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How does a naturalistic, evolutionary understanding of human sex undermine the claim that the purpose of sex is procreation? How does it challenge claims about the meaning of sex based in creationist or natural law thinking? What fallacies are involved in the claim that the “purpose” of se is procreation? Dan tackles these issues in this week’s episode.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am, as always, your host, Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Pleased, as always, to be with you.
As always, I want to thank so many folks for reaching out with feedback, comments, and so forth.
And I cheated a little bit this week and kind of went through some of the new emails rather than catching up on the old emails, so I apologize for that.
But a lot of good Feedback and comments and things, and I wanted to hit one of those today.
Last episode, I talked about, you know, the conservative Christian view that the purpose of sex, human sex, we're going to talk about sex this episode, that's all we're going to talk about really, and so I'm talking about sex between humans, okay?
I realize that there are other kinds of organisms that have sex and that the same points may or may not hold.
I'm not an expert on that.
I'll leave it to people who are.
Talk about humans and sex, okay?
But the conservative Christian view that the purpose of sex is procreation, right?
And I made the comment—I think it was something like this—that you go back a couple thousand years, traditional Christian ethics has long ascribed a divine purpose and reason to heterosexual sex to say that the purpose is reproduction.
And I went on to say this, and this is what a couple people reached out about.
I said, basically, it is taken—I said a random evolutionary fact.
The word random is probably not perfect there.
An evolutionary fact that only particular kinds of human bodies can couple and produce offspring, and has turned that into a kind of divine purpose, the reason for sex, the justification for sex.
That's what I said.
And I had a couple people who reached out, so they wanted to hear more about that, and what did I mean by that.
And I've had people bring this up in the past as well, and so I figured, you know, back-to-back episodes, maybe this is a good way to talk about this.
Um, and this is the reason, right?
I've, I've, I have experienced this.
This used to stymie me a little bit.
I've talked to other people whom it's also stymying.
I'm not sure if that's a word.
Um, but when they have conversations with people who are religious, family members, Uncle Ron, friends, just other interlocutors, whatever.
The religious interlocutor will say, well, the purpose of sex is procreation.
And basically, that becomes the argument against non-procreative sex.
So that becomes the argument against any kind of queer sex.
That becomes the argument against certain sex acts, even if undertaken between heterosexual couples.
That becomes the argument against birth control.
That becomes the argument against masturbation.
That becomes an argument, even potentially, against, you know, just sex between two, you know, monogamous heterosexual consenting partners, right?
Everything that conservatives like.
If the aim isn't procreation, right?
And so forth.
And I've had people reach out and say, like, that just sounds wrong.
But I don't know how to respond to it, because they'll say, well, that's not the purpose of sex.
How come it can lead to offspring?
The fact that you can biologically reproduce shows that that's what sex is for.
And they're not exactly sure why that is.
What's misfiring there?
In my coaching work, working with folks that are processing religious trauma, I've come into a lot of people who no longer identify with religion in that way, and they are still caught up in this.
And that'll be their own language, right?
They'll say, I'm still caught up in this idea that if there's sex, Outside of at least the possibility of procreation, let alone the intent of procreation, that it's somehow wrong, or we're misusing sex, or there's something wrong with that.
And I don't, I just don't know how to, like, deal with that.
Okay?
So I've had a lot of people who've asked, you know, not just this week, about how do you respond to that line of thinking?
As I say, this used to throw me a little bit as well.
And so I decided to take a quick shot at elaborating on that comment.
I'm not sure it'll be enough.
I might have bitten off more than I can or at least should try to chew in a single episode.
Folks can let me know because I can always put together other episodes.
I should also say that this is true of everything I do here, right?
The things I'm going to talk about today, I'm not an expert in evolutionary theory, obviously.
I'm not even a scientist.
I'm not an expert in the philosophy of biology, which is really, it's a subfield in philosophy.
That's what this would be part of.
But I think these reflections stand.
They're things I would like to develop further.
Folks can reach out if you've got additional insights or questions or whatever.
But I'm going to sort of share with you my response.
When somebody comes at me with this line of thinking, okay?
And to do that, I need to first give a little bit of background.
It's a topic that we've talked about before on this series.
If I could bring it up again, it's this notion of natural law.
Because when people say that the purpose of sexual intercourse is procreation, right?
Usually, if you encounter somebody saying that, they are Theists of some kind, and probably in a North American context, they're probably Christians, right?
Probably traditionally Catholic, more than Protestant, but in the contemporary language and, you know, in the J.D.
Vance's of the world and others, the popularizing of that view is to where it has become a perspective, not just for a Catholic like Vance, but for lots of Protestants as well.
It's usually a position grounded in natural law.
Okay.
And why is that important?
It's important because, in my view, remember what started this and the whole question about this was my comment about an evolutionary fact.
And perhaps I shouldn't have said random, I think I should have said contingent.
A contingent fact of evolution.
Why is it relevant?
It's relevant because evolutionary theory, in my mind and the minds of most, I know there are exceptions to this, there are evolutionary theists and evolutionary natural law theorists.
I think that's very much an exception, okay?
Evolutionary theory radically undermines natural law theory, as it relates to sexuality specifically, and most would argue just natural law itself.
But there are also people who misconstrue the dynamics and evolution in ways that are still problematic for thinking about sex, whether they're theists or not, whether they believe in natural law or not.
So I want to talk about those things, and I want to start with this notion of natural law, because when somebody comes to you and says the purpose of sex is procreation, whether they know it or not, They are appealing to natural law.
And the sort of, maybe the most significant origin for this in Western thought is Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher.
And Aristotle was something of a naturalist.
He was something of an empiricist.
He was very interested in studying the world to learn about it.
And that might sound kind of obvious, but in his context, that was novel in a lot of ways.
And one of the things that he did is he spent a lot of time looking at organisms and their development.
He did things like, you know, breaking open, you know, chicken eggs at different stages of development to study how the embryonic chicken was developing and so forth.
And this is one of the things that he did.
And this led him to the view that living things have a particular end or goal or purpose, right?
And the Greek word there is telos, and so people will talk about a teleological perspective using that word telos.
What that means is that biological organisms have a purpose toward which they are developing.
And so, for example, on this way of thinking, the natural end or goal or purpose of, say, an acorn is to be an oak tree.
If nature is left to unfold in its normal course, that acorn would become an oak tree.
Lots of things can disrupt that normal course.
Somebody can come along and eat the acorn, or there could be something wrong with the acorn, or somebody could crush it underfoot, whatever.
Okay?
And so, the idea is that because sex in humans and other mammals and animals, etc., can lead to reproduction, this leads to the view that this is the natural purpose of such acts.
So, if you don't interrupt the natural act through, say, the use of contraception, the natural end or goal will be Fertilization and the development of an embryo, right?
That's why people coming out of a natural law tradition, again traditionally the Catholics, have opposed quote-unquote artificial contraception.
You are artificially disrupting the unfolding of nature, okay?
So as the term law suggests, as in natural law, this led to the view that there's something normative or binding about what happens quote-unquote naturally.
That's why you're not supposed to interrupt the natural process.
So, fast forward some centuries, and this Aristotelian idea of natural law—Aristotle was not a theist in the sense of Christian theism or Judeo-Christian theism, if we want to call it that, or Abrahamic theism.
But Christianity eventually picks up this Aristotelian idea.
It's wedded to the Christian notion of divine creation, and now you can see how these fit together.
The natural outcome of sex is reproduction, but it becomes normative not only because nature, quote-unquote, would take it in that direction, but because nature is programmed the way it is by God.
This was God's intended design for nature.
So this is the religious basis for opposition, again, to contraception, to queer sex, to sexual expressions that would naturally lead to procreation, and so forth.
That's the natural law background, okay?
All of those practices are thought to be immoral or sinful in Christian terms because they counteract the divinely instituted natural order, they circumvent the purpose of sex, So, specifically procreative sex is given a divinely sanctioned normative status.
Okay?
That's the logic.
So, let's shift to an evolutionary perspective.
Okay?
Let's fast forward a number of centuries again and shift to an evolutionary perspective.
I'm no expert on evolutionary theory.
I don't think you need to be to understand the points that I'm going to make.
But here's a pretty key point, right?
Being able to reproduce is pretty much key for species survival, right?
If species are going to survive, they're going to have to be able to replicate themselves.
They're going to have to be able to reproduce.
Only those species that can reproduce will obviously live on.
So somewhere, way down the evolutionary line, the kind of reproduction that we and other mammals share caught on and became a defining norm of our species.
Okay?
There are obviously other ways that biological organisms reproduce or replicate themselves, or however you want to say this.
Push their DNA into the future, whatever.
But this is ours, and when particular kinds of human bodies sexually couple in particular ways, they can produce offspring.
Okay?
That account of sex, in my view, radically undermines the Christian or natural law account I just outlined.
And why is that?
Because there is no superintending agency in the process.
Evolutionary theory, and this is why it is perceived as such a threat and has been since it originated and became popularized among lots of conservative Christians, evolutionary theory provides a cogent, completely naturalistic account of how procreative sex became a significant feature of our species.
There's no need to appeal to God.
There's no need to appeal to final ends or purposes or a telos in that Aristotelian sense.
All of that becomes unnecessary.
And what that means is that the way that we reproduce becomes contingent, right?
Reproduction could have taken a different form, and it does.
We know that it could.
It did in other organisms that evolved down different pathways.
This is just the mechanism that gave humans and our forebears a distinctive enough adaptive advantage that it becomes a defining feature of our species.
So there's nothing normative or binding about how this process developed.
It's just a contingent fact of nature.
And so here's the key, okay?
And I want folks to stick with me.
I hope I'm not being too wonky.
Here's the key.
It means there is no purpose behind procreative sex or any other evolutionary development.
Agents invest things with purpose, right?
There's no purpose to it.
And I want you to hold on to that idea of purpose because we have to be careful how we talk, right?
Even in an evolutionary context.
So, for example, people will often say when they're talking about evolution that nature or natural selection, quote, selected for some adaptation or another, right?
That sometime in the past, nature selected for the kind of reproduction that mammals and humans have and so forth.
But we've got to be careful, and that language is fine as long as we recognize it's not literally true, right?
Within an evolutionary account, there is no agent selecting for or selecting against particular adaptations, right?
What people actually mean when they say that is that particular adaptations give organisms enough of a survival advantage that they are better suited for their environment than other organisms.
With the effect that they do in fact survive more, they breed successfully more, and eventually that advantage becomes, as it has for us, a defining feature of the species.
So the language of selection is misleading because it does make it sound like there's a purpose to those evolutionary shifts, but there isn't.
Some organisms are just better suited for their environment than others.
The environment doesn't quote-unquote select for them in a literal sense of sort of picking and choosing, okay?
And what that means is, that's what I mean when I say that we need to do away with that language of purpose in evolution.
And I think we would be better off to speak about the effects of evolutionary traits.
Right?
So, obviously, what that means is that if two humans with two particular types of bodies have sex in particular ways, an effect of this can be reproduction.
That can be one of the effects.
And that obviously provided a significant advantage for our survival, significant enough that, you know, humans are the dominant species on the planet, and so forth.
Okay?
But speaking from a naturalistic evolutionary perspective, this does not mean that the purpose of sex is procreation.
In my view, it's a category mistake to apply the notion of purpose at all.
And this is important because if we start thinking about, okay, well, what are the effects of sex, or sex acts, or having sexual intercourse, however you want to phrase that.
What are the effects?
We recognize that human sex also produces lots of other effects.
It can have the effect of being emotionally satisfying.
It can obviously have the effect of bringing physical pleasure.
It can have the effect of relieving stress.
It can have the effect of helping humans to bond and connect with one another.
It can have the effect of positive health benefits, right?
It can also have negative effects.
Sex can be used as a means of violence and coercion.
It can be used as a means of essentially sort of self-medicating and avoiding our problems.
People who use sex in sort of ways that are potentially self-destructive, for example.
But my point is that once we recognize this, once we realize that we—if we stop talking about purpose and start talking about effects, the whole idea of a normative purpose behind having sex becomes literally nonsensical.
Sex can be lots of different things, and it can take on lots of different purposes or meanings, which means that the idea that sex should only be undertaken for procreation Again, if we're speaking in terms of biology or evolutionary theory, it's a nonsensical perspective.
There's no basis for it.
But we're not done.
I want you to stick with me.
Because you might also run into somebody who, maybe they're not a theist.
Maybe they just read a lot of evolutionary theory and Richard Dawkins and people like that.
And Dawkins is good when he talks about evolutionary theory.
He's terrible when he talks about religion.
And he says misogynistic things and transphobic things and Islamophobic things.
Avoid him on those topics.
But on evolutionary theory, something he actually knows about, he's good.
Maybe they've read a lot of that.
And you'll find that they might still say, well, I hear everything you're saying.
I'm not a theist.
I'm not a natural law person.
But I still, I think on evolutionary grounds, we can still say that the purpose of sex is procreation.
Right?
And the way that they'll argue is this.
They will say, yeah, you're right.
Sex can have lots of effects, positive and negative, but let's focus on the positive effects.
But the effect that matters the most for species survival is procreation.
Therefore, procreation is the preeminent effect of sex.
All those other effects are secondary.
For example, the way that sex can help, you know, help a couple bond emotionally is that they're more likely to have more sex and produce more offspring and so forth.
So, those other effects are secondary.
They are in the service of procreation.
In fact, procreation is such a significant and defining Effect that yeah, we we should we should just call it the purpose.
We're not smuggling anything in here We should we should call it say that that's the purpose of sex and this is where this is where I used to get sort of stuck This is the point where I would hear that line of reasoning.
I think I Feel like something about that is off, but I don't know what And I now think that that's a fallacy.
It's a fallacious way of thinking about sex and evolution.
Specifically, it's a genetic fallacy.
I'm going to get into what that means.
I want to note here that I read some of the work of a philosopher named Simon Blackburn a long time ago for classes that I was teaching, and this is an idea that has evolved.
Evolved?
I didn't even mean to make the pun.
That's how natural they are to me.
An idea that has developed out of some things that he says, and I want to give credit for that, And basically what he highlights, and what I want to highlight, is the fallacy of using appeals to evolution to shift from explaining contemporary facts, facts that we can see and observe, to eliminating them.
The first of those makes sense, the second doesn't.
So, let's look at how this works, right?
Again, they will say, yes, sex can have other positive effects, but the primary evolutionary effect is reproduction.
This, effectively then, is the purpose, and those other effects become irrelevant because they are in the service of this primary purpose.
And to place those other effects on an equal footing with procreation is to ignore the evolutionary facts.
Okay?
And that might sound convincing, but it's a fallacious why.
Because it shifts from explaining the facts that we know about sex.
Things we know from observation.
We know that sex is physically pleasurable.
We know that sex can help people bond.
We know that sex has particular health benefits.
We know that sex can relieve stress.
All those kinds of things.
We know all of those things.
Those are facts about sex.
It basically shifts from explaining those facts to essentially denying that they exist.
It's an intellectual form of gaslighting.
It's as if sex is no longer physically satisfying or no longer helps pairs to couple and so forth or to bond and so forth, right?
Essentially, what it's doing is using the basis of evolution to deny existing facts that we know are there.
But the origins of sex and these other effects that it has, they don't change the facts.
Those facts are still there.
They're still in effect.
And this is why I say that it is a genetic fallacy.
That is, knowing the origin of sex, knowing the origin of the effects of sex, is irrelevant when it comes to evaluating the effects of sex that we now live with as a species.
Evaluating and explaining and putting to use the facts that we observe.
Right?
Biology doesn't tell us how to do that.
Evolutionary theory doesn't tell us how to do that.
Origins don't tell us how to do that.
We assume, we make the mistake, and our interlocutors do, when they assume that the origins or genesis of sex, how it starts, determine its present significance or meaning.
It's a fallacy of assuming that our present reality is determined by our origins.
And again, I'll just repeat, nature doesn't determine meaning or purpose.
Yes, we can tell the story of how sex comes to be and have the effects that it does.
That doesn't change the fact that those are still the effects that it has.
There's nothing normative about biological origins, and I think that this becomes doubly fallacious when we think some more about who we are as a species.
I think one of the other central defining features about the kinds of beings we have evolved to be is that we are a species that, among other things, is capable of the kinds of second-order reflection we're currently undertaking about sex.
We are capable of asking questions like, What is sex?
What does it do?
What effects does it have?
What positive effects?
What negative effects?
We can ask those questions.
We can reflect on the possible meanings of sex.
Purpose doesn't come from nature.
It comes from us.
We are the ones who determine the meaning of sex, the purpose of sex.
We are the ones who determine which effects are primary and why.
On an evolutionary basis, nature doesn't do that.
There's no natural law doing that, and there's no God doing that.
It's just us, right?
So we have the capacity to determine and assign the purpose and significance of sex.
It essentially equalizes those effects, puts them on an equal footing regardless of how they originated.
That's the fallacy in a certain kind of appeal to evolutionary thinking, is the thing that we can just explain away the present by looking at origins.
That's the mistake.
Okay?
I need to wind this down.
Let's tie all this together.
Let's take a look at where we are.
Okay?
This is why I think an evolutionary account of sex undermines both creationist and evolutionary accounts that would say the purpose of sex is procreation.
For the reasons I've given, I think it's a category mistake when we start using the language of purpose within evolutionary or naturalistic accounts.
We are the ones who determine what effects about sex matter to us.
So, for example, we will condemn negative effects, things like sexual violence, things like coercion, things like, you know, sex with minors and so forth, right?
We assign a meaning to those effects and say, those are bad effects, we are not going to do those things.
We are the ones who decide what effects to prioritize.
Yes, it could be procreation, but it could be bonding.
It could be physical release.
It could be health.
We are the ones who determine that.
What that means, folks, is that sex has no inherent meaning or purpose.
We, not just as individuals, as a society, as groups, we assign it the meaning or purpose that it does.
So, all of that is behind my assertion that if one isn't appealing to creationism or natural law, The idea that the purpose of sex is inherently procreation, it's literally nonsensical.
That is why I said traditional Christian ethics takes a contingent fact of nature and elevates it to a law or a purpose, and it does so illegitimately.
Okay?
That's the basis of that statement.
It's a lot.
It's quick, way too quick.
If folks want to reach out, I'd love to hear more about this.
Happy to try to clarify, or if somebody's an expert and you're like, you're wrong about everything, you can let me know that, too.
Here's the caveat, though, okay?
If you're talking to Uncle Ron or somebody, This is why they're going to say, I absolutely reject evolution.
Evolutionary theory isn't real, right?
If somebody rejects evolutionary theory, holds on to their theistic beliefs, is not open to the possibility or the persuasion that there's any reason why they should give that up, none of this is going to matter to them, right?
So just know that.
If they're an inerrantist and they hold on to natural law theory or they're just going to say whatever their pastor told them to say, this isn't going to work.
But if Uncle Ron or somebody does come to you and say, well, hey, you know, even on secular biological grounds, my point still holds, the purpose of sex is procreation.
Anybody can see it.
Even the scientists can see it.
Then you've got to basically say, no, you're wrong.
And there are scientists and others who speak that way.
They shouldn't.
It's a category mistake.
Some scientists aren't well enough trained in philosophy to recognize that.
That's fine.
Lots of them are.
The point is, You can't have, in my view, a very strong or cogent theistic or natural law account that says the purpose of sex is only procreative on evolutionary grounds.
Which means that there is no quote-unquote natural reason to condemn queer sex or to condemn sex acts of different kinds or to, you know, condemn, you know, sex that is non-procreative on any number of levels.
There's no reason to condemn it.
No quote-unquote natural reason.
We can come up with reasons to condemn it, and there are sex acts that we should condemn.
Again, violence, coercion, you know, having sex with people who are not what we recognize as incapable of consent, and so forth, on and on and on.
We're the ones making those determinations.
Those are determinations we as human beings are making.
They are not written into nature.
They are not handed down from creation, if one is approaching this from a naturalistic perspective.
Again, that's a lot.
It's fast.
It's too fast.
But I wanted to throw that out there.
I wanted to respond to the questions I got about that.
Thank you for giving me a chance to do that.
Please reach out.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
About that, about anything else, about feedback, about future episode topic ideas, always open to those.
As always, working through the emails, slowly closing the gap up to the present, but not where I need to be.
But please do reach out.
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And if you're one of the people I hear from who says, I value what you do so much, I just don't have the discretionary income to put into subscribing, I get it, and you're listening, and you're here, and you're supporting, and you're reaching out, and all of that is so valuable, especially yet another time in our society where it feels like that's so important.
