(Note: the blue horizontal menu bar directly above lists the subsections of "Evil, Ethics, and Human Values in an Evolving World." Beginning with "Selfish Behavior of Primates and Other Animals," be sure to read each of these subsections before moving on to the next primary section, "Original Sin in the Bible as Read Today.")

Judeo-Christian Ethics versus Darwinian Rules

While the evolution of our intelligence was producing more complex political, economic, military, and other communal expressions of selfishness, it also led naturally to the elaboration of diverse ethical systems. Ethical precepts gathered in collections of wise sayings are among the earliest known forms of human literature. From the Instruction of Ptah-hotep in the Egypt of 2450 BCE, to the writings of Confucius, Buddha, and the Greek philosophers of over two millennia later, the world of "pagan" antiquity enjoyed an abundance of edifying advice—not to mention codes of enforceable law, from Hammurabi to the empires of China, Rome, and elsewhere.

What was left for the revealed religions to contribute? This is not as obvious as one might think. The Ten Commandments and the Bible's wisdom literature contain little that is not already found in the ethics of other traditions. Lying, stealing, killing, offenses against filial piety and marital fidelity, neglecting the cult of the gods—all these are universally reviled. At the risk of oversimplifying, it seems that the God of the Hebrew scriptures sought to accomplish little more at the outset than weaning the Hebrew children away from polytheism, human sacrifice, and temple prostitution, while getting them to practice the elementary ethics that the civilized peoples around them already preached. Beyond that, the numerous precepts of the Jewish Law served mainly to demarcate the people of Israel from other cultures and to provide them with concrete ways in which to show their devotion to their God.

Of course, the Jewish tradition only began, not ended, with the Law of Moses. For centuries thereafter, prophets such as Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah strove to raise the moral standard above the merely legalistic and ritualistic, by developing the higher ideals that were implicit in the Law. But their success was mixed, and ritual and legalism remained central concerns.

Thus, over the ensuing centuries, the complexities of the Jewish Law occasioned much learned debate about the relative importance of what had become a host of distinct commandments. At length, a lawyer put the question to a rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth. His reply (Matthew 22:37-40) is a milestone in our ethical evolution. The greatest law, he said, is to love God (no surprise there); but the second-greatest is to love one's neighbor as oneself. Though not in itself original with Jesus (it is found in Leviticus 19:18, 33-34), that latter provision of the Law had until then been considered no more important than many others. Even though "neighbor" was usually construed narrowly in his culture to mean fellow countryman, for Jesus to give such prominence to this idea was downright novel from the Darwinian viewpoint. He placed the interests of others equal to one's own self-interest, and not just as sporadic generosity but as a consistent rule.

But then (as told in Luke 10:25-37) Jesus went on to drive home just how novel he meant it to be. The lawyer, ever alert for loopholes, pressed him further: "And who is my neighbor?" The reply was the parable of the Good Samaritan. Today we may fail to appreciate that this parable's title is an oxymoron—as much so as a "good Indian" would have been in the nineteenth-century American West, or a "good Palestinian" to many Israelis today. Samaritans were despised enemies of the Jews. What Jesus meant was: "Who is your neighbor? Your enemy is your neighbor. Even the one you despise most is your neighbor. It is his interest that you are to set equal to your own." Furthermore, throughout his teaching, Jesus made clear that this pertained especially to the despised poor: in short, to those who not only would not, but could not, repay.

Here was something new. Here was altruism stripped of the very possibility of reciprocity. Like many of his predecessors, Jesus approved the Golden Rule, but it would be a serious mistake to reduce his teaching to this principle alone. If the rule of reciprocal altruism really sums up the Law and the Prophets (Matthew 7:12), then the Law of Moses had made only a small advance beyond the law of the jungle. It is one thing to say (or imply, as in Leviticus 19:33-34), "Treat others as you would have them treat you," which implies at least the possibility of reciprocity. But it is subtly different for Jesus to say, "Treat your neighbor as you treat yourself." Of course, when your "neighbor" is your kinsman, this latter injunction involves no more than classic kin selection: genetically, to a certain degree, your neighbor is yourself. But with his parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus explicitly ruled out this sense of the word "neighbor." For him, "self" (on this concrete, biological level) is as different from neighbor as may be. And between you and your literal self, no question of reciprocity can arise.

Another significant aspect of Jesus' command is its clear premise that one should treat oneself well. Jesus and the Law of Moses both take it for granted that there is nothing tainted about proper esteem of oneself. Seen today from a Darwinian vantage point, this implies a reaffirmation of the basic goodness of human nature—indeed of the whole living creation—in which selfishness plays a central, creative role. Once noticed, this reaffirmation seems all the more striking for the offhand way it is slipped in: of course it is good and healthy and in accord with God's plan to love yourself! How could the world be otherwise? And yet, at the very moment in history when Jesus implicitly reaffirmed the goodness of the self-love that had gotten us to our present stage of evolution, he also explicitly called on us to leave behind that limited good in favor of something greater.

St. Paul, who wrestled at length (in Romans 5-8, Galatians 3-6, and elsewhere; cf. John 1:17) with the Mosaic Law's inability to offer salvation, was acutely conscious that Jesus had somehow changed radically the rules of the game: "if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old order has passed away; now all is new!" (2 Corinthians 5:17). And St. Paul knew where the change had been made: "The whole law has found its fulfillment in this one saying: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself'" (Galatians 5:14, emphasis added). Just how fundamental this change was, though, perhaps not even St. Paul could see as clearly as can a modern evolutionist. Jesus had plainly told his followers to do nothing less than defy the ancient law of natural selection (cf. Matthew 5:43-48; Luke 6:35; Luke 9:23-24; Luke 14:26; Mark 3:32-35; Matthew 10:34-39; Matthew 19:21-26).

Though a reward is promised to the generous in Luke 14:12-14, its spiritual nature—approval by God, though quite likely ingratitude, even persecution, from humans—is as far removed from Darwinian rewards as is possible to imagine. In fact, the latter rewards are to be consciously avoided! While evolutionary ethicists sometimes seek to explain altruism in terms of the value to the altruist of a good reputation, Jesus warned against even this subtle ploy (see Matthew 6:1-4). And just to underline the fact that this philosophy runs flatly contrary to the (Darwinian) way of the world, Jesus declares that he and his followers "do not belong to the world" (John 17:14).

In short, to follow Jesus is to obey his most basic command: "Reform your lives"—that is, change your whole way of thinking and acting and your whole approach to life (cf. Mark 1:15). It means rejecting much behavior that is genetically programmed as well as much that is culturally prescribed.

And Jesus did not stop at giving advice. He even modeled this new ethic in his own death, which he knowingly incurred by publicly shaming the powerful who neglected the needs of the powerless. He consciously and explicitly cast his death in the pattern of, and as a renewal of, the sacrifice that concluded the Covenant: the rapprochement or (re)conciliation between God and Israel (Matthew 26:28; cf. Exodus 24:4-8; Colossians 1:19-20). As he did, so are we to do (John 13:34). Thus the progression from "Treat others as you would have them treat you" to "Treat others as you treat yourself" to, finally, "Treat others as I treat you"—which is to say, with a totally disinterested altruism and the same lack of expectation of repayment that Jesus urged in Luke 14:12-14.

To disciples such as Paul, what was most astonishing in Jesus' self-sacrifice was his willingness to die for sinful humans (Romans 5:7-8). God/Christ—divine and in need of nothing—cannot be motivated even by the heavenly reward offered to us. His willingness to die in our service thus represents perfect altruism. This is incomprehensible to the "wisdom" of the world, because it is directly at odds with the Darwinian behavior manifested in the way of the world (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:18-20).

Just how original and unique was the total transcendence of self-interest in the life and teaching of Jesus? Perhaps it was only a small step from the limited, conditional altruism of previous ethical systems to the pure altruism of Jesus. Perhaps the idea of pure altruism can also be found in Buddhism or other faiths. That is a question for students of comparative religion. I think the relevant measure of this notion's "otherness" is that no matter where or how often this divine altruism has been revealed to us, even despite two millennia of "Christian" civilization it is still utterly foreign to our human nature (cf. John 8:23). The culture of Wall Street, the mentality of the downsizing corporation, the politics of indifference to the poor and minorities, the readiness to exploit those lacking the power to protect themselves—these are what come naturally to us. This is why the precepts of Jesus are so terribly challenging, and why the idea of God as a "suffering servant" is still so shocking.

From reciprocal altruism to pure altruism may be a small step in pure logic, but Darwin was right in sensing what an impossible leap it is in the concrete world of biology. Darwinian evolution was both necessary and sufficient to raise us to the jumping-off point for such a leap, by making us the conditionally altruistic creatures that we are; but it can carry us no further. The divine, universal altruism of Christ—even the very idea of it—is something that we, by our own power, can scarcely even approach asymptotically, never perfectly achieving it. As the farmer told the lost traveler in the old joke, it really seems in practice that "You can't get there from here."

Why, after all, would a God who was content to let evolution take its course for billions of years suddenly step in with something as meddlesome as a direct revelation of the divine will? Surely not for lack of patience! If we believe that such explicit revelation has occurred (especially in the person of Jesus), then we can only understand it as necessitated by our own constitutional inability ever to figure out that divine will on our own. "What? Put my own interests on the same level with those of somebody whom I don't need and who can't do anything for me in return? Nah, God would never expect me to do that. What ivory-tower philosopher dreamed that one up? It's not even possible. Show me someone who ever did that!"

Words highlighted in green appear in the Glossary.