Response to Van Leeuwen's Essay on Evolutionary Psychology

Prof. Van Leeuwen's article on evolutionary psychology (EP) provides a thought-provoking discussion of the complex nature of human behavior. She convincingly demonstrates that the claim by the proponents of evolutionary psychology to provide a rather comprehensive explanation of all human behaviors on the basis of evolutionary genetics involves many ad hoc, non-scientific, and contradictory concepts. The objections made specifically from a Christian worldview (but also from an honest observance of human history) are also valid: (a) EP has no basis for distinguishing the created from the fallen in human behavior, (b) there is more to human life than "naturalistic" ends of animal life, and (c) the sacrificial love demonstrated infinitely in Christ is clearly recognized as a superior norm for human life than the "the selfish-gene reductionism" of EP. She also rightly notes the devastating effect of a genetically determined behavior on morality: "You cannot get ethics from mechanics, so the obvious evolutionary d efault setting is simply that might makes right" (p. 107). From a theological perspective, what is most interesting in this discussion is the mysterious nature of the human person that emerges from the inadequacies of EP to describe the phenomena of human existence. The failure of EP to recognize the fallen state of humans, noted by Van Leeuwen, results in its total inability to explain the "unnaturalness" of many human feelings. If our behavior is simply the product of naturalistic genetic evolution, why do we so often have the sense that "things are not the way they are supposed to be." Why does the human heart long for something better and almost universally posit its reality in hope of a future life, even as the physically sick have a sense of health and long for it? Why do human beings long for meaning and purpose and suffer when they are absent? Why is human vitality drained by pangs of guilt for not living up to a "should"? Why do these and other experiences exist if human behavior is simply determined by genetic inclinations in harmony with "what should be" in the interest of specie-survival and gene-replication? EP's reductionism also does nothing to mitigate Noam Chomsky's comments made some years ago in connection with human linguistic competence: The processes by which the human mind achieved its present stage of complexity and its particular form of innate organization are a total mystery, as much so as the analogous questions about the physical or mental organization of any other complex organism. It is perfectly safe to attribute this development to "natural selection," so long as we realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena. (Chomsky, 1981, p.251) Perhaps most counter-intuitively, EP, flies in the face of the dignity of the human person, which although often violated in the treatment of others, is validated in universal self-application. No human is happily content to be treated as a non-person. In this regard, EP is not simply false science, but logically and inherently dangerous. For as Authur Koestler noted, when personal responsibility for deviant behavior is explained away as in communism by deterministic faulty social or economic conditions, the result is inhumanity: "Before long it began to become clear that those whom we do not blame we do not regard as responsible. Those whom we do not regard as responsible we do not see as fully human. And those whom we do not see as fully human we are willing to twist and manipulate to suit our own convenience" (Muehl, 1986, p. 65). Van Leeuwen's critique of EP clearly reveals not only the factual groundlessness, but also the hopelessness of EP to ever provide the full explanation for all of human behavior. It does, however, call attention to the significant question of how and why we behave as we do. …