It's in the Code Ep 127: “The Purpose of Sex (Part 3)?”
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In this episode, Dan takes on the “design argument” that the purpose of human sex is procreation. Here’s how the argument goes: If God created human beings, and therefore human sexuality, this means that the purpose of sex is procreation, because this is God’s intended purpose. But does the argument work? Dan argues that even if we presuppose human beings and their sexuality as a direct creation of God, the idea that the purpose of sex is procreation is STILL not compelling. Human sexuality is so ineffective at bringing about procreation that it is implausible to suggest that this is its “design.” Check out this week’s episode to hear more!
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As always, welcome to It's in the Code, a series that's part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am, of course, Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Glad, as always, to be with you.
Thankful, as always, for all of you, the support that you give us.
Subscribers, people who give new episode ideas, feedback on episodes.
Please keep all those things coming.
I want to open up today, actually, on that note, ideas for some upcoming episodes, and I need your help.
So two topics that folks can reach out about.
The first one is, I want to think about questions you were not allowed to ask in church.
And so if you—I put this on Facebook.
I put it in the Discord.
You can respond to it there.
If you want to respond to it with me directly, my email, danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Send me that.
Put it in the header, the subject line.
Put the subject line, questions I couldn't ask in church, or something like that, so I know to spot it.
But yeah, what were things that, if you grew up in church, if you had friends who grew up in church, things that you were not allowed to ask, the kinds of questions that would cause the awkward silence, would bring retribution.
That's the first one.
The second one is, I get a lot of questions about apologetics, Christian apologetics, arguments for the existence of God, arguments for why God is a necessary being and God has to exist and so forth.
I get a lot of emails about this.
I talk to a lot of clients about this.
I encounter this with a lot of folks that we meet after our live events.
And I want to tackle some of those issues.
So, a second topic, and again, put it in the subject line, maybe put it under antigenetics or why I have to believe in God or something like that.
What are the arguments you were given for why God had to exist?
These could be things you heard in sermons.
These could be things, I know some of you, I hear from you, I talk with some of you.
I know some of you engage, you know, sort of apologists on social media and things like that.
What are some of those arguments?
I know some people who don't buy into the whole religion thing are still kept awake at night by certain kinds of concerns.
Can you have a moral order if there's no God or something like that?
Whatever those are, let me know.
So those are a couple of sort of series that I'm thinking about.
But I want your help.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Send those in to me.
Put those in the header.
I'm always behind on emails.
I am reading them.
I promise I am trying to respond to them.
I'm going to hit a few in supplemental episodes and so forth.
But on those two topics, put it in the subject line as I'm trying to put those together for the future now.
All right.
Enough of that.
Let's come into the series that we're actually exploring, which is, I've called it We've Got to Talk About the Sex Stuff, really looking at discourses and really practices and understandings of sex and sexuality within conservative high-control religion.
And we've done a couple episodes on the purpose of sex.
Basically, my attempt to lay out why it is that I think that the argument that the purpose of sex is procreation just doesn't make sense.
Okay?
And this is the third in that.
I'm going to come full circle with this.
Okay?
In the first episode, we've talked about...
I suggest that the ways we ordinarily talk about sex, the way we participate in sexual acts...
Should remove us, or excuse me, should move us to reject—that's what I'm trying to say—this view, that we should not accept the notion that the purpose of sex is procreation or reproduction.
Last episode, I revisited a topic I looked at before, which is why, from a naturalistic or evolutionary perspective, the language of sex's purpose simply doesn't make sense.
It just doesn't fit.
It doesn't work.
And that last episode hinged on me linking together the concept of purpose.
If we say that something has a purpose or a reason or an end, linking those ideas together with the ideas of agency or intention or ultimately of design.
That if something has a purpose, it means it was designed in a particular way for a particular end.
And I suggested that evolutionary theory rules out any such agency and therefore purpose.
Okay?
That brings us to this week.
That brings us to the obvious religious response.
And that is the argument that sex has not arisen through evolutionary means, but was in fact designed.
I can hear the religionists now.
Who says, yep, you're absolutely right.
If evolution is true and we evolved to be this way and human sex evolved over time and it's just part of who we are as an evolutionary species and so forth, you're right.
The purpose of sex is not procreation.
It has no fixed, unchanging, immutable purpose and so forth, which is exactly why it's important to recognize that it was actually designed by God.
It hasn't arisen through evolutionary means.
So what we're confronting is the view that human beings and other biological organisms arise through direct acts of divine creation.
I'm not going to get into this.
There are lots of ways of thinking about divine creation within a broadly Christian or Abrahamic or monotheistic framework, okay?
They do not all involve a designer who kind of makes everything directly and so forth, okay?
We're not going to get into all of those.
If you want to email me about those, I'd love to hear about it.
But what I'm interested in here, what I'm confronting, is the view that Cousin Lonnie—Lonnie?
Lenny?
What do we call him?
The seminarian.
I think it was Lenny.
Cousin Lenny.
That he might be learning about in seminary class, or certainly that Uncle Ron might have, is the idea that when the Bible talks about Adam and Eve, it meant the first two literal people— And God invented them.
God designed them.
God designed them with sex.
It's a direct act of divine creation.
Okay?
And so within that view, human sex was designed with a specific purpose, and that purpose is procreation.
And this is a pretty standard view within conservative American Christianity.
And so what about this?
Because I get this.
I get folks who will say, look, I've tried talking to my brother-in-law about this till I'm blue in the face.
And he's always going to play the trump card and say, well, yeah, that's exactly why it's important to have a designer.
It turns into an argument basically for an argument for the existence of God.
God must have designed it because it leads to procreation.
And that's so obvious that that's the purpose and so forth.
So that's the question.
Does appealing to God as the designer of human sexuality, does it get us to the view that the purpose of sex is procreation?
I mean, this is the strongest, most direct argument.
If you want to argue that the purpose of human sex is procreation, your straightest line to get there is to say that it is that because it was designed directly by God.
God made it that way.
And what I want to suggest is that the idea that the purpose of sex is procreation, it still isn't plausible even if we presuppose this design theory of God.
That's what I want to look at here for the next few minutes, okay?
So let's do this.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that God created the first two literal human beings in their finished form, that they're a cis-heteropair, and all of that.
I don't think those things, but for the sake of argument, let's assume those things.
Okay?
They have sex.
It leads to kids, and that gets the whole human race rolling, according to the Bible.
Now, there's some awkward questions in there about possible incest and so forth, because, you know, it only lists the first pair.
All of that.
We'll set all that aside.
But that's the kind of story.
God creates the first two humans.
According to conservatives, they're a married couple and so forth.
They have sex.
They have kids, etc.
There are two ways one could get from those facts, if we assume those to be facts, to the interpretation that the purpose of sex is procreation.
That's the first important move here, is that people often move from observation to interpretation without recognizing that there's a shift.
So let's assume that it's true, again, first two humans, they have sex, it produces children, it's the human race ruling.
Let's assume that those are facts.
The interpretation arising from that is, aha, see, the purpose of sex is procreation.
There are two ways you do that, I think.
One is to just infer from what, in the Bible, God supposedly says about sex that procreation is the purpose.
Okay, so for example, God links a man and a woman, quote-unquote, being together with childbirth.
Their sexual union is linked to childbirth.
God tells humans to be fruitful and multiply it.
You have a parallelism of humans and the other biological organisms that are fruitful and multiply and so forth, which tends to connect the idea of sex with procreation.
So it doesn't explicitly say, there's nowhere in the Bible where God says the purpose of sex is procreation.
There's no place in the Bible where anybody says that, but there are places where one can infer from what is said or a narrative structure or whatever that sex and procreation are linked.
The other way to get to this is to supposedly start from observations about the nature and sex and move from them to an inference about divine purpose.
And that brings us back to the episode a couple weeks ago.
Appeals to nature, to natural law, the argument that sex, quote unquote, naturally leads to procreation, and so forth.
The idea is that one observes sex, sees that it naturally leads to procreation, and moves from there to the idea that it was designed by God to have this purpose.
Now, I suggested a couple episodes ago that this doesn't work.
I suggested that you have to cheat to get from supposedly natural observations to the view that sex is procreating.
You have to exclude a whole bunch of sex stuff to create supposedly natural sex, the reasoning is circular, and so forth.
Okay?
But, that's how the argument works.
And usually, the insistence that God designs sex for procreation is going to involve appeal to some combination of these.
There are going to be people reading the Bible who say, you know, we can draw the conclusion that the purpose of sex is procreation, or at least that the primary purpose, they'll allow secondary purposes, the primary purpose is procreation, and then they'll say, and if we look around in nature, we see, you know, animals and humans have sex, and it produces offspring, ergo, the purpose of sex is procreation.
Okay?
Okay.
Again, that last point, I don't think it works.
Go back, listen a couple episodes ago if you haven't.
Here's the bottom line.
I've run through all of that because this is how the reasoning works.
The bottom line is I don't care how one gets to the designer appeal.
I don't care what path Uncle Ron or your pastor or the seminary professor takes to get from the fact of human sexuality to the interpretation that its purpose is procreative.
I don't care how one gets there.
I still don't think it's a plausible argument.
If one is appealing to design.
And here's why.
No matter how one gets there, it's just not a very good design.
Even if you exclude all the non-procreative ways that humans with different kinds of bodies can have sex, talked about that a couple episodes ago, even if you take all of that out, cis, hetero, penis, and vagina sex is a poor design for procreation.
And to understand this, let's just think a little bit about the kind of designer that's in mind when Uncle Ron or the seminary professor or the pastor appeals to the designer god.
This is a designer who is omnipotent, who is all-powerful, literally possesses all—there's no limitation on this god's power.
This is a God who, as designer and creator, works without constraints of any kind.
God invented the laws of physics, the laws of molecular biology, you name it.
There are literally no constraints outside, possibly, most people would argue, of logical inconsistency.
There are no constraints of what God can create.
This God also has perfect knowledge and foresight.
This God can know with absolute certainty how every design will work out, how everything will develop over time, and on and on and on.
You can see perfectly what every possible outcome of a potential design would be.
We don't need to do any beta testing.
Don't need to have any room full of gamers testing it out ahead of time.
God knows.
And this God, and this is all part of it, is considered to be perfect in all ways.
Perfect knowledge, perfect in power, perfect in goodness, on and on and on.
So, if that's your God, that's your designer, one could reasonably expect that God's creation is going to have to clear a pretty high bar.
But I suggest that if we look at the links between sex and procreation, the supposed design of sex just doesn't meet those standards.
And so here's one piece of this.
First off, at its best, penis and vagina sex is highly ineffective at leading to procreation.
And I looked this up.
You can find this on medical websites and things like this, or probably fertility books, other places like that.
I actually looked up these numbers, okay?
At its most effective...
Unprotected penis and vagina sex has about a 25% chance of causing pregnancy.
Now, that's its most effective.
That's if people have unprotected sex around the time of ovulation.
The rest of the time, folks, the odds drop to like 5%.
And of course, that's an average.
There are going to be times when it's lower than that.
So what does that mean?
It means that at its highest time of effectiveness, penis and vagina sex is 75% ineffective at leading to procreation.
To say nothing of, you know, carrying a pregnancy to term and so forth, and the issue of all the fertilized eggs, the majority of which they believe never implant and so forth.
It's just most of the time, sex is not going to lead to procreation.
And to understand why this is significant, imagine designing.
Imagine you're a designer.
Or let's imagine this.
Let's imagine you got like a buddy down the street and he's like, you know, the garage inventor kind of guy, right?
And imagine designing anything.
Imagine he designs anything to fulfill a particular task Achieving a 5% to 25% success rate, effectiveness rate, which means it's 75% to 95% ineffective and calling it a success.
Like, imagine you go down to your buddy's garage, like, hey, I got something out here I want to show you.
You know, you go out there and he shows you points at his car.
You're like, okay, that's cool.
It's a car.
Like, what is that?
He's like, I replaced the brakes.
Like, oh, what do you mean you replaced the brakes?
I've got my own design.
I redesigned the brakes, man.
I redesigned them.
It's going to revolutionize cars.
Oh, okay, cool.
Tell me more about that.
Yeah, it's awesome, man.
They work up to 25% of the time.
Let's go for a spin.
You'd be like, yeah, no thanks.
I'm not going to get in a car with a 25% effectiveness rate.
I'm not going to get in an airplane if I think there's a 75% to 95% chance of mechanical failure.
Folks, this would be a terrible, terrible bar for design.
But as the design of an all-powerful, perfectly knowing being, working from scratch, with no constraints of any kind, with absolute foreknowledge and foresight?
In my view, it is just not plausible.
Is it possible?
Yes, it's possible.
And I'm going to dive into that issue, I think.
Maybe we'll touch on it in later episodes here, but in another set of episodes I'm thinking about doing.
I'm not saying it's impossible, and that's the trick about arguing for a divine or supernatural metaphysical entity is, you know, I guess, yeah, it's possible, but I don't think it's plausible.
This would be a terrible design if anybody designed it.
It's just not plausible to look at the design and say, yep, yep, all-powerful, perfect being designed it.
So that's the big one, the ineffectiveness and so forth.
But I have other questions.
If the purpose of sex is procreation, why do humans feel sexual attraction all the time?
Why not create humans more like some other species so that they're only sexually attracted during the time of ovulation, during the time of fertility?
Why make it so that they want to have sex all the time?
Or why not make it so that humans who produce eggs are fertile all the time, if that's the purpose?
Again, no constraints on the design.
So why not have built it that way?
Another question, the purpose of sex is procreation.
Why is the period of life during which people can carry children to term, why is it so brief?
Given the whole span of a human life, we might call a procreative window, is relatively small.
But people, to the first point, still desire sex before that window opens.
They desire sex after that window closes.
If the purpose of sex is procreation, Why is the period of life during which people can carry children to terms so brief?
Right?
Now, someone will say, well, you know, human beings didn't used to live as long, and so that wasn't as true, and so forth.
The people are dying in their, you know, late 30s to mid 40s.
Okay, true.
Here's the problem.
That's not a good argument here, because remember, this is a design created by a God with perfect foreknowledge and insight.
This is a God who knew that, yes, in the ancient world, people would live to their mid-30s or early 40s, but he also knew that we would live in a time now with, say, advanced industrial societies where people live into their 80s.
Who knows?
Medical advancements another 100 years maybe will hit the century mark.
And that it becomes very difficult for people to conceive and carry children to term much into their 40s or even late 30s.
So why?
Why do we still have sexual desire?
Why is that still a part of who we are as the kind of creatures we are if the purpose of sex is procreation?
On the other end, why have a process of puberty?
Why have humans mature to full, fertile capacity before they want to start child-rearing?
And again, you can say, well, there was a time when people got married as soon as somebody was of childbearing capacity.
That's fine.
Argument still doesn't work.
That's not the society we live in.
It's not the society most people want to live in, including most conservative Christians.
Again, this is a God working without constraints of any kind.
This is a God, one would presume, that could have said, you know what, if the only valid context for sexuality is a monogamous heterosexual marriage, and the purpose of that sexual union is procreation, why not make it so that, I don't know, there's some magic genetic switch that gets tripped once people are actually married?
Why not just turn on the sexuality then?
And if you listen to it and say, well, that sounds ridiculous, Dan.
It sounds ridiculous, but Because we don't think, deep down, that we were actually designed that way.
If we appeal to that designer, none of this is ridiculous.
Again, absolute designer working without constraints of any kind.
Okay?
Surely an all-powerful, all-knowing God without any constraints could have done this kind of stuff.
I could go on and on, but I think these considerations make my point.
I could generate these questions all day.
So for me, if we consider these facts about the ineffectiveness of penis and vagina sex for procreation, if we just really dwell on some of those questions, it just doesn't sound plausible that the purpose of sex is procreation for me, even on a design model.
It sounds even less plausible because it's a terrible, terrible design.
If we look at the facts and experience sex, it just doesn't even fit that that's what it was designed for.
Now, Like I say, I don't imagine you're going to have creepy arguments with Uncle Ron about this, but if you did, there are ways that advocates of the designer God can respond to this.
Okay?
Concerning my latter points, again, they'll say that procreation isn't the only purpose of sex.
They'll say that it does have purposes like emotional bonding, that there are health benefits to sexual activity, and so forth.
They'll say that.
But here's the issue.
Those purposes are supposed to be secondary.
Which still leaves untouched the issue of what a shitty design penis and vagina sex is for bringing out procreation.
Or on that point, the question that I raised about why it is that people desire sex long after the so-called procreative window has closed, those other purposes of sex become primary, not secondary.
Why?
Why not just make sexual desire stop, right?
So concerning that point, the crappy design, Christian apologists have a more tricky move.
And this is what they'll say.
They'll say, yes, sex and everything else is created by a perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing God working out constraints of any kind.
But, wait for it, that doesn't mean we should expect that God's creation is going to be optimal in all ways.
They'll have their cake and eat it too.
They will say there's a perfect, all-knowing designer, but we should not expect that designer's actual design to be perfect or optimal.
Why not?
That seems weird.
A couple reasons they'll give you.
One is they'll say we just can't understand.
God's ways are not our ways.
I did an episode on this like forever ago.
Long, long time ago.
This is the line that you will get from the conservative Christians and the high-control religionists when they run up against a wall.
You pose a question they can't answer or it doesn't make sense or it highlights a deep underlying contradiction, and they will play what I call the ineffability card.
They will say, God's ways are not our ways.
Who are we as humans to know?
The problem is they don't actually believe that.
They spend all their time, all the time, telling us that they know what God's ways are, that God has told them what God's ways are, that God has empowered them and commanded them to enact God's ways in the world.
So when they turn around and say, well, we just don't know, just can't know, God's ways aren't our ways, it's a vacuous answer.
But that's one that they'll say, well, we don't know why God didn't make creation perfect, but he didn't, he must have had good reasons.
Additionally, The Bible says, for example, in Romans 8, that all of creation is in bondage to decay as a result of sin.
So basically what they'll say is, well, that sinful fall that marred human nature, it marred all of creation.
So creation was created perfect and optimal, but it has fallen from that.
It has fallen away from that optimal design.
Okay?
You won't be surprised to know I'm not convinced by these.
And I used to level these arguments.
I used to put forward those arguments to defend a design account of creation and human sexuality and so forth.
I'm not convinced.
Here are a couple things about this.
The first one is just how the striking convenience of this.
It allows, as I say, the advocate of creation to have their cake and eat it too.
We are supposed to accept that there's an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect designer, but there's no problem with an exceedingly poor design.
We wouldn't accept that in some other context.
I don't think we should accept it here.
And the second is, again, and this is related to this, the circularity of this.
The apparent design of the world is often used as an argument for a perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing God.
So it gets even more murky.
You point to the world and say, look, a design is evident.
There must be a perfect designer of some sort.
And you say, well, yeah, but actually the design is really bad.
Well, yeah, there's a perfect designer, but we shouldn't expect creation to have a perfect design.
That's the way the argument works.
Again, it's just not plausible.
And I'm not the first one to say this.
Most famously, David Hume said this, a philosopher arguing before there was a theory of evolution, argued the fallacy of moving from a flawed, poor design to a perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful creator or designer.
The shift makes no sense.
Now, What does all that mean?
The religionists have moves.
I've got concerns.
The advocates of design have their moves.
They've got their ready-made answers.
We can't know God's ways.
Creation has fallen, what have you.
Here's where I'm at.
Given these observations and objections, I think the answer is simpler.
I think the answer is simpler than having to try to explain why an all-perfect, all-knowing creator and designer without any constraints designed an order that just doesn't work very well when it comes to human sex.
I think the idea that sex was designed with procreation as a purpose was only plausible because there was no alternative account.
No matter how flawed the world, including human sex, was for hundreds or thousands of years in the West, there just was no strong, non-theistic alternative for the origin of things.
And in the absence of a plausible alternative, I think appeal to a designer was the best we could do.
Though not everyone was convinced, I think it was the best we could do, but then evolutionary theory came along and provided that alternative.
That is why Darwinian evolution and modern evolutionary theory since then has been perceived as such a threat by theologically conservative Christians.
Because evolutionary theory comes along, it provides that alternative account, and it renders the design account of sex implausible.
For me, the plausible reason why sex seems like such a bad design is that it isn't a design.
It doesn't reflect design.
It's not that it's a bad design, it's that it's no design at all.
And evolutionary theory accounts for why that is.
Evolutionary theory, in my view, also accounts for why sex can take so many different forms and can have so many different purposes and meanings.
For me, this is a much more plausible account than the ad hoc modifications that proponents of divine design have to invent to rescue their account.
They have to keep tinkering and modifying and modifying and tinkering some more with their account to make it work.
For me, that just renders it implausible.
Which, of course, brings us back to the topic of the previous episode, which means we need to wind this down because this episode is already going long.
Here's the takeaway for me.
I think that even if one presupposes that human sex is designed by God, the idea that its purpose is procreation, it's still implausible.
Okay?
Now, somebody could be more creative, I guess, and say, well, what if God designed sex and all the diversity that you talk about, and that's all part of it?
Well, okay, that sounds maybe more plausible.
Broader question, broader issue.
Go read Nadia Bolts, Weber, Shameless, or something like that if you want to kind of have a perspective like that, okay?
I think the notion that God's the designer, therefore sex is procreative, bam, somebody throws down the trump card.
I don't think it's a trump card at all.
I think it's a bad design, and I think the way the defenders of the designer God have to shore up their arguments show that it just isn't compelling.
And I think we have, ready to hand, a much more plausible view in the idea that human sex evolved with our species, that it takes lots of forms that are not just procreative, that it doesn't have a single fixed or unchanging meaning or purpose.
As I say, I need to wrap this up.
I want to thank you again for listening.
If you like what you hear, if you find this informative and useful and you're not a subscriber, I would ask you to consider doing that if you're able.
If you like what you hear, or you got questions, or other ideas, or want clarifications, or want to pick a fight with me, or whatever, that's all fine.
Email me, danielmillerswadge at gmail.com.
I want to hear about this.
At the outset, I listed a couple of upcoming topics that I want to hit.
