Self-sacrificial love: evolutionary deception or theological reality?

It has become fashionable in our culture to see science and religion as enemies locked in a conflict that can only end when one of them breathes its last breath. This is ironic since modern science had its origins in the minds of European Christians. Scientists of the 16th-18th centuries, like Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton were Christians who believed that God's revelation takes the form of two books, the written Scriptures and the Book of Nature. In doing science they believed they were studying the handiwork of the Creator. This positive outlook eroded as pessimism about religion grew in response to the Thirty Years War. This devastating war, conducted by kings and princes in the name of the Christian God, led to suspicion about religious claims and philosophical attacks on all aspects of Christian theology during the so-called Age of Enlightenment.

The trend to disparage religious belief that was launched during the Enlightenment has expanded recently in response to numerous cultural and scientific developments. Cynicism about religion is once again on the rise in response to violence perpetrated under the guise of religious goals. To make matters worse, developments in scientific understanding of biological evolution have added fuel to the fires of criticism; if some academics were to have their way religion itself would be tied to the stake and burned. Perhaps the most (in)famous member of this camp is Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist at Oxford University. Dawkins has throughout his career interpreted his scientific research as proof that Darwinism eliminates God altogether, so all religious claims are bogus. In his most recent book, The God Delusion, he openly proclaims his agenda: "religious readers who open [the book] will be atheists when they put it down." (2) While not all who accept the scientific validity of evolution go this far, many do see direct and potentially devastating challenges to religious thought.

One issue potentially undermined by science is Christian theology's central doctrine of self-sacrificial (agape) love made known in the Christ Event. Altruistic service to the Other is paradigmatic for Christianity. But when viewed through the lens of science, genuine altruism--self-sacrificial behavior performed at possible risk and without benefit to the actor--is said to be impossible. If we accept the claims of evolutionary biology and psychology, even Jesus' actions were selfish since they were instrumental in furthering God's aims, not ends in themselves. Extending the analysis, religions become deceptive fictions or cultural parasites that once functioned for group survival but are now maladaptive. (3) While scientific theories about the evolution of altruism and human moral behavior need to be taken seriously by theologians, caution is in order. By using anthropomorphic vocabulary for aspects of genetic selection, theorists have made it inevitable that scientific hypotheses about altruism lead us into logical fallacies and confusion. Following an overview of the uses and abuses of the concept in science and theology, I will offer evidence to support my belief that, in spite of it all, altruism remains a robust term for theological reflection.

Altruism in the Evolutionary Sciences

In common parlance, altruism means "devotion to the welfare of others, regard for others, as a principle of action; opposed to egoism or selfishness." (4) It refers to actions which clearly are shaped by motives and have moral implications. But when scientists use the term, they do not mean precisely the same thing. In evolutionary science "altruism" is a metaphor used to describe other-oriented behavior that enhances the fitness/survivability of the recipient at cost in fitness to the actor. Strictly speaking, this is measured in terms of the numbers of copies of genes passed on to the next generation. Individuals increase fitness either directly by passing on their own genes or indirectly by enhancing reproduction of others, so a biologically altruistic act would result in lost or diminished reproduction of the actor's genes. Morality and motivation play no role here.

The origin and persistence of altruism is "one of the enduring puzzles" facing biologists today and it has become the object of extensive research. (5) Strictly speaking, natural selection should eliminate altruistic behavior, but it does not. This problem has led to voluminous literature that offers literally hundreds of theoretical models for altruism in evolutionary biology. Although there is much disagreement on the details, most evolutionary biologists agree that the driving factor in all helping behavior is genetic survival. (6) In this paradigm, altruism is merely genetic selfishness, explained functionally in terms of reciprocity, kinship, or group selection.

Reciprocity, or reciprocal altruism, is a form of barter driven by the assumption is that if one helps another, when roles are reversed, the helping will be returned. In this framework, altruism is a short-term strategy aimed at long-term gain. This is sometimes called "Tit for Tat," and one of the most captivating displays is found in the Costa Rican vampire bat. (7) The vampire bat works hard to survive since it lives by drinking the blood of much larger animals. Very young bats tend fail in the search for blood one out of every three nights, while older bats are unsuccessful about one in ten nights. Feeding must be successful at least once every sixty hours or a bat will starve. Since the bats are nocturnal, failing two consecutive nights would likely mean death. A fascinating form of reciprocal altruism has evolved that increases chances of survival. When a bat feeds effectively, he drinks more blood than he needs, and when he returns to the roost, he regurgitates some of the excess to feed others who have failed. In a purely Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest model this should not happen, especially since in at least some of the observed cases sharing occurred between unrelated bats. Individual bat survival would be enhanced by building up nutritional reserves to tide them over the inevitable nights of failure. But instead the bats engage in this exquisite form of survival insurance that involves a kind of score keeping--"You give to me and I'll give to you. You cheat me, and I'll cheat you." (8) The bats have a relatively long life span (up to twenty years), live in close proximity, and develop individual sharing relationships--bats who have shared blood in the past receive blood when needed from the recipient of past generosity. This remarkable example of reciprocal altruism underscores that the tendency toward cooperation is inherent in nature--survival is dependent upon it.

The kinship model more directly sees genetic material as the compelling force behind altruism. In this fairly straight-forward framework, self-sacrificial acts ensure the survival of genes. The closer the genetic relationship, the more likely it is that helping behavior will occur, whereas in a reciprocal altruism model, there may be no kinship relation between giver and receiver at all.

The group selection framework claims that altruism happens because it enhances group survival. Although this theory fell out of favor for a time, now that the importance of culture in human evolution has been recognized, group selection models are making a comeback. Simply put, the claim is that groups with some altruists have survival advantage over groups without them. Within the group, a few altruists are exploited for the overall advantage of the group, and behaviors evolve to control the degree of altruism expressed. Sanctions are imposed against members who take advantage of altruists for personal gain, and incentives are offered for altruistic acts. In this model, having too many altruists is as dangerous to group survival as having none, and so the incentive/sanction process evolves into a sophisticated form of insurance.

The Evolution of a Metaphorical Problem

Metaphorical use of this concept that implicitly points to the actor as a conscious, choosing agent has led some scientists to speak of non-conscious biological processes in excessively anthropomorphic terms. A prime example appeared in a recent issue of Nature, the highly respected international journal of science. In an article on honeybee colonies entitled "Evolutionary Biology: To Work or Not to Work," the author writes that a "stinging honeybee worker commits suicide when her stinger is torn out, but this saves her kin. She is not making an escape from outrageous fortune but making the best of it--not fearful of what dreams may come but hopeful for what genes may come." In describing relations within the colonies, the author speaks of worker bees as "fully committed altruists" who are "coerced" into, "volunteer" for, or "choose" the altruistic role. (9) While the literary allusion makes the article more entertaining, it leaves the reader with a vague and mistaken sense of the whole process as somehow consciously enacted.

Scientific thought is necessarily materialist and reductionist since the object of study must be measurable and the easiest way to do this is to break issue down into its smallest parts. When scientists add anthropomorphic description to this materialist reductionism, they can be seduced into making claims that are at best category mistakes and at worst sweepingly inappropriate generalizations. Attributing conscious decision-making to genes compounds the problem when it misleads some into reversing the fallacy with claims that since genes are driven by the selfish urge to be passed on, all helping behavior on the part of humans is caused by nothing more than gene selfishness. In addition to setting us up to commit these sorts of errors in thinking, claims like these assume that genetic selfishness exerts some sort of direct moral force. Even more problematic is the fact that a 'genetic competition' paradigm ignores the complexity of human cultures and of the evolutionary process itself. Many scientists now see genes as only one dimension of evolution. Epigenetic inheritance, passing on traits through non-DNA cellular transmission, complicates the biology tremendously. Add to the mix the fact that human cultures evolve through behavioral and symbolic means (e.g. language, writing), and at the level of human evolution the process rapidly becomes very different from the simple 'selfish gene' formula. (10) In human life, cultural evolution is so powerful that it can produce "extended phenotypes" or "culturgens"--behaviors that reinforce or extend genetic components. Cultural transmission among humans can generate costs and benefits apart from other inheritance systems, so much so that social rules governing helping behavior evolve to overcome the fundamental genetic pull of gene-selfishness. (11)

When we move our discussion to the level of human psychology, things become more complex also because motivation comes into play. Psychologically, altruism is defined in terms of motivation. At this level the question becomes whether altruistic desires can be ends in themselves or whether they are always only instrumental means to selfish ends. Psychological egoism, a popular theory among evolutionary psychologists, insists that other-directed behavior is always selfish. Like the biological selfish gene approach, if we are motivated only by egoism, altruism is a deceptive concept that masks the basic selfishness of all human behavior. According to this model, even Jesus' death was selfish, since he would at the very least have been motivated by an egoistic desire to be perceived by others as obedient to God. But a significant body of research supports claims that human beings are at least sometimes capable of genuinely selfless acts that have only the well-being of the other as the ultimate motivation: "individuals are capable of true altruism and yet achieve high fitness benefits from doing so not because they have 'overcome' our genes, but because true cooperation was originally to their benefit." (12) Just because cooperation has evolved as a survival strategy, this does not eliminate the possibility that we might have "irreducible other-directed ends" in mind when we act on behalf of others. (13)

Richard Alexander acknowledges the existence of true altruism, but insists that when it appears, it is always "an evolutionary mistake for the individual showing it." (14) But some biologists do admit that "empathy and altruism often exist where the chances for any return to the altruist are nil." (15) Even Richard Dawkins has noticed a tendency in nature that confounds his selfish gene claims: "We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism--something that has no place in nature ... We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators." (16)

Theology and Altruism

Scientists are not alone in their struggle to understand the evolution of self-sacrificial behavior. Philosophers debate the meaning of morality in light of biological claims about altruism, and have pointed out that altruism does not always equate to positive morality. (17) Religious Studies scholars debate the relationship between altruism and religious teachings on concern for the well-being of others. Theologians dissect the various Greek terms for love in the New Testament, debate whether altruism and Christian agape are synonymous, worry about how seriously one ought to take scientific claims in a theological context, and ponder whether such theories undercut the teachings of the faith.

Among all scientific claims, evolutionary theory offers perhaps the strongest test of religious claims. It undermines, many say, the Biblical creation stories since there was no "age of innocence." Suffering and death existed on earth long before human life evolved, so the claim that the Original Sin of Adam and Eve caused it all cannot be accepted as literal information. And far from creation being a discrete process completed in six days, the universe and life in it are still evolving.

The problem of evil, always a difficult one for Christianity with its doctrines of God as all-powerful and all-loving, becomes more acute in an evolutionary universe. Evolution is a messy and apparently wasteful process that seems to stumble in the direction of increasingly complex life forms by way of the extinction of unknown numbers of species (scientists estimate that 99% of all species that ever evolved are now extinct). (18) And if evolutionary biologists are right about genes and altruism, the meaning of sin, freedom of the will, morality, are also suspect. As noted above, according to some interpreters of evolution, religion itself is nothing but an adaptive fiction that serves to enhance genetic survival. (John Haught has uncovered a bit of irony here. If deception is central to survival then the healthiest are those who cannot face the truth. If our failure to see that religion is a lie has been one of our more adaptive features, and if religion is merely an elaborate deception evolved to enhance survival, then without religion, life might not have evolved to the point where evolutionary biologists could figure out it was all a lie. Does this mean then that those who accept that religion is a deceptive fiction are destined to extinction?) (19)

At this point, it may seem as though science is ringing the death knell for religion. But although theology faces real challenges, the claims of science do not necessarily contradict faith. Before exploring one way theology can make use of science to elaborate on basic teachings, it will be helpful to briefly address concerns about method--how theologians might best respond to and make use of scientific information.

A Word on Method (20)

Many scientists and conservative Christians believe that the only possible relationship between scientific and religious thought is conflict. Advocates of this approach tend to fall into one of two camps: scientific materialism or biblical literalism. The scientific materialist insists that everything in existence is material and therefore at least in theory measurable. The biblical literalist insists that only that which is contained in the Bible is true. Both of these positions are fundamentalist in their refusal to entertain the possibility that claims outside their own framework might be valid. Both approaches seek to ground knowledge in a solid foundation (of either human origin or divine origin), both make literal claims about nature, and neither observes the boundaries of science. Scientific materialism starts with science and ends up making sweeping philosophical claims: to say that the fundamental reality is matter and only matter is a metaphysical claim beyond the boundaries of science. The scientific materialist is a kind of science fundamentalist who ends up "making a metaphysics out of a method." Besides, the idea that we ought to only accept as true what can be established through scientific observation may be self-refuting since there's no way observation can establish the truth of this claim! (21) On the other hand, scriptural literalism starts with a religious document and ends up making scientific claims. One example is the 'creation science' claim that the Bible proves the universe is only a few thousand years old. The scriptural literalist ends up making a science textbook out of the Bible.

A second approach is to say that since theologians and scientists study different things and use very different methods, the only appropriate relationship is independence. Stephen Jay Gould's NOMA, or Non-Overlapping Magisteria is the most well-known example. According to Gould, science and religion are not in conflict because they operate in separate domains. Many people find this approach attractive because it seems to mean a kind of peaceful co-existence without interaction. One example of the independence model from a Religious Studies perspective is a recent collection of essays, Altruism in World Religion. In this book, scholars examine a variety of religious teachings on concern for others and decide that altruism as defined by the sciences does not apply to religions. Since religious benevolence unavoidably produces benefits for the actor, there can never be unrewarded other-directed action. Regarding Christianity, the argument is that although Jesus' teachings on love were distinctive in his equating love of neighbor to worship of God, since concern for the Other is fundamental to caring for the self, action on behalf of others with no benefit to oneself simply "does not arise" for the Christian. (22) The conclusion is that, while benevolence and charity are fundamental categories in the religions, altruism is a secular term that is incompatible with religious claims since "only by a rigid secular calculus is benevolence less benevolent because the actor benefits." (23) While I have no quarrel with this conclusion, I do think these scholars have given science the upper hand in a way that, for Christian theology at least, loses sight of central issues.

The truth is, though, that neither conflict nor complete independence is authentic to the spirit of historical Christianity. Some form of dialogue and integration has always worked best for ensuring the teachings of faith remain credible in each age. Across the centuries, the most enduring theologies have been written by thinkers who have made use of the best of human knowledge in re-thinking and communicating doctrine.

Greater unity of thought is possible if we think in terms of multiple levels of explanation. In a recent lecture, John Haught used the current environmental situation as an example of how this can work. The state of the environment can be understood through several disciplines--physics, chemistry, biology, economics, politics, ethics, theology, etc. Each level provides an adequate explanation at its own level and in its own terms. But to have explanatory adequacy at one particular level does not mean the other levels of explanation are impossible or invalid. Physics and chemistry explain through concepts like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy, molecular structures, etc. Biology focuses on consequences of pollution for plant and animal life. The economist might explain it in terms of human consumption, availability of resources, and market growth. The political scientist might talk about the government's push for growth that exceeds sustainability. The ethicist might speak in terms of animal rights, human arrogance, greed, and the theologian might explain it all in terms of the philosophical and religious assumptions that led to the exploitation of nonhuman resources. (24) Multiple levels of explanation are possible and if we work with a hierarchy of explanation, rather than assuming either conflict or independence, we come to a much richer understanding of the situation. This enriched conception opens the door to fruitful integration of ideas and a greater likelihood of successful response to the problems.

Integration of theology with other forms of human knowing has always been important in Christian thought. Controversy over just how to do this has been part of Christianity from the start. Paul and the Jerusalem Church leaders debated over how best to communicate the Good News to the non-Jewish world. The earliest apologists for the faith, like Justin Martyr (c. 100-165 CE) and Tertullian (c. 155-230 CE), debated the integration of Christian thought with Greek and Roman philosophy. Thomas Aquinas (c 1225-1274 CE) Christianized Aristotelian philosophy and created a system of thought that became the most well-known method for seeking knowledge of God in nature and human reason apart from scriptural revelation. Today we call this "natural theology." A "natural theologian" starts with the natural world because he believes that the existence of God can be inferred from the evidence of design in nature. On this line of thinking, an atheist and a believer alike should be moved to see something of the divine in linear algebra, for example. (25) There are lots of examples of natural theology--recent versions of Aquinas' design argument are the Anthropic Principle and the Intelligent Design Movement.

Instead of starting from science as natural theologies do or claiming that it is possible at this stage of human experience to construct a metaphysics that explains all of reality, a "theology of nature" approach starts from theology, stands within a religious tradition, and has a more humble goal. This method accepts that some doctrines need reformulation in light of scientific discoveries, but is cautious and insists that only the most solid science be used. Doctrines ought not to be revised to accommodate limited and speculative science. It is premature, for example, to rewrite Christian theology according to the principles of quantum physics since there is no agreement within science yet as to what that's all about. My own work on integrating evolutionary biological theories of altruism with Christian theology, outlined below, is an example. I accept the validity of scientific theories about helping behaviors as an outgrowth of the genetic imperative for survival, but theology, not science, is my starting point. I stand within the Christian tradition, which means I begin with Jesus and his teachings and allow science to inform how we might better understand those teachings in the modern world. For those who do not insist on a literal reading of scriptures, conversation with science is opening up exciting new possibilities for theological reflection.

Steps Toward an "Evolutionary" Theology of Altruism

Central to Jesus' teachings and life as recorded in the Gospels is idea that love of the other is the means by which we do the will of God. This very Jewish teaching received distinctive emphasis in Jesus' preaching such that love of the other and care for those in need becomes synonymous with worship of God: "love is the means of access to God after the pattern of Jesus." (26) Some evolutionary scientists and psychologists who are critical of Christian teachings on altruism imply that because humans are not consistently able to exhibit purely other-directed actions, this undercuts the whole system of thought. But there is no expectation in the scriptures that we can be completely successful; Paul bemoans his own inability to do the things he knows he ought to do (Romans 7:15) and says that it's only because of God's grace that we can even come close.

In the original language of the New Testament, there are numerous terms that distinguish among forms of love. When describing Jesus' teachings on love, the New Testament writers consistently used agape. Agape as it has been developed within Christian thought is distinctive. It tends to be a God-centered term for radically self-giving love, something like the "pure, disinterested altruism" that Dawkins says is possible although it has not place in nature. Agape is not "a rational, anthropocentric concept. It represents the divine extravagance of giving that does not take the self into account." (27) The Christian God is agape; this reality challenges us to live it out as best we can. Christians are called to live as Christ lived--love of God is love of the other (and vice versa), whether that other is one's neighbor or enemy.

The Apostle Paul's attempts to unpack the meaning of agape in I Corinthians led him to use about fifteen different descriptive words or phrases that are hard to accurately translate because he used the verb form for some words that function only as adjectives or nouns in English. This is a crucial point--use of the verb form implies that agape is not a thing. It is action, a way of being in the world that manifests the divine: To live out agape if to protect, trust, hope, and persevere with the other in patience, kindness, selflessness, humility, equanimity, forgivingness. We are called to strive toward this action but no where in the New Testament is it said that any human being other than Jesus can hope to live it perfectly.

In the 1980s Gerd Theissen hypothesized that Jesus was something like a bio-cultural mutation. "In the midst of history a possible 'goal' of evolution is revealed: complete adaptation to the reality of God." (28) Jesus is the clue to the whole evolutionary process, and what is most distinctive about Jesus' ministry is his insistence that nonviolent self-sacrificial action on behalf of the Other is the means of salvation. Jesus' teachings were future-oriented. Jesus believed that we must be willing to be transformed because God is at work in the world bringing it into alignment with the divine will. The behavior that makes transformation possible is self-giving love on behalf of the Other. Framed in the terms of evolutionary science, Jesus taught that we can and must reverse the biological genetic drag toward in-group preference--he reversed the social order by insisting that family ties be broken if they interfere with the doing of God's will, that we love our enemies, that we care for the sick, the poor, the outcast. He challenged in-group hierarchical structures with the claim that "whoever would be great among you must be your servant and whoever would be first ... must be slave of all (Mark 10:43-44)," "the first will be last and the last first (Matthew 19:30)." And he reinterpreted tradition consistently such that self-giving love always wins out over tradition. (29) He insisted that the way things are is not the way they ought to be, and Christians are required to enact agape in the service of God.

In a sense, then, Jesus' focus on what we can become is a radicalization of the trans-kin altruism central to most religious traditions. Even though some scholars have claimed that altruism isn't a useful category for religious studies, they do acknowledge that benevolence and charity operate as fundamental religious categories across cultures and centuries: "Without question religions are major forces for other-directed human behavior. That such behavior operates within a transcendent or eternal framework does not diminish its impact." (30) If we read science through the lens of Christian theology rather than the other way around, we see an ever-widening altruistic impulse first expressed genetically in the drive toward optimizing survival. The impulse ripples outward in rudimentary forms to find expression as biological altruism, and then gains momentum as it reaches expression in human experience, where the altruistic impulse is now propelled forward through cultural evolution.

Kristen Renwick Monroe, a political theorist at the University of California, studied helping behavior and concluded that "ethical political action emanates primarily from one's sense of self in relation to others." (31) She conceptualized behavior along a continuum, with pure altruism at one extreme and pure self-interest at the other, and defined true altruists as those who placed themselves and families at risk over a period of time to help others in ways that offered little or no possibility of reward. Although the entire study is fascinating, most pertinent to this essay are her findings about people who hid Jews from Nazi persecution. Many rescuers housed refugee Jews for months or years at a time. Obviously recognition for these acts was out of the question since whenever discovered by the Nazis rescuers were imprisonment or execution, and often uninvolved family members were as well. These people often lacked the very things that self-interest based theories say are pre-requisite for selflessness: safety, emotional support, even food. The act of helping was the end itself: in-group or kinship concerns were not operative since none of the rescuers in the study was Jewish and many of those helped were foreigners. Because the danger of imprisonment, torture, and execution extended to their families, many helpers isolated themselves from loved ones and friends. There was absolutely no incentive to assist the Jews, and tremendous incentive not to. Why, then, did these people help? Monroe found no similarities in developmental factors among the sample group. Overall the altruists' experiences of parental and societal influences were pretty much the same as that of the general population. Monroe said she could find only one distinctive difference: "Altruists see the world as one in which connections exist and extend through nature, beyond the death of anyone particular individual." Because of this, altruists acted without regard for consequences, and even said they felt they had to act. If the kinship model applies here at all it is as a perceived link to humankind as a whole: "All life concerns [the true altruist]. All death diminishes them. Because they are part of mankind." (32)

The New Testament portrays Jesus as very like Monroe's true altruist. He also relinquished the emotional support of family in the interests of what he perceived to be a greater human need. And like Monroe's rescuers,

    Jesus found it necessary to violate learned standards of behavior
    and to disobey the authority of the rabbis. Out of a sense of
    loyalty to a greater and more universal ethical standard he broke
    the basic teachings of his faith regarding work on the Sabbath (cf.
    Mark 3:1-6; Matthew 12:1-14). Jesus also seems usually to have
    wanted no praise for the good that he did. He often directed those
    he healed "to tell no one" (Luke 5:12-16). Just as the altruist acts
    without regard for consequences to family and self, Jesus went so
    far as to respond, when told his mother and brothers were waiting,
    "Who are my mother and brothers?... Whoever does the will of God is
    my brother and sister and mother (Mark 3:31-35)." Knowing full well
    the dangers, Jesus continued to preach and to teach publicly, even
    to the end. He prayed, as death approached, that if it be God's
    will, he be relieved of the burden (Luke 22:39-42). For him, the
    choice was God's, not his own. (33)

Evolution moves slowly, even with the added power of cultural and symbolic transmission. In Jesus, "the first fruits" of a possible future humanity are revealed. Only now do we perhaps see hints of the next stage of development. As the altruistic drive slowly breaks down the barriers of in-group selection it also has begun to extend its reach beyond the human, to encompass care for other species and for the earth itself. God is Altruism Itself and the altruistic impulse found throughout biological existence is the grace of God set "loose in the world." (34)

Notes

1. Portions of this essay are based on work previously published in my "Altruism in Nature as Manifestation of Divine Energeia" Zygon Journal of Religion and Science, vol. 41 no. 1 (March, 2206): 129-141, and Divine Becoming: Rethinking Jesus and Incarnation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002). Research for this paper was supported in part by a grant from the Office of Research and Creative Activity, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

2. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 5. For an excellent critique, see Terry Eagleton's essay, "Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching." London Review of Books Vol. 28 no. 20 (October 19, 2006) http://www.lrb.co.uk/28/no20/print/eagl01_.html.

3. See, for example, works by Pascal Boyer, David Sloan Wilson, R. D. Alexander, Daniel C. Dennett.

4. Oxford English Dictionary.

5. For a recent attempt at developing a framework for understanding the array of information available in the evolutionary biology literature, see L. Lehmann & L. Keller. "The evolution of cooperation and altruism--a general framework and a classification of models," Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Vol 19 no. 5 (2006): 1365-1376.

6. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).

7. Gerald S. Wilkinson, "Reciprocal Food Sharing in the Vampire Bat," Nature. 308 (1984): 181-184. See also L. K. Denault and D. A. McFarlane, "Reciprocal Altruism Between Male Vampire Bats, Desmodus Rotundus," Animal Behavior 49 (1995): 855-856. This study has been extensively examined, most recently for the general reader by Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 383-385.

8. Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 191-209. See also Lyall Watson, Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995); and Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Penguin Books, 1996).

9. David Queller, "Evolutionary Biology: To Work or Not to Work," Nature. Vol. 444. (Nov. 2, 2006): 42-43.

10. Eva Jablonka & Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

11. Louise Barrett, Robin Dunbar, and John Lycett. Human Evolutionary Psychology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 371-379.

12. Ibid., 91.

13. Elliott Sober & David S. Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 228.

14. Richard Alexander. The Biology of Moral Systems. (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1897), 191.

15. Paul R. Ehrlich, Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect (Washington, D.C. Island Press, 2000), 312.

16. Dawkins, 215. Emphasis mine.

17. The dark side of in-group niceness is out-group aggression. The dark side of altruism is that humans can use it to bring about evil acts--the Nazis during the Holocaust encouraged physicians to conduct horrible experiments on human beings and guards to persevere in killing because they were suffering on behalf of the good of humanity. Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medicalized Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

18. Charlene P. E. Burns, "Honesty About God: Theological Reflections on Violence in an Evolutionary Universe," Theology and Science Vol 4 no. 3 (2006): 279-290.

19. John Haught, Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect for Religion in the Age of Evolution (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2003).

20. The following material is based on Ian Barbour's seminal work on method in theology and the sciences. A very accessible version of his thought can be found in When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? (HarperSanFrancisco, 2000).

21. Keith Ward, Pascal's Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding (Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2006).

22. Bruce Chilton, "Altruism in Christianity," in Altruism in World Religions. Eds. Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton (Georgetown, University Press, 2005), 65.

23. William Scott Green, "Epilogue," Altruism in World Religions. Eds. Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton. (Georgetown, University Press, 2005), 193-194.

24. John Haught, "Love and Happiness in an Unfinished Universe." Paper Presentation. Metanexus Conference: Continuity and Change: Perspectives on Science and Religion," Philadelphia, PA, June 4, 2006.

25. Thanks to my colleague, Geoffrey Gorham, for this insightful example.

26. Chilton, 57.

27. Colin Grant, "For the Love of God: Agape," Journal of Religious Ethics Vol. 24 (1996) 3-21: 19. 27.

28. Gerd Theissen, Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Approach (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 83.

29. Philip Hefner, "Going as Far as We Can Go: The Jesus Proposal for Stretching Genes and Culture," Zygon Vol. 34 no. 3 (1999): 485-500. John Haught advocates a "metaphysics of the future" as well.

30. Green, 194.

31. Kristen Renwick Monroe, The Heart of Altruism. Perceptions of a Common Humanity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). See my Divine Becoming, chapter six for a detailed discussion of this work in a theological context.

32. Monroe, 123, 216.

33. Burns, Divine Becoming, 121-122.

34. Phrase from Thomas F. O'Meara, Loose in the World (New York: Paulist, 1974).