherited animal nature and the wonder of reflective self-consciousness.”
Seen in the cognitive science of brain and human intellectual, Nessan finds it important to take on the issue of sex drive, aggression and the experience of pain, elaborating on a unique responsibility for reflecting and acting upon them.
Nessan’s neuro scientific understanding of human intellectual reminds me of the emergent understanding of circular structures at the nervous system. According to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Valera, the nervous system is not merely an information-processing system like a computer or cybernetic model, but it is self-organization (autopoiesis; autonomy and self-production).
It is an emergent network having internal, or operational closure within the boundary. The brain configures or constitutes relevance for otherwise meaningful interactions, and our cognition is practically embodied as lived experience in our interaction with the world. The meaning of life or religious source is emergent of embodied mind within a tremendous network of historical, environmental relationships.
Life is not in the genes, or genetic engineering, but is incarnated in the dynamical pattern and interaction; human mind is situated in the life as an emergent property. The emergent approach to human brain in autopietic system seeks to deconstruct adaptationist position by neo-Darwinism.
According to sociobiology, there is difference between men and women in capacity of the survival of their genes. Men would propagate their genes by impregnating women as frequently as possible, favoring the polygamy in an evolutionary advantage. Otherwise, the female strategy is based on the status and wealth, tending toward monogamy.
Although such genetically determined view of men and women would be empirically read in the newspapers, it does not tell the whole story about human behavior.
Hence, Nessan questions whether human beings are predetermined to act upon their innate sexual impulses, as the sociobiological model argues. Contra Sociobiology, however, it is of special significance to take into account the human capacity for reflective self-consciousness, along with the empathy and a long term commitment to partners and children. Cognitive mind is incarnated in human life, emergent as reflection and self-consciousness in an autopoietic sense.
In so doing, theological anthropology is in a better position to account for the complexity of human sexual behavior in dealing with ethical integrity, parental care, empathy, and religious source. This contrasts with an evolutionary strategy of sociobiology, which justifies status quo of social hierarchy and racial discrimination. Rather cultural structures and religious symbols make the case for reinvigorating human capacity for reflective self-consciousness, fostering marital relationship and stabilizing family life for the sake of human community.
Nessan’s integrative model of reflective self-consciousness, which is espoused with empathy and altruism, provides an insight into non-violent alternatives (Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.) to the sociobiological explanation of violence and aggression according to the shared genes.
For instance, male violence against women is seen in such as male body strength, or the physiology of the male in reproductive process of impregnation, competition, rivalry and jealousy, or the use of force (coercion and rape), and homicide, among others.
Furthermore, Nessan identities pain as a necessary (though ambiguous) function, which is integral to the survival of living creatures. But in the human life, reflective self-consciousness turns the pain into the meaning of suffering, elaborating on the meaning of life along with reality of unbearable suffering. Human sensitivity is undertaken in ethical and religious symbols to alleviate reality of suffering,
Intellectual cognition is embodied in human life, in which a theological anthropology is captured in terms of reflective self-consciousness along with empathy and altruism. Hence, human behavior cannot be reduced to sociobiological gene determinism. The emergence of reflective self-consciousness becomes the occasion for underwriting moral deliberation against self-aggrandizing or other-serving purposes.
As Nessan argues, with self-reflective consciousness we can either shape a culture to maximize our sociobiological impulses to self interest or we can construct a culture that fosters altruistic and the common good. Religion can do either, for example, Christian white nationalism or the Great Commandment for neighbor love.
At this juncture, a theological concept of fall and sin finds its proper place in the face of the sociobiological tendency and categories, because humans created in the image of God imply human capability to live in relationship with God, as God’s collaborators. This provides a theological basis in understanding the emergence of reflective self-consciousness, making human beings responsible for responding to their sociobiological tendencies and conditions.
The biblical narrative—such as good creation, natural evil, fall, sin and image of God—may incorporate sociobiological challenge into developing theological anthropology in furthering dialogue between science and religion, without falling into a gray zone of a biological determinism,
Prof. Crag Nessan presents his alternative approach to sociobiology, responding to biological condition of human being in an adequate manner through the model of reflective self-consciousness. Cultural evolution is part of biological evolution, yet human capacity of language and empathy remain crucial in shaping cultural evolution and the significance of organismic view of the complexity of life can be seen in sharing other’s feeling through mutual collaboration in the face of competition and survival of the fittest.
Culture and religious source help to construct human capacity of self-reflection in league with common good governance and civil society in democratic pluralist configuration and solidarity with those who are categorized into loser. Nessan’s public theology provides a constructive alternative with a corrective to the reality of sociobiological reductionism through a core theological idea of human being created in the image of God.