It's in the Code Ep 126: “The Purpose of Sex (Part 2)?”
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If we accept that the human species is the end result of a long process of evolution, rather than the result of a unique act of divine creation, does it make sense to claim that the “purpose” of human sex is procreation? In this week’s episode, Dan makes his case (again!) for why a naturalistic, evolutionary account of human origins makes the claim that the purpose of sex is procreation non-sensical. Give this week’s episode a listen to find out why.
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It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am your host, Dan Miller.
sir.
Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, pleased as always to be with you, and as always, just a reminder that this is a series that is driven by you.
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I want to dive in here.
We are continuing in a series that I'm calling We Gotta Talk About the Sex Stuff, looking at sex and gender and sexuality within high-control American Christianity.
And this is the second of what's actually going to be three episodes looking at the question of the purpose of sex.
I introduced the first of these episodes last week.
And what I'm doing is specifically challenging the notion, and it's an idea that is still intuitive to many people, even people who are not religious, not coming out of a religious background.
It is to challenge the notion that the purpose of sex is procreation or reproduction.
And I noted in a prior episode, talked about it a little bit, that this view has traditionally been tied to what's called natural law.
And that's the idea being that sex, if it follows to its natural end, leads to procreation.
Talked about that more in the last episode.
If you're interested in that and haven't had the chance to check that out, go do that and then come back.
Last episode, I suggested that the ways we ordinarily talk about sex and the ways we ordinarily practice sex, take part in sexual acts, they don't line up with this view.
And so I was trying to give what I consider sort of practical considerations for my reasoning that the idea that the purpose of sex is procreation just doesn't make sense.
Okay.
And one of the things, the argument that I tried to make there, the observation I tried to build to was that really the nature to which people have answered in this view appeal, when they say it's natural, natural sex leads to reproduction and so forth, that that nature is a construct.
And it turns out that it's a really exclusive view.
Only sex that is carried out by people with particular kinds of bodies in very particular ways can lead to procreation.
And there's no way to define only that expression of sex as quote-unquote natural in a way that isn't just completely circular in his reasoning, okay?
Not going to rehash all that.
Go back again.
Listen to that episode if you didn't get a chance to do so.
In this episode, I want to consider this from another angle.
And this is an episode, and I apologize if it's repetitive for folks.
This is an issue that I have tried to talk about a couple times.
I have talked about it.
I haven't tried to talk about it.
I've tried to make my case a couple times.
And as I've noted before, last time I brought this up, I got as much pushback, even from sympathetic listeners, I have on almost any topic.
So what I want to do today, I want to give this another try, is I want to argue that if we assume a naturalistic evolutionary origin of human beings, and therefore of human sex.
So basically I'm saying, let's just set aside the idea, let's just imagine that as many of you would agree, and I know that lots of conservative religionists wouldn't, but I'm not talking to them right now.
If we assume that we came to be the kind of creature we are through evolutionary processes and so forth, I want to argue that the idea that the purpose of sex is procreation, it not only doesn't make sense to say the purpose of sex is procreation, it's nonsensical to say that.
And it's essentially a category mistake.
That's what I want to try to highlight here.
I've done more reflecting on this since I got feedback on the first time I tried to kind of make this point.
I'm going to try it again.
So let's see how this goes here, okay?
So let's start with an evolutionary perspective.
What I'm proposing, and this is not unique to me.
This is, I think, a well-recognized point.
An evolutionary perspective undermines any appeal to the idea of natural purpose.
It undermines specifically any appeal to natural law.
Most people, I think, would say that the concept of natural law is radically undermined within the contemporary theory of evolution.
And what I'm proposing is that an evolutionary perspective undermines any appeal to the idea of a natural purpose.
And here's why.
And this is what I want us to think about.
This is how I've been trying to kind of reframe this since the last time I gave this a shot.
So you all can let me hear it.
You can let me know how I do.
The language of purpose, as we use it almost all the time, implies conscious agency.
It implies design.
When we say something has a purpose, we mean that it was designed by some sort of agent that To attain that purpose, to carry out that purpose, to attain that goal.
That's how we talk about purpose.
I think the category of purpose implies agency and conscious intention, two key ideas.
Here's how we might think about this.
If you're taking all this stuff in the world, All the things that we come across, everything is going to fit into one of two containers.
The first container, the first box, is going to be those things that came about through agency and intention.
And as I'm just kind of looking around as I record this, there's a lamp on my desk.
I'm talking into a microphone.
I'm using a computer.
I'm fidgeting with a mechanical pencil.
I am looking at my Kindle sitting on my desk.
I can look around and I see all kinds of things that came about through agency and intention.
Those are things that have a purpose.
They were all designed by somebody with an intent and a purpose in mind, some task that they're supposed to carry out.
So there's all those kinds of things in the world, and they would go in that one box.
But the other box that things can go into is all those things that didn't come about through agency and intention.
All those things that don't have a purpose.
They weren't designed.
They weren't created.
Nobody had an intention for making them that way and so forth.
What I'm suggesting is that, from an evolutionary perspective, human sex belongs in that second box.
It did not arise through intention and agency.
Therefore, the concept of purpose just doesn't attach to it.
Okay?
When we speak of procreation as the purpose of sex, We're taking it out of that second box where it belongs.
We're putting it into that first box.
We're assigning agency and intention.
We're putting it into the same box as the lamp on my desk or the phone sitting next to my computer or the microphone that I'm talking into.
We are assigning agency and intention.
And so here's the issue.
Nature, from an evolutionary perspective, has neither of these traits.
Nature is not an agent.
Nature doesn't have intentions.
It doesn't have desires.
It doesn't have aims.
It doesn't have purposes.
From an evolutionary perspective, again, I'm not an evolutionary scientist.
I'm not a philosopher of science studying evolution, but I think I've got the main contours of the idea, right?
From an evolutionary perspective, traits in organisms persist and eventually become the norm within those organisms because, one, they give the organism in question some environmental advantage.
They make it more likely that that organism will survive in its given environment.
And two, following from this...
That survival advantage makes it more likely that the organism in question would survive and reproduce and pass on that trait.
That's, as I understand it, evolutionary theory in a nutshell.
There's no purpose here, folks.
There's no intention.
There's no guiding agency.
Now, we talk about evolution in ways that mask this, in ways that confuse this issue.
A big obvious one is we have the concept of so-called natural selection.
We talk about evolution, I'm putting evolution in quotes there, selecting for particular traits.
It makes it sound as if evolution is some kind of intentional agent choosing traits or species, etc.
It's like You're a kid out at recess and like, I don't know, picking teams for kickball or something.
You got everybody milling around.
You got the two team captains picking and choosing who's going to go on which team.
It makes it sound as if that's what nature does.
Nature selects for certain advantages and traits and so forth.
But that's just a euphemistic way of talking.
That's not what nature actually does.
Nature doesn't do anything.
Nature's not an agent.
Species either survive or they don't.
They either reproduce or they don't.
They reproduce enough offspring that some genetic trait or physiological characteristic or whatever is established as a kind of norm in the species and so forth.
That's what happens.
Again, big idea here.
There's no agent.
There's no intention.
Okay?
So from an evolutionary perspective, if humans evolved, human sex belongs in the box of things that have not arisen through agency and intention.
Which means that understood in those terms, it has no natural purpose or goal.
That's what I mean when I say it is nonsensical to say that the purpose of sex is procreation.
As an evolved characteristic, it has no purpose.
To say that it does puts it in the wrong box.
It's an ontological category mistake.
You have taken something that can't have a purpose because there's no agency or intention behind it, and you've put it into the category of things that do have agency and intention as their origin.
It's a category mistake.
So, what does all that mean?
It means that from an evolutionary perspective, yeah, a result of certain kinds of human sex acts is obviously procreation.
Again, you get the right kinds of human bodies coming together in the right way, at the right time, and all of that sort of stuff.
Yes, a result can be reproduction.
And clearly, this form of reproduction, among other things, it clearly gave humans some kind of survival advantage because it caught on.
It became like a defining feature of us.
It's how we reproduce.
But it is a mistake from an evolutionary perspective to take this as the purpose of human sex.
Or let me even restate that.
If one accepts a naturalistic evolutionary conception of where the human species and therefore things like human sex came from, it makes no sense to assign purpose to that.
That's the argument that I'm trying to make.
And I'm not trying to be dogmatic or anti-religious here.
Last episode, I was anti-religious.
Next episode, I'll be anti-religious.
Here, I guess, maybe I'm being anti-religious if I'm affirming evolution or anti-certain kind of religion.
But that's not my point.
I'm just trying to make a basic point about what, in the philosophical tradition, we would call ontology, about things that exist.
Sex can't have a purpose.
In the sense that any of us ordinarily use that term that comes from nature because nature doesn't have purposes.
Nature is not an intentional agent.
Purpose just doesn't apply.
It's just a category that doesn't apply to nature.
Okay?
So that's the argument that I'm trying to make.
That's the argument that I've tried to make before.
I think part of the reason that some folks are resistant to that One is that, you know, it just seems so well-suited to the environment.
We're going to pick up on that next episode.
Another one, I think, is a concern that some of us might have, and that certainly, if you were going to talk to Uncle Ron about this, I feel like I haven't talked about Uncle Ron in a while, and I realize you might not.
It might be weird to sit around talking with Uncle Ron about sex.
Like, maybe that's weird, but it's the idea that an Uncle Ron or a skeptic or a religious apologist might have, and they would say this.
They'd say, so...
If procreation isn't the purpose of sex, are you saying sex is just meaningless?
There's no purpose to it?
Doesn't mean anything?
Aren't you just cheapening sex and everything that comes with it?
I think that that's a real concern.
It's a real concern that people have.
Even people who aren't into, say, purity culture or think that people can have sex if they're not trying to have kids or whatever.
I think that's a real concern, and the answer is no.
Of course we're not saying that sex is meaningless.
We're not saying that it doesn't mean anything, that it can have no value, that it can have no purpose or utility.
I think for virtually every one of us, there is some purpose or purposes of sex.
Even for people who might identify as asexual, sex still has a meaning to it, a significance.
That's a reality, I think, for all of us.
But that meaning or purpose doesn't come from nature.
It comes from us.
And when I say us, I mean it comes from us as a species.
I think there are lots of things that feed into this.
I'm not an expert here, folks.
I think for some, it's maybe just psychological characteristics.
Some of us might just be wired in different ways so that sex means something different for us.
It certainly comes through socialization.
It certainly comes from enculturation.
And some mix of all these things means that yes, For all of us, sex and sexuality has a meaning, it has a value, it has a purpose.
There is some reason that we do or don't have sex in any given circumstance or in general.
So my point, and the point of this is not that there's no meaning or purpose to sex, it's that it doesn't come from nature.
For humans, the purpose of sex, this is how I would say it, it's not fixed.
It's not natural.
It's not immutable.
It is variable and malleable and fluid.
I think one of the things that makes human beings the species that we are, one of the things that I think defines us, is that we can invest things in the world with meaning or purpose.
They don't get them from nature.
They get them from us.
We are meaning-making organisms.
And so, yes, of course, sex means things for us.
It means deep things for us, but it doesn't mean the same thing for everybody.
And that kind of brings us back to last episode, talking about the way that we talk about and practice that.
Everybody knows that there can be sexual incompatibility.
We can have really divergent views of what sex means or the context of it or the significance of it.
And for some people, that means that it's just not a compatibility between them.
They have fundamentally different understandings.
We make meaning.
And it can even change the meaning or purpose of sex could change for one person over time.
Many of us can recognize the purpose or meaning or significance of sex has changed for us.
Think of teenagers, think of young adults having sex.
The purpose for them is absolutely not typically to procreate.
That's often like the one thing they don't want to come about from having sex.
But those same people, like, let's imagine people start dating and they start a sexual relationship and, like, procreation is just not on the table.
It's not something that they want, it's not a good time, what have you.
But let's say that they stay together long enough, they're committed, they decide that they want to start a family, the meaning of sex for them, the purpose has changed.
Now it may be procreation.
And that could even be heightened.
Like, let's say that they imagine they want to have kids.
It turns out that there's infertility issues, or it's not as easy to have kids as they thought that it would be.
And all of a sudden, that becomes like a primary driving force, procreation.
It shifts.
And let's imagine that we look further down the line and, I don't know, maybe let's be optimistic.
They were able to have that family they wanted to have.
The kids grow up.
Maybe they're past their childbearing years.
Maybe they just don't want to have more kids.
They still want to have a sexual relationship.
Once again, the meaning or purpose has shifted.
Beyond that, people start out thinking one thing about sex and maybe they awaken to, you know, queer identity over time.
Sex has now maybe changed shape and come to mean something different.
Maybe they discover about themselves that they're polyamorous.
And sex, again, shifts its meaning, shifts its significance.
That's my point.
Not that sex is meaningless, but that it can have lots of meanings.
And that that meaning is buried and immutable, or excuse me, mutable and varied and not universal for everyone.
So here's the point.
If we go back to the creepy discussion with Uncle Ron, it's not to say that sex is meaningless.
It's just to say that that meaning and value is not given by nature.
It's not fixed.
It's not immutable.
It's not simply handed to us.
It is something that we discover and figure out and create as the species we are.
Which is exactly, of course, why sex is such a complicated part of our social lives.
Okay?
What I'm trying to do in this episode is say, to come back full circle, The idea that the purpose of sex is procreation, it's more widespread than I would have thought, based on the feedback I got in that first episode.
If we're looking at it from this perspective, the perspective of if we accept evolutionary theory, if we accept that account of human origins, it just doesn't make sense to say that the purpose of sex is procreation.
If we're talking about the meanings we, as human beings, assign to sex, yeah, that can be a meaning of sex.
It's not the meaning.
And it doesn't come from nature.
It comes from us.
That's the point that I'm trying to make.
Now, if you're listening carefully, you'll also be saying, well, Dan, all this discussion of agency and intention and purpose, isn't that exactly part of why Christians say that evolutionary theory isn't what we should be listening to?
That human beings are created by God, and so there is purpose and agency and intention, and now we come full circle.
How do we respond to the person who says, well, yeah, that's exactly why evolutionary theory is wrong.
Humans are created by God.
Sex is created by God.
The purpose and agency and intention behind that is procreation.
I'm going to tackle that in the next episode.
Because I think that even that model of divine creation, bringing agency and intention back to it, I think it doesn't make the purpose of sex to be procreation.
I don't think it makes that idea as plausible as folks assume that it does.
It certainly doesn't make it as plausible as Uncle Ron would assume it is, were you, again, to have creepy discussions with Uncle Ron.
We'll hold that for next time.
I've got to wrap this up, so I want to say again, thank you.
Thank you for listening.
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