For over a century Christian ethics has been deeply influenced by the social sciences and, in particular, by social theories of the kind developed by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, but it has not engaged in an analogous enterprise when it comes to the natural sciences. In this book I intend to explore the relevance of science, and specifically the information and insights of evolutionary theory, for Christian ethics.

The theory of evolution is now the primary explanatory context for understanding the origin of species. Scientists and writers in the last thirty years have produced a significant body of literature dealing with “evolutionary ethics” and the “evolution of morality,” but Christian ethics has for the most part ignored it. This inattentiveness takes place at a time when popular evolution-based writers represent the public face of science. The “sociobiology” proposed by Robert Trivers, E. O. Wilson, and Richard Dawkins attempts to provide the comprehensive explanation of social behavior in terms of evolutionary theory. The slightly less overtly political “evolutionary psychology” developed in the 1980s by Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Donald Symons, and popularized by Steven Pinker and Robert Wright, strives to explain the deepest roots of human behavior in evolutionary terms, primarily through an understanding of the functioning of “evolved psychological mechanisms.”

In this book I argue that, despite various difficulties, Christian ethics and evolutionary theories are in principle consonant with one another. Distinct vantage points do not have to compete with one another if interpreted properly.