Reviewed by: Kierkegaard After the Genome: Science, Existence and Belief in This World by Ada S. Jaarsma Ronald F. Marshall Kierkegaard After the Genome: Science, Existence and Belief in This World. By Ada S. Jaarsma. New York and London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017. xiii + 227 pp. Jaarsma sets out to right the wrong of ignoring Kierkegaard’s connection to the natural sciences. “Whether it is the curative logic of health, the normative logic of community or the modern logic of genomic science, the lures of the present age challenge us, but also, on Kierkegaard’s terms, compel us into more impassioned, critical, ecologically attuned relations” (40). She does this in spite of Kierkegaard’s insistence that belief in Christ matters more than understanding the natural orders of creation. For in Christ’s redemption Kierkegaard saw God’s greatness “in a deeper sense” than in creation (Christian Discourses, trans. Hongs, 289). But this abiding conviction gets no play in Jaarsma’s broad ranging book. Jaarsma contests President Bill Clinton’s view that the Human Genome Project’s mapping-out displayed “the language in which God created life” (61). For her there are no “magic genes”—that would “literally reproduce [themselves] tautologically” (50, 57). No, what is given “need not be timeless” (72). And so genes are better rendered as concepts than as simple causal agents (66). Jaarsma mounts her critique using Kierkegaard’s attack against “leveling” all existence into aggregates, thereby disrupting all “fixed and immutable mechanisms” of inheritance (56, 50). For Jaarsma inheritance is “modifiable” (70). So we are neither “haunted” by our past (61, 73), nor “hard-wired” by our genes (73, 51), since properly construed they are not “deterministic” (63). So we are free to be, given that there is “no single, standard, normal DNA sequence, shared by each one of us” (68). Neither can there be any “normative ethics” (182), but only “ethics in a minor key” (189). We have “no genetic explanation for living particularity” (70). In this critique she also links Alfred North Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (191, 59, 32, 11) to Kierkegaard, turning him into “an early process philosopher, an ally of Whitehead (3, 26, 33). [End Page 460] Jaarsma also uses this attack against leveling to displace any grounding of the individual in the transcendent (189, 62, 33, 10). There is no “outside” to our existence, she writes, “no way of propelling ourselves outside of the lived abstractions by which we share agency to varying degrees with others” (59). We have “no god’s-eye view from which to adjudicate existence” (37). Therefore Christian faith becomes belief in the world (2, 10, 31n11, 39, 183–200). Yet Kierkegaard insists on the self being grounded in what is outside of us, or resting ”transparently in God” (Sickness Unto Death, trans. Hongs, 30). Undaunted, Jaarsma flattens out Kierkegaard because she believes that divine authority inexorably leads to “docility,” leaving undisturbed our unjust status quo (198). Then the “very liveliness of existential life” is all over for her (183), and the human “spark” dies out (36, 129, 161, 191, 209, 212). Then nothing counters the “normalizing pull of adaptation” (207). But Kierkegaard knew of more. He knew that the obedience of faith actually leads to nonconformity with the world (Rom. 1:5; 15:6), not to belief in it. He knew that Christianity brings about a “polemical stance against the great human society” (Journals, trans. Hongs, 4:4175). Martin Luther, his favored tutor (Journals, 3:2422, 2465), reinforced this. For Luther the fear of God leads to wide-ranging fearlessness, not to docility; and being a “rebel” becomes the indelible Christian mark (Luther’s Works 51:139; 13:414). Jaarsma argues throughout that her critique of genomics opens up the way to accepting homosexual behavior since there is no one normal way of being sexual (21–24, 179–83, 213–16). This makes Kierkegaard an early proponent of queer advocacy (26). It would have been illuminating to have had her critically assess the argument by the gay activist Frank Browning that no one is born gay, seeing it instead as a choice based on desire (The Culture of Desire: The Paradox and Perversity in Gay...