I remain mystified why The New York Times continues to use Tanya Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford University, as a regular op-ed columnist. Although she may not be a believer, when she writes about religion she is devoted to explaining why faith is good or useful.  When she says anything else, it’s mundane.  But one thing she rarely does is to point out the dangers of faith.

There’s a small exception to this in her December 28 column, “When demons are real,” about African Pentecostal Christians’ belief in demons, but the bad stuff is outweighed by her explanation of why those beliefs are useful psychological tools.

Her subject is Ghana, the world’s most religious country (the Christian Science Monitor reports a poll showing that the percentage of nonbelievers is zero), with 70% of the inhabitants Christian and the rest of other faiths.  Luhrmann attended one of the many all-night “revivals”  in Accra, much of which involved excoriating demons, which those in attendance consider real. (Luhmann adds the frightening statistic that 57% of Americans also believe in demons.)

(By the way, if one included sub-Saharan African countries like Ghana in the worldwide positive correlation between religiosity and social dysfunctionality, the correlation would be even more striking, for sub-Saharan countries are both highly religious and highly dysfunctional.)

Luhrmann’s title should have been “When demons seem real,” but of course she doesn’t want to judge them as illusory. She is, after all, an anthropologist, and it’s presumably not kosher to pass judgment on such things. And besides, belief in demons serves a useful purpose (Luhrmann’s metier is always to point out the utility of faith).

J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, a professor at Trinity Theological Seminary in Legon, Ghana, argues that these churches have spread so rapidly because African traditional religion envisions a world dense with dark spirits from which people must protect themselves, and these new churches take this evil seriously in a way that many earlier missionizing Christianities did not. Indeed, I have been at a Christian service in Accra with thousands of people shouting: “The witches will die! They will die! Die! Die!” With the pastor roaring, “This is a war zone!”

Most of us know what this “demonizing” has resulted in: horrible killings, expulsion of children from homes, and so on, but Luhrmann barely mentions this. All she says is this:

But it is also true that an external agent gives you something — and often, someone — to identify as nonhuman. In West Africa, witches are people, and sometimes, other people kill them or drive them from their homes.

Yes, “sometimes” other people kill them or drive them from their homes. “Sometimes.” This is about as much of a downside as Lurhmann can muster (the other downsides of African Pentecostal Christianity include helping spread HIV and AIDS by urging the afflicted to go off their drugs, for God will cure them, and, in the past, encouraging the genocide in Rwanda).

Luhrmann goes on, helpfully, to tell us how demons can be useful even if we don’t believe that they’re real. The following lame discussion is unworthy of an undergraduate paper, much less a column by a professional anthropologist.

. . . One way to think about demons (if you happen not to believe in supernatural evil) is that they are a way of representing human hatred, rage and failure — the stuff we all set out to exorcize in our New Year’s resolutions. The anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, who grew up in Sri Lanka, got a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and, eventually, a job at Princeton, once remarked that all humans deal with demons. (He was quoting Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov” — “In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden.”) The only question, he said, was whether the demons were located in the mind, where Freud placed them, or in the world. It is possible that identifying your envy as external and alien makes it easier to quell.

Do Luhrmann or Obeyeskere really think that the presence of real demons in the world is a viable question?

Finally, after downplaying the hundreds of murders and child expulsions done under a false belief in demons, Luhrmann raises what she sees as the really serious problems of such belief:

In an April poll conducted by Public Policy Polling, over one in 10 Americans were confident that Barack Obama was the Antichrist — and the Antichrist is, as it happens, associated with war in the Middle East. If those people think that demons are real, they don’t mean that Obama is misguided, confused or mistaken. They mean that he is real, inhuman evil.

That is a terrifying thought.

If those people think that demons are real.  We don’t know that, but Luhrmann makes the assumption. But I seriously doubt that more than 10% of American think that Obama is “inhuman.” This is simply a lame segue between African demons and the President, a way to say something when you have nothing to say.

But at last we have an editorial comment by anthropologist Luhrmann! How terrifying it is that 10% of American think that Obama is the Antichrist! If the murder of large groups of Africans is as terrifying as Obama’s demonization, Luhrmann doesn’t tell us; she says onl that y “sometimes, other people kill them or drive them from their homes”

This is writing and thinking at its most mundane.  Luhrmann’s analysis is superficial and her writing wooden. There is nothing in her piece that makes you think, and that’s because she really has nothing to say.

Why on earth does the New York Times pay her to churn out stuff like this? And why, if she’s an objective anthropologist who does not judge the social phenomena she observes, why does she pronounce the demonization of Obama “terrifying” but says nothing about the genuine harm that comes to demonized Africans? Does her moral relativism begin only at the U.S. border?

The commenters on Lurhmann’s piece are in fact much savvier than she is. Many of them point out the connection between poverty and superstition; even more note that demon-belief is one of the great evils of modern religion.

Here are three such comments:

Busily engaged in apologetics, BioLogos has a new post on the never-ending kerfuffle about the meaning of Adam and Eve: “Why the church needs multiple theories of original sin.” It’s by Loren Haarsma, who has a doctorate in physics from Harvard and teaches it at Calvin College (he’s also the co-author, with his wife Deborah, of Origins: Christian Perspectives on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design).

The cynical—but correct—answer to the title question is: “Because science showed that there isn’t an Adam and Eve, so you have to make up stuff to save the meaning of Jesus.” And indeed, that’s precisely what theologians do, though of course they don’t admit it. Instead, they pretend that the scientific results showing that humans didn’t evolve from a single pair of ancestors simply means that we must reinterpret the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. But, as usual, theology cannot solve this problem, though Haarsma pretends that diligent theological study and proper interpretation of Scripture will yield an answer. It’s a prime example of how religious tenets are not only disproven by science, but, more important, how religion, unlike science, is powerless to find truth.

The facts first. Sheehan et al., building on an earlier paper by Li and Durbin (references below), calculated that the minimum population size associated with the worldwide expansion of humans out of Africa about 60,000 years ago was 2,250 individuals, while the population that remained in Africa was no smaller than about 10,000 individuals. For population geneticists, this is the “effective population size,” invariably smaller than the census size, so these are minimum estimates, and ones derived from conservative assumptions.  The population sizes are estimated by back-calculating (based on reasonable estimates of mutation rates and other parameters) how small an ancestral population could be and still give rise to the observed high level of genetic variation in our species.

Note: 2,500 is larger than two.

This means, of course, that Adam and Eve couldn’t have been the literal ancestors of all humanity. Normally, such a scientific trashing of scripture could be absorbed, at least by liberal theologians. They’d just reinterpret Adam and Eve as metaphors. But that causes big trouble on two counts. First, if there really were 2,500 or more ancestors, then all of them must have transgressed to bring original sin into the world. That is hard to fathom: did everyone do something bad at the same time?

Second, if Adam and Eve were metaphors, and the source of original sin is mysterious, then we have no idea why Jesus died. After all, his death and Resurrection occurred precisely to save us sinful humans from the transgressions of Adam and Eve. If you have to turn that story into a metaphor, then Jesus died for a metaphor. That’s not very palatable to Christians.

An easy and sensible way to solve this conundrum is to assume that the whole scenario is concocted: humans don’t have original sin; there was no Adam and Eve; and the Resurrection and divinity of Jesus were fictions. But Christians won’t have that, for the meaning of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection is the final, non-negotiable “truth” of Christianity. You can see everything else as metaphorical, but not that. For if you metaphorize Jesus, you’re basically abandoning Christianity.

But before Haarsma even gets to the science (whose truth he gracefully admits, because he has to), he discusses how the Church has historically dealt with the problem of atonement. The answer is that they’ve considered multiple theories and can’t settle on one. No answer is, or will be, forthcoming:

The church has developed multiple “theories of atonement” which seek to explain how Christ’s work solved the problem of sin. Not every proposed theory of atonement has been accepted; many were debated and rejected. But many competing theories remain—still studied, preached, and compared with each other centuries after they were proposed. This is because scripture itself uses numerous images for Christ’s work: victory over evil, ransom to free us from slavery, covenantal sacrifice, substitutionary bearing the penalty of sin, an example for us to imitate, and more. Indeed, how could a single human theory fully describe Christ’s work? By holding in tension multiple theories of atonement, each with its basis in scripture and each recognized as incomplete, we do more justice to the magnitude and the mystery of Christ’s atonement than any single theory could.

This is making a virtue of necessity.  Theologians recast “inability to decide among multiple explanation” into the words “hold multiple theories in tension.”  And then they pretend that this lack of resolution does “more justice to the magnitude and mystery of Christ’s atonement than any single theory could.” Can you imagine if scientists behaved this way? If they did, we’d say stuff like, “We have multiple theories of origins: evolution, creation ex nihilo, seeding of life from space, and so on, and we hold these theories in tension, knowing that this does more justice to the mystery of life than any single theory could.”

We don’t do that because science wants a correct answer, and is not satisfied with competing theories. But theologians are satisfied, because they have to be: unlike scientists, they have no way to decide among their competing explanations. And so they say, “They all could be right.” Let a hundred theories blossom.

Haarsma adds:

How did we find ourselves in need of such divine rescue? God created us. God is good. God loves us. So why aren’t we sinless? That’s the question of original sin.

But none of these theologians consider whether we actually do find ourselves in need of divine rescue, or why God is good and loves us. This is simply assuming that scripture is true.  In fact, many people are relatively sinless, leading decent lives.  Of course everyone lies on occasion, or commits small transgressions, but why can’t that just reflect our evolved and partly selfish nature? That is a good alternative explanation, and one that has some evidence behind it. It’s also one that theologians must ignore.

But on to Adam and Eve.  Haarsma describes three ways to reconcile the facts of science with “original sin” and our salvation through Jesus. I will put numbers in front of his alternatives to make this easier:

A variety of scenarios are being proposed by Christian scholars today for how we might understand the Adam and Eve of Genesis 2, and their disobedience in Genesis 3, in light of modern science.

1. Some scenarios propose Adam and Eve as two individuals living in Mesopotamia just a few thousand years ago, acting not as ancestors but as recent representatives of all humanity. As our representatives, their disobedience caused all of humanity to fall into sin.

2. Other scenarios propose Adam and Eve as two individuals, or as literary representations of a small group of ancient representative-ancestors, selected out of a larger population, living in Africa over 100,000 years ago at the dawn of humanity; they were ancestors—but not the sole ancestors—of all humans today; they fell into disobedience against God over a relatively short period of time with a fairly distinct “before” and “after.”

3. Other scenarios propose that Adam and Eve’s disobedience in Genesis 3 is a symbolic retelling of the story of every human who, over our long history, became aware of God’s claims on how they ought to live, and then disobeyed.

As noted by Haarsma, each of these has its own set of problems if you want to save the idea of original sin. The first raises the problem of how the transgressions of two people could infect the entire species. And what about those people outside the Middle East who were already on their own evolutionary path? How did original sin get to the Aztecs, Mayans, and East Asians?

The second scenario, which proposes that Adam and Eve could be “literary representations” (i.e., made up) of an entire group of ancestors, also fails to explain how that whole group became infected with original sin. (It’s easier to explain two people disobeying God’s orders than how 2,500 or more humans did so simultaneously.) And if Adam and Eve were real (i.e., not “literary”), then the chance that they would be genetic ancestors of us all is virtually nil. Did God then plan that, and, if so, what part of their DNA did we all inherit?

The final alternative, if you wish to save original sin, is the one employed by more sophisticated theologians like Peter Enns (reference below). Enns, formerly a biblical scholar at BioLogos, but presumably expelled from Paradise by his science-y transgressions, simply says that the whole scenario is metaphorical. Granted, in the Bible Paul sees Adam and Eve as the ancestors of all humanity, and the bearers of original sin, but, as Enns says in his book (p. 143):

“One can believe that Paul is correct theologically and historically about the problem of sin and death and the solution that God provides in Christ without also needing to believe that his assumptions about human origins are accurate. The need for a savior does not require a historical Adam.”

In other words, the Adam and Eve story is fictional. Enns, of course, does not solve the problem of sin and death, for nobody can. Any answer must be confected to give meaning to the fictional deeds and salvific potential of Jesus.  Since that stuff is non-negotiable, neither Enns nor other Christians are willing to abandon their faith for the more parsimonious hypothesis: to the extent that humans are “sinful” (i.e., behave selfishly and occasionally deceptively), that is the result of both our evolutionary past and the ability of our big, evolved brains to have a theory of mind and anticipate the results of our acts. There’s much evidence supporting this latter scenario: just look at the behavior of our primate relatives. But Jesus couldn’t have died to save us from our evolutionary heritage, for Christianity presumes that there was a time when humans were not “sinful.”

After metaphorically tearing out his hair over the explanation of original sin, Haarsma simply punts and says that having many theories is a good thing, and that, one fine day, we may know which one is right. All it will take is lots of hard work by theologians and a “proper”  understanding of scripture. And even if we can’t solve the problem, it’s still all to the good, for that will simply make us appreciate God all the more. (How is that supposed to work?). As he says,

If we do our job carefully, the church will be well served by the time spent working through the theological implications of these differing scenarios. If the problem of sin is so vast that it requires such an astonishing solution as the Atonement, perhaps we will also need multiple theories of original sin. Some theories of will be discarded as being inconsistent with God’s revelation in scripture. Those that remain should deepen our understanding and our appreciation of God’s grace and the immensity of the rescue God undertook through Jesus Christ.

Talk about turning necessities into virtues! The debate will never be settled, for theology has no tools to settle it. The game is given away when Haarsma mentions that “some theories will be discarded as being inconsistent with God’s revelation in Scripture.” But the whole problem is this: what, exactly, is God’s revelation in Scripture? It used to be a literal interpretation of Adam and Eve, and still would be had science not taken that off the table. But maybe original sin is metaphorical, too, and perhaps even Jesus is!  Indeed, maybe God isn’t loving and good, either. After all, he’s pretty much of a hateful bully in the Old Testament.

In the end, nobody can tell us what God’s revelation in Scripture is, though Biblical literalists are the best at doing it without looking like weasels.  The liberal theologians simply sit around and make up interpretations that comport with their more sophisticated a priori “interpretations” of the Bible. What a blessing that we scientists don’t have to act like that!

h/t: Michael

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Enns, P. 2012. The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins. Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI.

Li, H., and R. Durbin. 2011. Inference of human population history from individual whole-genome sequences. Nature 475:493-497.

Sheehan, S., K. Harris, and Y. S. Song. 2013. Estimating variable effective population sizes from multiple genomes: a sequentially Markov conditional sampling distribution approach. Genetics 194:647-62.