CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 10
WHAT’S WRONG WITH US?:
WHY WE NEED THE IDEA OF SIN
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
What is the future of humanity? Nobody knows. For a start, we might suffer the same fate that is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs—an “extinction event” caused by collision with a meteorite or comet.[1] These events are certainly unpredictable; with due respect to the imaginations of Hollywood moviemakers, they are also probably unavoidable. Yet most worrying of all, human beings have developed technologies that now put us in a unique position. We, alone among earth’s species, are able to bring about our own mass destruction—perhaps through the reckless use of nuclear weapons or designer pathogens. Never before has a species emerged which might bring about its own extinction event.
But why, some will ask, would humanity do something so utterly stupid and perverse as to bring about its own destruction? If we were the idealized rational calculating machines of the “Age of Reason,” we would never dream of doing something so bizarre. Yet as we reflect on our future, we need to ask an awkward question. Are we really that clever? Or is there something wrong with us that allows or even impels us to do some very unwise things?
We need to understand ourselves—who we are, what we are meant to be, and why we so often get things so badly wrong. I’m not a great fan of the English essayist William Hazlitt (1778–1830). Yet some of his aphorisms strike home powerfully, their crystalline prose softening the blow of the hard truths they contain. That’s certainly true of his comment on human nature: “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.”[2] Both Hesiod and Plato spoke of a lost “Golden Age” of harmony, stability, and prosperity, the memory of which tantalizingly haunts the present, intimating that this is not the way things were meant to be. The rich and complex Christian worldview frames human history in terms of fleeting memories of a lost paradise and the hope of its future restoration. Something is wrong with us. But what? Is there something that can be done about it? And how can we make sense of the vast gulf between what things are and what we feel they ought to be?
Human history is littered with bright hopes and dismal failures; with technological inventions that some unwisely hoped might end war and suffering yet which seem to end up being used to promote them. How are we to make sense of this enigma? What “big picture” of human nature helps us make sense of the perplexing and generally discouraging patterns of history? Or maybe even to change them for the better? What story can be told that gives a coherent account of our dilemma and its possible resolutions?
Framing the Human Dilemma
During their Grand Tour of Europe in 1765–6, the great English man of letters Samuel Johnson and his biographer, James Boswell, met the Italian playwright Giuseppe Baretti, best known for his unevidenced attribution of the words eppur si muove (“nevertheless it moves”) to Galileo more than a century after his death. During their conversations, Baretti rubbished the idea of the fundamental goodness of humanity with a well-judged one-liner: “I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.”[3]
It was a witty remark, spoken largely in jest, and greatly appreciated by Boswell—perhaps because it offered a witty counterfoil to the prevailing platitudes of the “Age of Reason,” which took an elevated view of human rational and moral capacity. It was an age of boundless optimism, driven by a sense of the irresistible advance of rational creatures to ever-greater heights and achievements. This view was given a new injection of energy in the nineteenth century, as Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx offered critiques of religion which treated religious beliefs as human productions, lacking any counterparts in the real world. God was not so much dethroned as declared to be a pointless fiction; human beings were thus unaccountable to any higher authority. Wars arose because of a lingering heritage of religious bigotry. Neutralize religion and the world would become a peaceful place.
Yet it has all gone wrong. Perhaps Western thinkers were lulled into a false sense of security by the virtual absence of global conflict during the period 1815–1914 and prematurely concluded that human violence and barbarity were a thing of the past, abolished by the rise of science and rational thinking. Yet as the global explosion of war and destruction in the twentieth century made uncomfortably clear, the volcano of human violence had merely become temporarily dormant, not permanently extinct.[4] Further eruptions are to be expected.
As we saw earlier, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola declared that humans have the capacity to be angels or beasts. So what if there is something within us that predisposes us towards the bestial rather than the angelic? The brutality of the last century inclines us to suspect that this might well be the case, helping us to reconnect with older and wiser accounts of the human predicament. Perhaps we have come to the belated recognition that the Enlightenment hope of a more peaceful and humane world—laudable in itself—now depends upon human beings adopting a more realistic and resilient view of human nature than those idealized fictions of the Enlightenment itself.
In his chillingly accurate depiction of human violence during the twentieth century, Jonathan Glover speaks of the need to “replace the thin, mechanical psychology of the Enlightenment with something more complex, something closer to reality.” We “need to look hard and clearly at some monsters inside us” if we are ever to cage and tame them.[5] That’s why we need a solid diagnosis of human nature, rather than delusional and aspirational promissory notes which soon prove their lack of credibility and utility.
We want to think that we are good, and we conveniently ignore evidence that subverts that belief. Human beings are very good at refusing to admit that they are wrong. They shift goalposts, rewrite narratives, and redefine terms in a splendid but futile attempt to evade admissions that they were wrong.[6] A defeat is redefined as a victory. Sure, it’s totally irrational. But it’s also very human. That’s just the way we are. And unfortunately, human beings like to think that we’re fundamentally good and lock ourselves into interpreting everything in ways consistent with this, filtering out anything that challenges this dogma. Yet everyone knows it’s not right. So let’s try and work out what is wrong with us and what we might do about it.
False Solutions to the Human Dilemma
The dogma of the intrinsic goodness of humanity is a patently false notion which can only be sustained in five highly creative, but intellectually implausible, ways.
History and present experience alike point to human beings having a capacity for doing some good, even inspiring, things, matched by what appears to be an equally great capacity for messing things up and getting things wrong, which often—but happily not invariably—leads to evil and the infliction of pain. Augustine of Hippo, one of the early church’s most important thinkers, argued that things that were good in themselves could nonetheless become the carriers of moral corruption, countering a simplistic equation of “evil” with “that which can transmit contamination and decay.”[7] We need a richer vocabulary to cope with the sheer complexity of human engagement with the world and its morally variegated outcomes.
The awkward truth about human beings is that they are perfectly capable of taking good things and doing some thoroughly nasty things with them. Science and religion can both go seriously wrong. It’s easy for ideologues on every side to seize on their failures, unburdened by complicating facts, and depict these as disclosing universal truths. Yes, both science and religion can go wrong—badly wrong. But that doesn’t mean that either of them is bad. It just shows that they are both thoroughly human undertakings.
Perhaps the problem goes even deeper than this. Many seem reluctant to recognize that human beings can willingly do evil. The charming but utterly naive belief that we “needs must love the highest when we see it” (Tennyson) fails to do justice to the complexity and mixed motivations of human beings. We are all capable of doing—and being—good and evil. There may be some variation in the extent of this capacity, yet most of us are honest enough to recognize this tension within us, which pulls us in different directions.
Our problem is that we seem to lack a vocabulary adequate to describe this complexity within human nature. This is the disturbing enigma that any defensible and viable account of human nature must acknowledge and engage with. Evil is not located in the “other”—in someone or something else. It is a living presence, whether dormant or active, within each of us. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s experiences in the Soviet labor camps led him to realize that the “line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”[8] Evil is not something that can be conveniently located in the “other”—someone or something else that contaminates us. Its roots lie deep within us. We like to portray ourselves as the innocent victims of evil, preferring to overlook the awkward truth that we are perfectly capable of actualizing our innate evil tendencies in certain contexts.
Let’s explore this question by looking at how human beings have done some worrying things with science.
The Corruption of Scientific Innocence
Human beings are very good at messing things up. Just about everything they touch has the capacity to crumble to dust. Science is one of the greatest forces within today’s world. It’s capable of doing some great things. But it has opened the door to some horrors. I remember a debate at Cambridge University some years ago on the place of science in today’s world. One speaker declared that science had saved the human race. It had given us penicillin and new medical techniques for saving and extending life. He was immediately challenged by angry audience members to tell the full story, not just the bits that fitted his Panglossian view of science. What about atom bombs and other weapons of mass destruction? Weren’t those also produced by scientists? It was an uncomfortable moment. It was as if a curtain had been drawn aside, allowing us to see a dark secret that everyone preferred to keep hidden.
The moral ambiguity of science arises partly because science is ethically blind and partly because it is undertaken and applied by human beings with morally conflicting principles. My own reflections on this theme go back to the time when I was studying chemistry at Oxford University in the early 1970s. At that time, I took a strongly optimistic and positive attitude towards natural sciences, seeing them as an intellectual undertaking which was wonderful in its own right and which also opened the way to the extension of human life and the elimination of disease and poverty. And I was right about that—but only in part.
One of the core elements of Oxford University’s chemistry course at this time was synthetic routes for complex organic compounds. The leading authority on this subject was Louis Frederick Fieser (1899–1977), whose classic series Reagents for Organic Synthesis gave me lots of ideas for my own work. Fieser served as Sheldon Emery Professor of Organic Chemistry at Harvard University and had an outstanding international reputation in his field. He and his wife, Mary Peters Fieser (1909–97), pioneered the artificial synthesis of a series of important naturally occurring compounds, including the steroid cortisone and Vitamin K, which is needed for blood coagulation.[9] Their brilliant synthetic procedures made medically important chemicals much cheaper and more widely available, with highly beneficial outcomes for patient care. Fieser and Fieser’s work became increasingly important during the Second World War as supplies of quinine (a naturally occurring compound used to treat malaria) began to run low.
That was all I knew about Louis Fieser when I studied as an Oxford science undergraduate in the early 1970s. It was only later, as a graduate researcher in Oxford University’s Department of Biochemistry, that I learned that Fieser had also been involved in another project during the Second World War. The US Army urgently needed a chemical weapon suitable for eliminating troop concentrations in jungles and destroying population centers in the Pacific war theater. Fieser and his team of chemists at Harvard won the contract to develop this weapon of mass destruction. They invented napalm, a petroleum gel that stuck to buildings and human bodies. Once ignited, it could not be removed or extinguished. Tests by the US Army’s Chemical Warfare Service confirmed it was an ideal weapon for firebombing Japanese cities. Napalm proved to be a phenomenal military success, killing more Japanese civilians than the two atomic bomb blasts of 1945 combined.[10]
When I first learned about this, I found myself deeply conflicted about Fieser. How could someone who had pioneered ways of synthesizing chemicals that would extend human life and enhance its quality also create a chemical that was specifically designed to end life on an industrial scale in a horrifically inhumane manner? The impact of napalm on Japanese soldiers and civilians was psychological, not merely physical, evoking a horror of being burned alive in a hideously painful manner.[11] My perception of Fieser changed, becoming darker and more unsettled, partly because it reflected my difficulty in holding these aspects of his professional career together in my mind and partly because this triggered a more troubling question. What if this moral ambiguity in a leading scientist was also embedded within science itself?
It was not easy for me to accommodate this radical dissonance in my thinking about science, although I later realized that many physicists experienced similar anxieties about the military use of their science to develop nuclear weapons. Gradually, I came to the conclusion that science itself was neither good nor evil; it was neutral. It was something capable of being used for good or for evil. It all depended on the people who were using it and their motivations. Science is morally ambivalent because human beings are morally ambivalent.
So how can we make sense of this? And what can we do about it? For a start, we can face up to the problem.
Facing Up to the Human Problem
Rowan Williams once remarked that there is “inbuilt into human beings a sort of dangerous taste for unreality.”[12] We prefer make-believe worlds in which everything is sweetness and light—apart, of course, from the worlds of those we dismiss as out-groups, who are invariably deluded, evil, and stupid, locked into primitive affective states that ought to be relegated to where they belong—an earlier stage in hominid evolution. We devise worldviews that are designed to reinforce our own importance and denigrate those of people we despise. We end up becoming willing prisoners of our self-serving myths that do nothing to advance knowledge or understanding.
The philosopher John Gray’s Straw Dogs (2002) was an iconoclastic book, caustically debunking the pretensions of the kind of bland humanist philosophy you find circulating with the Zinfandel at metropolitan dinner parties. For Gray, “humans cannot live without illusion”—such as a blind faith in progress or the goodness of human nature.[13] Humanists may like to delude themselves that they have a rational view of the world, yet their core belief in moral progress is a “superstition,” which is arguably further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions. Progress in science and technology is subservient to selfish and corrupting human agendas and does not inevitably lead to social and political progress. “Without the railways, telegraph and poison gas, there could have been no Holocaust.”[14]
In place of such illusions, Gray offers a ruthlessly Darwinian account of human nature, which discards such cherished notions as that of progress as a pre-Darwinian myth. “Humans can no more be masters of their destiny than any other animal.”[15] We have to realize that grandiose social experiments to remake our world are destined to fail, precisely because they are developed by human beings and depend on delusion-prone humans to trust and implement them. We must learn to live without the consolation of religion, of scientific explanation, or of any dream of a perfect society. After all, human beings didn’t evolve so that they could find truth or meaning in life. They evolved to reproduce.
Where Richard Dawkins dismissed religion as the defining human delusion, Gray sees religion as one such delusion among many others, including those unacknowledged delusions entertained by bien pensants such as Dawkins himself, who somehow believe that criticizing religion establishes the rationality of their own ideas. Such people think that naming a delusion entertained by other (lesser) people somehow validates their own beliefs, when it merely blinds them to their tenuous evidential basis.
Many humanists will dismiss Gray’s view that “humans are weapon-making animals with an unquenchable fondness for killing.”[16] Yet this is an evidenced claim that cannot be dismissed because we don’t like it. It may be an overstatement. But I would rather have an overstatement of an uncomfortable truth than a blind refusal to engage with the substantial body of historical evidence that points to this inconvenient insight.[17] Gray’s suggestion that “death camps are as modern as laser surgery”[18] may need some nuancing, but there is sufficient truth in his argument to challenge the delusions of even the most incorrigible rationalist. Gray has perhaps taken to heart R. G. Collingwood’s famous remark of 1939 rather more than some of his more idealistic fellow philosophers: “The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.”[19]
The evidential basis for abandoning the optimism of some leading Enlightenment thinkers about human nature is overwhelming, and I can see no good reason for maintaining this myth other than a forlorn dogmatic commitment to an outdated ideological orthodoxy. In any case, we now seem to have finally realized that many textbook accounts of the Enlightenment are actually “thinly veiled ideological manifestos or pale reflections of current trends.”[20] In other words, we tend to project contemporary progressive intellectual and social outlooks back onto the “Age of Reason,” reconstructing it in our own image. Happily, intellectual historians have shown that the Enlightenment was a much more diverse movement than earlier generations realized, and it is not difficult to find writers within the movement—or on its fringes—who developed what can now be seen to be more realistic accounts of human nature, including the limits of human reason. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, which we noted earlier, offers some perceptive and cutting reflections on human nature that allow us to begin to make sense of the horrors of modern genocide.
Yet Gray’s point—however overstated—about genocide being “as human as art or prayer”[21] raises the question of what vocabulary we can use to engage with this and other human deficits, whether we see these as originating from within our evolutionary history or from somewhere else. In the following section, we shall revisit the Christian language of sin, which affirms and attempts to explain humanity’s rationally inexplicable yet seemingly inescapable tendency to debase and destroy its own best achievements.
Why We Need to Talk about Sin Again
My own transition from atheism to Christianity was catalyzed by a growing realization of the importance of “big pictures.” As a scientist, I took the view that the ability of a theory to account for observation and experience was an indicator of its truth. I came to the view that the Christian “big picture” fitted in the world much more persuasively than its atheist counterpart.[22] I do not expect everyone to share this belief, but it is important to understand what this influential and immensely generative way of seeing things is all about and why so many find it helpful in making sense of the enigmas and seeming contradictions of human nature.
The enlightened philosophers of eighteenth-century France dismissed the notion of sin, regarding it as insulting to human beings. Sin suggested that humans were flawed and fallible, prone to selfishness and violence. Critics of the Enlightenment made the obvious counterargument that the irrationality and violence of the “Reign of Terror” which followed the French Revolution seemed to confirm precisely these tendencies and called out for them to be recognized and expressed properly. However archaic its language may seem, the vocabulary of sin engages with the fundamental ambiguity of human nature and challenges naive utopian visions of the human future.
Why is it that every human institution seems to subvert its own goals? The Christian church, considered as an institution, regularly falls victim to social forces and pressures—such as the need to accumulate resources in order to continue its mission—which end up compromising its core values. And it’s not on its own. Countless institutions, religious and secular, find themselves failing and collapsing through human flaws. For example, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the United Nations sent “peacekeeping” troops to protect vulnerable communities in Africa. What happened? These troops ended up raping and abusing local women, giving rise to a new social problem—“peacekeeper babies.” United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described this outrageous sexual abuse by peacekeepers as “a cancer in our system.”[23]
Yet as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr so prophetically remarked, the flaws in human institutions ultimately arise from corresponding flaws in human nature itself.[24] The “cancer” lies not only in the “system” but in its constituent human beings. This was one of the reasons why Niebuhr came to develop such a respect for the American constitutional system, with its checks and balances and its genius for recognizing the inevitable conflicts that would arise within society, demanding workable means of preventing the excessive localization of power.
We cannot allow the delusion of a fundamental and incorrigible human goodness to shape such important issues as social policies or ethical thinking. The empirical realities of life demand that we realize that there is something wrong with us and force us both to confront this awkward truth and to figure out how to minimize its impact. The Christian tradition offers what it regards as a totally realistic account of human nature, which is dismissed as “pessimistic” only by those who close their eyes to what is happening in the world.
Christianity offers an evaluation of human nature. This can be framed as a forensic judgment that we are guilty or negligent, having failed to pursue goodness and combat evil. Perhaps we all need our delusions of moral perfection to be challenged from time to time in this way. Yet this evaluation of our condition can also be framed as a medical judgment—a diagnosis which tells us what is wrong with us, what might be done to cure us, or what could help us to manage a chronic and persistent condition that prevents us from being the people that we are meant to be.
The Christian understanding of human nature has two key points of focus: the notion of humanity bearing the “image of God” and the concept of sin. Although there is some latitude of interpretation concerning both these ideas, there is a generous consensus within the Christian tradition about what these core notions are trying to express. The idea of humanity bearing the “image of God” speaks of some inbuilt drive within human nature which perhaps could be conceptualized as a “homing instinct” for God. Just as a compass needle is drawn towards the magnetic pole, so the human imagination is drawn, as much by intuition as by reason, towards its origin and goal in God.
Perhaps more importantly, the notion of the “image of God” expresses the notion that human beings are drawn upwards, avoiding collapsing into the material order from which they emerged. We emerge from dust; we shall return to dust; but we are more than dust. The human urge for self-transcendence can be seen in the light of this theological framework as a hidden or disguised yearning for God, which calls out for interpretation.
The term “sin” is used in a theological sense to designate a flaw within human nature which prevents us from achieving our true goals. It is not a moral or existential concept; it is essentially a theological notion, with moral and existential outworkings. The term “sin” can be used to designate both individual actions which represent a failure to achieve our true goal and the underlying human state that gives rise to those individual acts. Writers such as Augustine suggest that human nature can be seen as damaged, wounded, and broken. It needs healing and restoration if we are to achieve our true aspirations and goals. We are trapped—by our evolutionary past, by our personal weaknesses, and by the seductive whisper of delusions that have become the received wisdom of our day.
If the word “sin” didn’t exist, we would need to invent it. But it’s already there, precisely because earlier generations recognized the problem and knew that the first step in dealing with this problem is to name it. In and through its concept of sin, Christian theology gives us a critical lens through which to view the complex motivations and mixed agendas of human beings. We bear God’s image, yet we are sinful. We are capable of good, just as we are capable of evil. If the “image of God” affirms our need to reach upwards—to grasp and be grasped by the love of God—the notion of sin affirms a darker reality, namely our tendency to be drawn and dragged down.
We thus find ourselves excited and inspired by the vision of God, which draws us upwards; at the same time, we find ourselves pulled down by the frailty and fallenness of human nature. Earlier we noted Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s view that human beings were poised in the theological space between angels and beasts. The “image of God” causes us to yearn to be angelic; sin inclines us towards our animal natures, driven by deep Darwinian instincts of survival, dominance, and power. In a sense, Christian ethics is a principled refusal to conform to these social Darwinian principles, however pragmatically they are stated.[25]
Much the same point was made by Thomas H. Huxley in his 1893 Romanes Lecture at Oxford University, entitled “Evolution and Ethics.”[26] Huxley noted that human animals have triumphed in the “struggle for existence” through their cunning and “ruthless and ferocious destructiveness.” Yet human beings, having subdued the remainder of the sentient world, now found that these “deeply ingrained serviceable qualities have become defects.” The violence and ruthlessness that secured their triumph over other animals were now seen as “sins”; there was a recognition that the methods used in the “struggle for existence” are “not reconcilable with sound ethical principles.”[27]
Ethics, for Huxley, was thus a principled resistance to precisely those animal qualities that secured human domination of the living world and the Darwinian processes that underlie them. Yet—and here Huxley must be heard—this demands the subjugation of animal instincts that linger within us. Our hereditary history continues to shape our present—and it must be resisted, even though it cannot be eradicated. “The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence.” Evolution may explain the origins of ethics; it cannot itself function as the basis of ethics, in that we are now called to leave behind those former virtues of violence and aggressiveness which are today seen as vices. “Evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.”[28]
Huxley’s emphasis on the tension between hereditary forces that linger within us and our sense of justice and ethical principles finds echoes within the Christian tradition. Augustine of Hippo’s basic criticism of Pelagius was his failure to allow for the continuing presence of inherited habits of thought and action, which are carried over into the life of faith. It is impossible to break free totally from our origins and contexts. Today, we would probably amplify his comments with reference to our evolutionary past.
The Christian “big picture” depicts humanity as containing within itself a tension between two different modes of being. The New Testament uses the terms “flesh” (Greek: sarx) and “spirit” (Greek: pneuma) to refer not to parts of the human body but rather to two different modes of human existence. Paul adopts what scholars term an “aspective” rather than a “partitive” understanding of terms such as “soul,” “flesh,” and “body.”[29] To “live according to the flesh” means to live at a purely human level, disregarding the spiritual side of life. Yet this theological framework can be extended to the moral and existential realms. It affirms that there is a tension within us as we feel drawn to good and to evil.
This framework emphasizes the importance of divine grace in that it recognizes the limits placed on human beings for self-improvement and self-transcendence. We cannot heal ourselves; we need to be healed by someone else. We find ourselves drawn to sin, despite knowing that it is wrong; we find ourselves unable to achieve the good, despite knowing that this is what we should be doing. This dilemma was known and expressed by Paul: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:19).
The Christian insistence that Jesus Christ is the savior of humanity—not simply its teacher and moral example—reflects this view of the human situation. Salvation is not something that humans can achieve or earn; it is something achieved and given by God. Yet salvation is a process in which a changed status in relation to God is gradually effected in terms of a transformed inner reality, often expressed using the language of “renewal” or “regeneration.” These terms do not designate an instantaneous change, in which someone suddenly breaks free from the power of sin to pull him or her down.
Augustine of Hippo used an analogy in making this point: we are like someone who is ill but is receiving appropriate treatment and is in the process of recovering. We are still ill; however, the healing process has begun, and we will eventually get better. We are thus both ill and better at the same time. We are ill in fact, in that we have not yet recovered, but we are healthy in hope, in that our healing is under way. Martin Luther famously expressed this notion when he declared that a Christian is “at one and the same time a righteous person and a sinner (simul iustus et peccator).”[30]
Christianity thus sets out a vision of human nature which recognizes its enormous potential while nevertheless affirming that it is wounded, damaged, and broken. The New Testament uses the language of putting our old nature to death and putting on a new nature—while at the same time recognizing the lingering influence of our older selves in the life of faith. The “Old Adam” lingers within us, shaping our motivations and actions (the parallels with Huxley’s reflections on our hereditary history are worth exploring here). Human nature needs to be healed and does not possess the capacity to heal itself. This framework helps us make sense of the complex picture we see of human culture and history, characterized by aspirations to greatness and goodness on the one hand and oppression and violence on the other. From a Christian perspective, it is clear that we must recognize both the greater destiny of humanity and a corresponding capacity to fail to achieve such aspirations unaided and unhealed.
Individuals may indeed have the capacity for good; this seems matched, however, by their intrinsic capacity for evil. We are morally ambiguous, easily led astray. Recognizing our own innate capacity for sin makes us less judgmental about others in that we realize how easily we too might fall into such patterns of thoughts and behavior. A recognition of this profound ambiguity and tension within us is essential if we are to avoid political and social utopianism, based on ideologically driven value judgments about human nature.
Science and Sin: Convergence without Identity
So where might science come into this? Nobody who knows anything about science or faith would be so crass as to suggest that their ideas on the human dilemma can be merged or treated as if they are intellectually equivalent. We need to respect their quite distinct approaches and emphases. Yet the idea of “enrichment of narratives” offers a way of respecting the individual identities of scientific and theological approaches while at the same time exploring how their distinct perspectives might illuminate the complex reality that we call “sin.” Many have turned to psychology for illumination of humanity’s deeply puzzling tendency towards violence and self-destruction. Although the reliability of some of Sigmund Freud’s judgments can easily be challenged, his own questioning of the myth of human goodness must be taken seriously. “Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.”[31] The evidence strongly indicates that males show this tendency to violence significantly more than females, especially in the case of sexual violence.
Since the advent of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the imagery of conflict and a struggle for survival within the biological world has come to dominate discussion of human beings. Should we be surprised that humanity, having emerged from within this biological realm, is characterized by tendencies towards violence? Darwin’s own language is highly suggestive here:
The inevitable result is an ever-recurrent Struggle for Existence. It has truly been said that all nature is at war; the strongest ultimately prevail, the weakest fail. . . . The severe and often-recurrent struggle for existence will determine that those variations, however slight, which are favourable shall be preserved or selected, and those which are unfavourable shall be destroyed.[32]
The development of related approaches within sociobiology also opens up some important possibilities for expanding our understanding of the nature of sin.[33]
We’ve already noted how both Thomas Huxley’s lecture “Evolution and Ethics” (1893) and Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene (1976) opened up some fundamental questions about the biological origins of human tendencies towards violence and selfishness and how these might be alleviated, if not entirely eliminated. The geneticist Steve Jones develops this point further,[34] reflecting on the dark side of human nature, and pointing to hereditary factors which might shape contemporary human attitudes. Traditionally, Christian theologians speak of “original sin” in the sense of tendencies that lie within us from birth rather than being acquired from our social context.[35] This resonates with genetic reflections on violence and self-centeredness.
In her Fall to Violence (1994), Marjorie Suchocki considers sin in terms of instinctive human violence. “A tendency toward aggression is built into human nature . . . we are by nature an aggressive species with a history of physical and psychic violence. . . . The capacity for violence is built into our species through aggressive instincts related to survival. When that violence is unnecessary and avoidable, it is sin.”[36] This innate human tendency towards violence is expressed in multiple cultural forms, which extend far beyond the extreme case of international wars.[37] Yet it is important to notice that warfare does not represent a departure from basic human instincts but actually represents their fulfilment.
Why are these scientific insights into human nature so important? In my view, their significance lies in their challenge to the naivete of the “Age of Reason,” which held that humanity was naturally good. The notion of original sin was rejected as insulting and demeaning to humanity, as it implied that human beings were born with some innate tendencies towards evil or irrationality. This, Enlightenment writers declared, was patently unfair. Yet we now know that we are born into this world with certain genetic dispositions, which may be further enhanced through our social context—just as they can be reduced. Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously declared that humanity is “born free, and everywhere he is in chains”[38]—implying that this imprisonment is the result of an unjust society, which must be overturned and reformed. The science of genetics suggests that we are not born “free” but with inbuilt genetic tendencies which in themselves imprison us. Dawkins believes that we can overcome these by ourselves; I think we need help if we are to do so and to transcend our natural limits and boundaries.
Sin: A Lens through Which We See Ourselves
We are long past the historical moment when it was plausible to pretend that human beings are good. Earlier I noted Anne Frank’s heartbreaking confession that she held on to her belief that “people are really good at heart,” despite its obvious absurdity in the light of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. “I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.”[39] I make no criticism of her. We all need to “tread softly” (W. B. Yeats) when walking over others’ dreams. Yet I very much fear that hers is a dream that can only collapse and crumble in the face of a massive evidential dissonance.
We all need a lens through which we can see ourselves. Paradoxically, such a lens is something that we judge (is it right?), while at the same time being something which judges us (are we really like this?). We are often reluctant to be shown to be flawed, weak, or foolish and reject any such judgments primarily because they are threatening and embarrassing, irrespective of whether they might be true. Yet this difficulty is alleviated if we think of the lens as offering a diagnosis—an interpretation of the human condition.
For C. S. Lewis, Christianity provides a “big picture” of reality which “chimes in” with our experiences within us and our observations of the world outside us. Lewis set out this vision in his book Mere Christianity, the opening chapters of which deal particularly with the human condition. Christianity offers an intellectual mirror in which we see ourselves reflected and evaluated.[40] The resonance between what we “see” in this mirror and what we experience of ourselves inclines us both to take this diagnostic capacity seriously and to share in the hope of transformation that it brings. This is perhaps paradigmatically reflected in Paul’s famous words in his letter to the Romans: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25). Realism about our problems is thus suffused with hope about the future—a hope that is grounded in a faithful God, not in a misplaced optimism about ourselves or our world.
This analysis of human nature destroys any naive optimism about human nature, demanding that we confront the darker forces that lie within us. Freud’s identification of the darker shadowy forces at work within our unconsciousness may seem overstated at points; nevertheless, his point can hardly be ignored.[41] As Hannah Arendt pointed out, the unbearable horror of Auschwitz resides in the fact that its perpetrators were not Satanic or diabolical; they were “human, all too human figures” trapped within all too human political and ideological systems.[42] What happened in the past could happen again.
So do “human, all too human figures” stand at the center of a nexus of evil which they themselves have created and which (other) human beings must oppose and dismantle? It is a most uncomfortable thought for those who insist on making humanity the defining frame of reference for morality—a view that many now term as “humanism.” Yet as we shall see in the next chapter, “humanism” is a more elusive and complex notion than many realize. We must therefore look at the variety of humanisms and consider how they deal with the moral ambiguity of humanity.
[1] Charles Frankel, The End of the Dinosaurs: Chicxulub Crater and Mass Extinctions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Michael J. Benton, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003).
[2] William Hazlitt, Essays of William Hazlitt, ed. Frank Carr (London: Walter Scott, 1889), 269.
[3] Baretti’s remark was recorded by Boswell, although it is often misattributed to Samuel Johnson. For the quote, see Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle, eds., Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 1765–1766 (London: Heinemann, 1955), 281.
[4] For detailed documentation of this point, see Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Pimlico, 2001).
[5] Glover, Humanity, 7.
[6] See the superb analysis in Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (Boston: Mariner Books, 2015).
[7] G. R. Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Rowan Williams, On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 79–105.
[8] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archpelago 1918–56 (London: Harvill Press, 2003), 75.
[9] Louis F. Fieser, “The Synthesis of Vitamin K,” Science 91, no. 2350 (1940): 31–36.
[10] For the story of Fieser’s intimate association with this development, see Robert M. Neer, Napalm: An American Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 5–44.
[11] Described in Neer, Napalm, 60.
[12] Rowan Williams, interview by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, BBC, September 15, 2009.
[13] John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta, 2002), 29.
[14] Gray, Straw Dogs, 14.
[15] Gray, Straw Dogs, 4.
[16] Gray, Straw Dogs, 92.
[17] For some good introductions to this grim theme, see Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian, eds., Studies in Comparative Genocide (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Omer Bartov, Atina Grossman, and Mary Nolan, eds., Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 2002); Manus I. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (London: Routledge, 2006).
[18] Gray, Straw Dogs, 173.
[19] R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 79.
[20] Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 17.
[21] Gray, Straw Dogs, 91.
[22] I explain more of this in Alister E. McGrath, Inventing the Universe: Why We Can’t Stop Talking about Science, Faith and God (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2015).
[23] Ban Ki-moon, quoted at Kevin Sieff, “Members of a U.N. Peacekeeping Force in the Central African Republic Allegedly Turned to Sexual Predation, Betraying Their Duty to Protect,” Washington Post, February 27, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2016/02/27/peacekeepers/?utm_term=.6e9e50f11bf0.
[24] Richard Crouter, Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 101–2.
[25] Some liberal Protestants unwisely melded some Darwinian values into their ethics in the name of “progressive religion”: see, for example, Gary J. Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 69–73. Most, however, recognized this was a false turn.
[26] Thomas H. Huxley, “Evolution and Ethics,” in Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1905), 46–116.
[27] Huxley, “Evolution and Ethics,” 51–53.
[28] Huxley, “Evolution and Ethics,” 81–82.
[29] James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 51–78.
[30] Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 197–206.
[31] Sigmund Freud, Civilization, Society and Religion: Group Psychology, Civilization and Its Discontents and Other Works, vol. 12 (London: Penguin, 1991), 302.
[32] Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1868), 5–6.
[33] Patricia A. Williams, “Sociobiology and Original Sin,” Zygon 35, no. 4 (2000): 783–812.
[34] Steve Jones, In the Blood: God, Genes and Destiny (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 207–42.
[35] For an excellent study, see Alan Jacobs, Original Sin: A Cultural History (New York: HarperOne, 2008). For a thoughtful theological defense and exploration of this important concept, see Tatha Wiley, Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meaning (New York: Paulist, 2002).
[36] Marjorie Suchocki, The Fall to Violence (New York: Continuum, 1994), 85.
[37] A point stressed by Susanne Kappeler, The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behaviour (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 9.
[38] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract: The Principles of Political Rights (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893).
[39] Frank, diary entry July 15, 1944, in Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (New York: Bantam, 1993), 263.
[40] A good example of this is found in the conversion of Charles Colson, Richard Nixon’s hatchet man and master of dirty tricks. Following his conviction in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Colson recognized Lewis’s description of sin in himself and converted to Christianity. See Jonathan Aitken, Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed (London: Continuum, 2005), 192–211.
[41] Steven J. Bartlett, The Pathology of Man: A Study of Human Evil (Springfield, IL: Thomas, 2005), 75–90.
[42] Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), 38. See the full discussion in Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1958).