Abstract
In a series of three articles, presented at the Goshen Annual Conference on Science and Religion in 2015, with the theme ‘Interdisciplinary Theology and the Archeology of Personhood’, J. Wentzel van Huyssteen considers the problem of human evolution – also referred to as ‘the archaeology of personhood’ – and its broader impact on theological anthropology. This trajectory of lectures tracks a select number of challenging contemporary proposals for the evolution of crucially important aspects of human personhood. Lecture Two argues that, on a postfoundationalist view, some of our religious beliefs are indeed more plausible and credible than others. This also goes for our tendency to moralise and for the strong moral convictions, we often hold. It demonstrates that, in spite of a powerful focus on the evolutionary origins of moral awareness, ethics emerge on a culturally autonomous level, which means that the epistemic standing of the particular moral judgements human beings make is independent of whatever the natural sciences can says about their genesis.
Highlights
As we saw in the first lecture, it is the materiality of our embodied existence that has come about through the long process of biological evolution and has given us what seems to be a unique human sense of self
We have seen that for Sheets-Johnstone, Boehm, De Waal and Joyce in spite of a powerful focus on the evolutionary origins of moral awareness, ethics as such emerge on a culturally autonomous level, which means that the epistemic standing of the particular moral judgements we make is independent of whatever the natural sciences can tell us about their origin and genesis
The interdisciplinary conversation with and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Christopher Boehm, Frans De Waal and Richard Joyce on the natural history of morality, on evolutionary ethics and on our conceptions of good and evil, yields the following tentative conclusions for me: 1. Evolution by natural selection can explain our tendency to think in normative terms, that is, our innate sense of moral awareness
Summary
As we saw in the first lecture, it is the materiality of our embodied existence that has come about through the long process of biological evolution and has given us what seems to be a unique human sense of self. Sheets-Johnstone offers us a fascinating evolutionary trajectory for engaging any project in ethics that opens up an understanding for a particular form of interanimate meaning, namely empathy, moral awareness and a rationality of care (cf SheetsJohnstone 2008:215).
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