“Does God have an appendix?”
June 2003
The great paradox of evil is more than hundreds of years old. It has been debated by philosophers and theologians alike. “If God is perfectly good, he would not permit evil. Evil exists, hence God is either not perfectly good, or not omnipotent.” This simplistic dichotomy ignores other possibilities, of course. The most common reply is that God did not create evil (Isaiah 42:7 notwithstanding), but rather he created beings with agency to choose between good and evil. As a result, many beings have chosen evil, but they have not been coerced (into choosing either good or evil).
This equally simple reply fails to address the evils of the appropriately named “acts of God”: natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, droughts, and so forth. “Evil” might be an ambiguous term for such disasters—indeed, one might choose to define “evil” as “actively choosing something that is against God’s will,” which would make the previous reply a tautology. What instead of the problem of pain, or even unhappiness? Voltaire puts the paradox in this form: “If the great Being had been infinitely powerful, there is no reason why He should not have made sentient animals infinitely happy; He has not done so, therefore He was not able.”
Natural disasters do certainly, on occasion, decrease the general happiness of sentient beings, and there is no “created being with agency” upon whom God can place the blame. Either the great Being is unable to prevent the disasters from occurring, or else he has some reason to allow his creatures to experience pain. I favor the latter; from my experience I have found that the greatest happiness comes alongside, not in ignorance of, pain.
But no matter how important pain is in our struggle for joy, we cannot hypothesize that God desires his creatures to inflict evil. In our clever sidestepping of the issue—saying that God merely created us with free will, not that he created evil—we seem to imply that man is a benign entity who makes occasional and timid forays to the side of wickedness, mostly out of curiosity, and quickly returning to the safety of righteousness and the all-pervasive Good. After all, isn’t man only “a little lower than the angels,” crowned with glory and honour1?
This is obviously not the case. Man comes hard-wired with a strong tendency towards “evil”, at least as defined in the familiar Judeo-Christian realm. Examine the ten commandments, for example—the last half, the “thou shalt not”s, are: murder, adultery, theft, lying, and covetousness. Why are humans so inclined towards violence, fornication, prevarication, and jealousy? Why didn’t God create us with considerably less “evil” innate? He was either unable or unwilling; the first implies impotence, the latter malevolence.
I tend towards the first, but I do not plan on spending the rest of this essay defending such a position. Instead, I wish to discuss some things which make far more sense when explained by evolution than when explained by theology. Whether this implies the truthfulness or falsity of either will be left as an exercise to the reader.
Leaving aside our religious explanations for a moment, then, let us look at evolution. Darwinian evolution can be defined most simply as ‘genetic variation plus selection’. Selection works “by conferring greater reproductive success upon advantageous variants”.2 In other words, those who are able to reproduce most copiously (and prevent others from doing so), those who outnumber the rest, are the ones who survive. It would not be surprising from this context, then, to discover that the reproductive urge of humans is perhaps the greatest appetite of the species.
Self-preservation and self-interest are also obviously closely linked to reproductive success, so the traits of violence, dishonesty, and rivalry are likewise not farfetched. In fact, it is the great cooperativity of the human race that should attract our incredulity. Biologists and game theorists have treated that subject with far more depth and skill than I could ever claim, so I must leave the balance in their hands.
Along the same lines, there is a phenomenon for which I kept trying to devise clever and insightful theological explanations. When I looked at the same problem from an evolutionary perspective, it made perfect sense—more than any religious explanation could ever afford. I have heard many anecdotal experiences of when, after copulation, the women seem to grow closer and more emotionally attached to their partner, but the men appear to experience the reverse. In fact, I have often heard men express that they feel like they “hate” the woman they have just slept with!
It wasn’t until I came across game theory explanations of mating behavior that this phenomenon made sense. As explained by Richard Dawkins in his book, “The Selfish Gene,”3 in a particular hypothetical community there exist two types of males (“faithful” and “philanderer”), and two types of females (“coy” and “fast”). “Coy females will not copulate with a male until he has gone through a long and expensive courtship period lasting several weeks. Fast females will copulate immediately with anybody. Faithful males are prepared to go on courting for a long time, and after copulation they stay with the female and help her to rear the young. Philanderer males lost patience quickly if a female will not copulate with them straight away: they go off and look for another female; after copulation too they do not stay and act as good fathers, but go off in search of fresh females.”
In a population with too many faithful males, the fast females will benefit, since they don’t pay the cost for a prolonged courtship. In a population with too many philanderer males, the coy females will benefit, since the philanderers desert the fast females and the coy females will only mate with faithful fathers.
In a population with too many fast females, philanderers will benefit, since they do not pay the price for the prolonged courtship, nor do they stick around to help with the rearing of the child. In a population with too many coy females, the faithful males will benefit, the faithful males benefit, as they are the only ones with whom the coy females will mate.
Dawkins calculates an “evolutionarily stable strategy” based on arbitrary numbers for the cost of a prolonged courtship, the cost of rearing young, and other such factors. In such a population, a certain stable percentage of faithful, philanderer, coy, and fast will exist. Indeed, he mentions various animal species, each with different such strategies.
In this (admittedly overly simplistic) example, what about a male who pretends to be faithful, but deserts the female after copulation? Well, when mating with fast females, he’s no different from the philanderers. But when mating with coy females, he must first pay the courtship cost before deserting. Depending on the amount of the courtship cost and the relationship of other factors, he may not be at too great an advantage.
But what about a male who, when he encounters a fast female, immediately copulates and then deserts, but when faced with a coy female, will pay the courtship cost and then settle down to a life of faithful domestic bliss. Such a male has a great benefit over both the philanderer and the faithful, having the advantages of each.
Recall that throughout these examples we are not attributing conscious desire to the differing types. We’re speaking of genes which influence the behavior of the individual. Imagine, then, a human male influenced by his genes. When he copulates with a fast female, he may be biologically influenced to feel inclined to “desert”. Previous to copulation, he may have felt very much, biologically and mentally, “in love” with this particular female. But following copulation this desire seems to disappear. The female, on the other hand, has great interest in coaxing the male to stay, and provide a “faithful” role—her feelings of “love” remain.
On the other hand, when this same male encounters a coy female, he may spend a lot of resources in courting this female. (In other words, paying a high courtship cost.) Then, after copulation, the genetically-influenced reaction might be different—he might, generally speaking, be more inclined to stay in that “faithful” role—his feelings of “love” also remain.
Obviously the story is more complex than these greatly simplified scenarios, but I think it demonstrates clearly enough that this interesting quirk of human behavior might very well be easily explained by evolutionary psychology.
