The world is what it is and we Christians, of all human beings, have to accept it and work with it. For example, against the various do-gooders including those who think themselves Christians, I believe the Body of Christ has to be built of the human material which is us, the material created by God through some evolutionary and developmental processes which can be ugly even when things go well and can be quite ugly when things go wrong. In the way of this world, some of those processes can seem pretty when things go very badly—Baudelaire was not entirely wrong in claiming to see a certain sort of beauty in some evil things and evil acts. A pretty face truly can hide an evil mind or heart.
I’m less concerned about evil in my writings, including this one, than I am about the need to make peace with empirical reality, the one created by God, and not to pursue dreams of a world designed according to our desires or ideals or dreams. If evil exists or threatens to come into existence, then we need to deal with it. (It’s not a problem of theodicy: I have no problem at all with the suggestion of Martin Buber, Jewish scholar, that God can create a world in which evil exists without at all affecting God’s all-goodness. Satan isn’t needed.)
So, what are we to make of a free-thinking paleoanthropologist who tells us Yes, Demons Do Exist? What does Frost mean by `demons’? We can find out in the first paragraph of his article:
Are we being manipulated by microbes? The idea is not so wacky. We know that a wide range of microscopic parasites have evolved the ability to manipulate their hosts, even to the point of making the host behave in strange ways. A well-known example is Toxoplasma gondii, a protozoan whose life cycle begins inside a cat. After being excreted in the cat’s feces, it is picked up by a mouse and enters the new host’s brain, where it neutralizes the fear response to the smell of cat urine. The mouse lets itself be eaten by a cat, and the protozoan returns to a cat’s gut—the only place where it can reproduce (Flegr, 2013). [Links for this and other references can be found in the original article.]
T. gondii can also infect us and alter our behavior. Infected individuals have longer reaction times, higher testosterone levels, and a greater risk of developing severe forms of schizophrenia (Flegr, 2013). But there is no reason to believe that T. gondii is the only such parasite we need to worry about. We study it in humans simply because we already know what it does in a non-human species.
Recently, there has been some joking, as well as serious commentary, on the Internet about a “dumb virus”. This isn’t a cognitively impaired microbe but rather one which can alter our intelligence levels. See this abstract, Chlorovirus ATCV-1 is part of the human oropharyngeal virome and is associated with changes in cognitive functions in humans and mice , where we can read:
Human mucosal surfaces contain a wide range of microorganisms. The biological effects of these organisms are largely unknown. Large-scale metagenomic sequencing is emerging as a method to identify novel microbes. Unexpectedly, we identified DNA sequences homologous to virus ATCV-1, an algal virus not previously known to infect humans, in oropharyngeal samples obtained from healthy adults. The presence of ATCV-1 was associated with a modest but measurable decrease in cognitive functioning. A relationship between ATCV-1 and cognitive functioning was confirmed in a mouse model, which also indicated that exposure to ATCV-1 resulted in changes in gene expression within the brain. Our study indicates that viruses in the environment not thought to infect humans can have biological effects.
Frost also talks about the sexually transmitted infection caused by the bacterium, Chlamydia trachomatis:
Chlamydia is a major cause of infertility, and this effect seems to be no accident. Its outer membrane contains a heat shock protein that induces cell death (apoptosis) in placenta cells that are vital for normal fetal development. The same protein exists in other bacteria but is located within the cytoplasm, where it can less easily affect the host’s tissues. Furthermore, via this protein, Chlamydia triggers an autoimmune response that can damage the fallopian tubes and induce abortion. This response is not triggered by the common bacterium Escherichia coli. Finally, Chlamydia selectively up-regulates the expression of this protein while down-regulating the expression of most other proteins. (Apari et al., 2014).
But how would infertility benefit Chlamydia and other sexually transmitted pathogens? Apari et al. (2011) argue that infertility causes the host and her partner to break up and seek new partners, thus multiplying the opportunities for the pathogen to spread to other hosts. A barren woman may pair up with a succession of partners in a desperate attempt to prove her fertility and, eventually, turn to prostitution as a means to support herself (Caldwell et al., 1989). This is not a minor phenomenon. STI-induced infertility has exceeded 40% in parts of sub-Saharan Africa (Apari et al., 2011).
As it turns out, pathogens might also be able to change human sexual habits and sexual orientation. After a couple of disturbing paragraphs—when understood in the context of human moral freedom, Frost tells us: “Both male and female homosexuality seem to have multiple causes, but it’s likely that various pathogens have exploited this means [changing sexual preference] of spreading to other hosts.”
In his conclusion, Frost writes:
This is a fun subject when it concerns silly mice or zombie ants. But now it concerns us. And that’s not so funny. Can microbes really develop such demonic abilities to change our private thoughts and feelings?
It surprised me a little when I read that conclusion and its concern for privacy and then I remembered yet again that I live in a world in which even our most fundamental understandings of Creation have been restated in terms compatible with a radical individualism—even when that restatement is so much at odds with Christian doctrines.
A Christian believes in a Trinitarian God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit in one God. Three Persons sharing one nature. Human beings are an image of this God. But how could that be? Certainly, a modern individualist, even if Christian, should recoil at the deep conflicts between such views and their belief in their own individual, private selves. Human beings, to modern liberals—including both collectivists and libertarians, are freestanding entities which engage in contractual, voluntary relationships. We exist as fully-formed human entities and then choose to form friendships and political or economic or cultural relationships. Even collectivists have no concept of communal being, only that of entities being connected in the way of cogs in a machine.
So goes the modern liberal worldview and the strange belief that privacy should, or even could, be of primary importance in a world in which entities penetrate each other or live inside each other in various ways, including the way in which human and non-human entities exist in our all-too human empathetic and sympathetic faculties.
Can freedom exist without privacy? To orthodox Christians, Father and Son and Holy Spirit can be free despite having no `privacy’. They share all thoughts, all feelings, all actions. Yet, each is God; each is free.
I’m not presenting arguments but rather conclusions forced by the basic assumptions of orthodox Christianity, Trinitarian Christianity true to its traditions and its historical descriptions.
To be sure, we aren’t God though maybe, by the mercy of the Almighty, destined to share in His life. In this world, we develop by processes which can be damaged without some significant amount of privacy. Loss of this privacy would lead to a failure of development of our individual human natures as improper social development, or genetic problems—including any introduced by microbes, would lead to a failure of our communal human natures. We need some significant amount of freedom for either individual or communal human natures to develop properly. I’m not upset about my privacy being violated by infectious agents and, in principle, I’m not even upset about my privacy being violated by my fellow Christians because the nature of the Body of Christ, if He is to share the life of God and to be as God, tells us we won’t have privacy in the modern sense if we are resurrected by God to share the life of Jesus Christ.
The implication that infectious agents can remove a significant amount of our moral freedom is more disturbing and will require some serious research and contemplation by Christian moral thinkers. Freedom is entangled with privacy in this mortal realm but is ultimately something quite different from privacy—if not, then we orthodox Christians are wrong either in our understanding of God as Triune or else wrong in our belief that we are, somehow, the image of God and we are part of one perfect Man—the Body of Christ.
I’m holding on to my belief in orthodox Christianity and am working to understand the world, as known to us through modern empirical sciences including all disciplined human studies.
So freedom remains a problem. How can we have any true freedom, even if limited, if a stray virus thought to have been adapted to infecting pond algae can make us dumber, if a bacterium can force some women to lead disordered lives by sterilizing them, if other microbes (discovered or only conjectured) can change us from heterosexuals to homosexuals or from bisexual women to obligatory lesbians? True it is that a `heroic’ effort can help us to remain within the boundaries of Christian moral teachings but calls to such efforts on the part of parents and clergymen and teachers have failed and such failures have motivated many Catholics and Baptists and others to join in the call for changes in what they were taught to be absolute and unchangeable truths. More fundamentally, we still need to understand why it is that some need to put forth a `heroic’ effort to behave as demanded by Christian tradition and, indeed, by any straightforward reading of the Bible. We still need to understand why it is that some will never feel as they are told they should feel, even with a `heroic’ effort.
Will we go to Hell because we caught a flu-like illness that has a side-effect of changing our sexual preference? A seemingly silly question but what’s truly silly is that Christian moral thinkers, and moral thinkers of other dispositions, have no way of answering this question outside of perhaps a blanket dismissal any sort of normality, a trivialization of sexuality and of any other particular aspect of human being. The previous statement covers those who advocate tolerance of homosexuality and other forms of sexual practice condemned by Christian teachings.
What does all of this mean? It means that Christian moral thinkers (including artists) and teachers are standing upon shifting sand which is almost washed out from beneath their feet. This is not to predetermine what the results would be of refounding Christian teachings of human nature, including sexuality, upon more solid ground. I’m strongly inclined to believe the old rules will be mostly reconfirmed but that is a matter beyond human certainty until we go through the process of examining our mountains of empirical knowledge of human nature and bravely, with faith in the Almighty, asking the appropriate questions—no matter how difficult or uncomfortable. When we know a little better what a human being is, we can better understand claims about what a human being should be. And we can better understand why there is a significant difference between `is’ and `should’ in many areas.
This doesn’t mean that Christian moral teachings are suddenly wrong; it means that explanations of those teachings not stated in terms of acknowledged reality are implausible and cast doubt upon the teachings, even those which seem to be clearly stated in the Bible. It means young people, and many not so young, who are trying to form or recover an understanding of the world or their own human being or the human being of their children will find tales of a special creation of human beings and a fall from grace at the same time Christians have been forced to acknowledge the truth of the evolution of human beings from creatures which were also the ancestors of chimpanzees. Yet, Christian moral teachings are founded upon the misunderstanding of the story of Adam and Eve: we have an identifiable pair of ancestors who were created in a state of grace and fell by way of a freely made decision.
Is it any wonder that young men and women raised as Christians often conclude that Christian leaders are just being mean to homosexuals or to men or women who married and then fell in love with someone not their spouse or grew bored with their spouse after their children grew up? Is it any wonder Christianity has lost so much credibility as a guide to human conduct?
Reality, the reality created by the God of Jesus Christ, is biting back and the leaders and teachers of Christianity can do no better than to back up claims that they are the teachers of the great truths with absurd discussions based upon superstitions which are the decay products of scientific knowledge and philosophical speculations which were once valid. A lot has changed in the human understanding of empirical reality, that is, of the provisional human understanding of the thoughts God manifested in His Creation.