Youth Ministry Initiative

All Citations

Author 
Source 
Subjects 
Year of Publication

1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 119:

Aquinas’s moral arguments emerge when he argues for the superiority of monogamy over polyandry and polygyny. He immediately rejects polyandry because it does not provide for paternal certainty: man naturally desires to know his offspring, and this knowledge would be completely destroyed if there were several males for one female.”64…If a father’s emotional and financial investment in the lives of his own children is experienced as a good, then polyandry, according to Aquinas and contemporary evolutionists, is not likely to bring it about. He rejects polygyny because it is simply an unjust institution for women. He writes: Besides, equality is a condition of friendship. Hence a woman may not have several husbands, because this removes the certainty of offspring; were it lawful for a man to have several wives, the friendship of a wife for her husband would not be freely bestowed, but servile as it were. And this argument is confirmed by experience; since where men have several wives, the wives are treated as servants.65

Notes:
  1. 64 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, chap. 124.
  2. 65 Summa Contra Gentiles, 3, p. 118.
Author 
Source 
Subjects 
Year of Publication

1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 118:

Procreation was for him the primary end of matrimony, but he recognized nonprocreative purposes as well. One of the purposes is mutual services which married persons render one another in household matters.”59 Here Aquinas reminds us of contemporary anthropologists who teach that husbands and wives, like the Aka pygmies referred to above, stay together partly because they help each other. This is what moral philosophers call the teleological dimension of marital love; love between a husband and wife increases the goods experienced by each member of the couple. We hold that this element of “doing good things” for the other is an important subordinate dimension of the ethics of equal regard and mutuality. But did Aquinas see a place for sexual exchange? He did, but not in a very positive way. Aquinas, as did Paul and Augustine before him, spoke of the need to pay the “marital debt.”60 Not all sexual exchange, for Aquinas, was for procreation. Some was done to avoid the lustful pursuits of nonmarital sex. To avoid this catastrophe, a spouse was to render sex to a partner who desired it.61 If pleasure was experienced in doing this, it was excused by the force of the marital blessing.62

Notes:
  1. 59 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 3, q.41, a.1.
  2. 60 1 Cor. 7:3-4; Augustine, “The Good of Marriage,” in The Fathers of the Church, ed. Roy J. Deferrari (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1955), 13,16.
  3. 61 Summa Theologica, 3, q.64.
  4. 62 Ibid., q.41, a.3
Author 
Source 
Subjects 
Year of Publication

1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) pages 116-118:

The human female, he insists, is far from sufficing alone for the rearing of children, since the needs of human life require many things that one person alone cannot provide.”46 For this reason, it is “in keeping with human nature that the man remain with the woman after coition, and not leave her at once, indulging in promiscuous intercourse.”47 It never dawned on Aquinas that in human pre-history, females did raise the children. This last quotation suggests, as William James and Mary Midgley have argued so cogently in the twentieth century, that human beings are creatures of multiple impulses that sometimes conflict.48 Aquinas recognized that under certain conditions, males have inclinations to form families and assist females in raising highly dependent infants. But they also have other inclinations toward promiscuity or something akin to what evolutionary ecologists call the R-strategy (procreation of a large number of offsring). In the Summa contra Gentiles, he writes that male animals desire “to indulge at will in the pleasure of copulation, even as in the pleasure of eating.” For this reason, they fight with one another for access to females and they “resist another’s intercourse with their consort.”49 Aquinas recognized the role that pateral certainty and recognition play in forming a lasting bond between a male, his consort, and their offspring: “Man naturally desires to be assured of his offspring: and this assurance would be altogether nullified in the case of promiscuous copulation. Therefore the union of one man with one woman comes from a natural instinct.”50 This is Aquinas’s rather wooden way of saying that males prefer not to unknowingly take responsibility for another male’s children. A system of monogamous bonding heightens a male’s certainty that a particular child is his and makes it more likely that he will care for his offspring and remain with the mother. Aquinas taught that fathers care for their children as a way of enhancing their own immortality, a concept similar to the theories of inclusive fitness and kin altruism. With a distinctively masculine bias typical of his day, he wrote, “Since the natural life which cannot be preserved in the person of an undying father is preserved, by a kind of succession, in the person of the son, it is naturally befitting that the son succeed in things belonging to the father.”51 Aquinas’s main source for this insight was Aristotle’s Politics.52 In one place Aristotle wrote, “In common with other animals and with plants, mankind have a natural desire to leave behind them an image of themselves.”53 These protoevolutionary theories of reproductive fitness and kin altruism led Aristotle to oppose Plato’s proposal in The Republic that civil harmony and true equality would be enhanced if a child were taken from its parents after birth and raised by the state. Parents, according to the proposal, were to be kept ignorant about which child was actually theirs. Plato argued that such an arrangement would lessen competition between families and clans, lead adults to treat all children as their own, and encourage children to relate to all grown-ups as their own parents.54 Aristotle believed that Plato’s proposal would lead to the general neglect of all children. He wrote, “That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.”55 For Aristotle, parental investment comes with parental recognition that a particular child is his or hers. He thought that in Plato’s state, “love will be watery…Of the two qualities which chiefly inspire regard and affection – that a thing is your own and that it is your only one – neither can exist in such a state at this.”56 In every animal species where the father has a certain care for his offspring, the one male has but one female, as may be seen in birds, where both unite in feeding their young. On the other hand where the male animal has not the care of the offspring, we find indifferently union of one male with several females, or of one female with several males: such is the case with dogs, hens and so forth.”57 There can, of course, be too much emphasis on the role of parental certainty for producing long-term commitment to children. Qualifications of this rule apply to most couples who adopt. Such couples are highly motivated to become parents – more so than most people. Hence, they often make excellent, highly invested parents. Furthermore, evolutionary theorists tell us that we become attracted to nonkin infants partly because they activate parental potentials which have been selected and retained over the course of evolution for their relevance to children.

Notes:
  1. 46 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 3, ii,p.112.
  2. 47 Ibid.
  3. 48 William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 2 (New York: Dover Publications, 1951), 383-441; Midgley, Beast and Man.
  4. 49 Summa Contra Gentiles, 3, ii, p.117.
  5. 50 Ibid., 118.
  6. 51 Ibid., 114.
  7. 52 Aristotle, Politics in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941).
  8. 53 Ibid., 1, i.
  9. 54 Plato, The Republic
  10. 55 Aristotle, Politics, 1, iii. 56 Ibid., iv. 57 SCG, 3, ii, p.118
Author 
Source 
Subjects 
Year of Publication

1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 115:

Aquinas’s argument about the family had three levels: naturalistic or psychoeconomic, ethical, and narrative-theological. Aquinas saw the family as a natural institution grounded in deep human inclinations. In order for these inclinations to become fully human, he thought, they had to be refined by will, culture, and divine revelation. At the naturalistic level, Aquinas discussed four conditions for family formation analogous to the ones found in evolutionary psychology, namely, infant dependency, paternal certainty, mutual assistance, and sexual exchange. In emphasizing these conditions, Aquinas made assumptions about humans’ natural preference for blood-related family ideas similar to the modern-day theory of kin altruism. Yet nature does not include thereto in the same way in all animals; since there are animals whose offspring are able to seek food immediately after birth, or are sufficiently fed by their mother; and in these there is no tie between male and female; whereas in those whose offspring needs the support of both parents, although for a short time, there is a certain tie, as may be seen in certain birds. In man, however, since the child needs the parents’ care for a long time, there is a very great tie between the male and the female, to which tie even the generic nature inclines.”44

Notes:
  1. 44 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 3, “Supplement,” trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948), q.41.1. We also want to express our thanks to Professor Stephen Pope of Boston College for his many excellent articles on the biological dimensions of Aquinas’s thought and its analogues to modern biological theory. See particularly his “The Order of Love and Recent Catholic Ethics,” Theological Studies 52 (1991): 255-88. Although his unpublished essay titled “Sociobiology and Family: Toward a Thomistic Assessment and Appropriation” came into our hands after this chapter was complete, it was encouraging to see how closely our interpretation of Aquinas was converging, since he is the leading Aquinas scholar on these matters.
Author 
Source 
Subjects 
Year of Publication

1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) pages 114-115:

Philosopher Paul Ricoeur developed a theory of symbolism that helps us understand Aquinas’s use of Christian symbols to address the male condition. In his magisterial Freud and Philosophy (1971), Ricoeur argues that, in order to interpret a symbol, one must understand the unconscious archeology (the unconscious motivation) that is brought to the symbol and, to a degree, transformed by the symbol. A religious symbol, he argues, contains a mixed language” with two levels: (1) a primitive archeology (based on an analysis of deep natural inclinations) and (2) a teleology or direction in which these inclinations are being transformed.42 In the symbolic reading of Aquinas that follows, we do not use Freud to interpret the archeology of the symbols we find. We use, evolutionary psychology’s theory of our unconscious desires. Symbols have to do with the transformation of instinctuality. This statement in itself assumes a nondeterministic view of human action. We are not determined by our desires. We are instead profoundly shaped by the symbolic universes that attract, help define, and then restructure our desires. Nonetheless, our desires do exist; however much they are shaped by the symbols through which we view them, the symbols themselves do not create our desires.

Notes:
  1. 42 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1971), 12-26.
Author 
Source 
Subjects 
Year of Publication

1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 113:

In addition to this claim, psychologist John Snarey’s four-generation study in How Fathers Care for the Next Generation (1933) shows how engaged fathers contribute to the cognitive, emotional, and physical maturation of their children.32 Snarey follows the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson in using the term generativity” to refer to the commitment to children that evolutionary psychology calls “parental investment.”33 Snary’s research showed that a father’s reading and playing with his children benefits daughters as much as sons, a point that McLanahan and Sandefur confirm.34 David Popenoe and David Bakan go even further in their claims: they believe that the addition of fathers to the primordial mother-infant family was a key to the rise of civilization among Homo sapiens. They also believe that the decline of this male generativity and paternal investment is one of the greatest threats to civilization.

Notes:
  1. 32 John Snarey, How Fathers Care for the Next Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), 149-91.
  2. 33 Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963). For a summary of Erikson’s concept of generativity and an extension of the concept into moral psychology and philosophy, see Don Browning, Generative Man (New York: Dell Publishing, 1993). 34. McLanahan and Sandefur, Growing Up, 19-38.
Author 
Source 
Subjects 
Year of Publication

1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) pages 111-112:

We must face these tendencies, not to conform to them but to appropriately build on and modify them. Through a variety of biocultural steps, this has happened to some extent in the course of human evolution. According to evolutionist Donald Symons, by the time hominids had left the forests and become hunter-gatherers in the open grasslands, males had for the most part put behind them the promiscuous pattern of inclusive fitness typical of their chimpanzee ancestors; they had become attached to a single female, formed a relatively egalitarian conjugal couple , and were helping to care for their children.22 Their primary contributions to their children and mate were protein and protection. However, studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers such as the Kung San of Northwestern Botswana in Africa suggest that these earliest fathers also cuddled, fed, played with, and taught skills to their children.23 Since the time of these earliest hunter-gatherers, human males have generally joined females and followed what evolutionary theorists call the K-strategy of inclusive fitness. The K-strategy invests a large set of resources into raising only a few children to adulthood. This contrasts with the R-strategy, which procreates a large number of offspring (as is the case with fish and tadpoles) and leaves it to luck as to how many will survive.24 The question is, how did this transition from what evolutionists call the cad” strategy to the “dad” strategy occur for the human male? How deeply grounded in male human nature is the “dad” strategy? Is the “cad” strategy lying just below the surface of the male ego, ready to manifest itself in contemporary social behavior? Evolutionary psychology argues that four factors worked together to bring the “dad” strategy into existence and lead human males to join the primordial mammalian mother-infant family. Today we may be undergoing a reversal or an undoing of some of these conditions. The first condition was the extreme vulnerability of human infants due to their long period of dependency in comparison with other mammalian newborns.25 Human infants, because of their enormous heads, must be born before they become too large to slide down the birth canal. They are born, therefore, virtually helpless. This puts enormous pressure on the hominid mother to feed and care for dependent children, often at the expense of her own needs. Yet for eons that is exactly what mammalian mothers did. Infant dependency, however, stimulated females to turn to their male consorts for assistance, protection, and food. At the same time they turned to males for assistance, females also developed strategies to actively resist manipulation by the male.26 Familes were formed, first of all, to help the infant and mother, even though this arrangement often functioned to oppress them as well. Second, according to Robert Trivers, conditions supporting “paternal certainty” began to emerge.27 Paternal certainty refers to the recognition by a male that an infant is his and not the offspring of another male. Mammalian females knew with certainty that the infants moving in their wombs were theirs; this was true until the advent of surrogate motherhood. But males could never be completely certain that they were indeed the father. Trivers and others have argued that human males became parentally invested when they acquired the capacity to infer that a child was biologically theirs. They developed a dim sense that their paternal investment in a child who was partially themselves contributed to their inclusive fitness.28 In those societies where paternal certainty was difficult to achieve because of female sexual freedom or male absence during war, the mother’s brother, who was genetically related to both child and mother, often became the surrogate father.29 Third, paternal investment, the theory continues, was part of a wider pattern of male helpfulness calculated to win one of the most sought after goods of life: the pleasures of sexual exchange. Males found sex an integrating experience, esteemed the person that gave them such delights, and were inclined to give up their promiscuous ways and R-strategy and develop regular relations with a single consort. Finally, evolutionary ecologists believe that males helped females for reasons beyond the desire for sexual pleasure. They also helped with infants in return for help from females in tasks primarily assigned to males.

Notes:
  1. 22 Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), 131-36.
  2. 23 Van den Berghe, Human Family Systems, 131-40; see also David Popenoe, Living without Father: Compelling New Evidence that Fatherhood and Marriage are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society (New York: Free Press, 1996), 139-90.
  3. 24 Daly and Wilson, Sex, Evolution, and Behavior, 124-29; Van de Berghe, Human Family Systems, 25-26.
  4. 25 Symons, Evolution of Human Sexuality, 31.
  5. 26 Female activity in resisting manipulation within the context of asymmetrical or “antagonistic” male-female reproductive patterns is a recent subject of investigation by feminist evolutionary psychologists. Address by Patricia Gowaty, Human Behavior and Evolution Society (June 26-30, 1996).
  6. 27 Barry Hewlett, ed., Father-Child Relations: Cultural and Biosocial Contexts (Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine De Gruyter, 1992); Robert Trivers, Social Evolution (Menlo Park, Calif.: Benjamin/Cummings Publishing, 1985), 203-38.
  7. 28 Trivers, “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection,” 139-41. 29 S. Gaulin and A. Schlegel, “Paternal Confidence and Paternal Investment: A Cross Cultural Text of a Sociobiological Hypothesis, “Ethology and Sociobiology 1:4 (December 1980): 301-09.
Author 
Source 
Subjects 
Year of Publication

1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 110:

The ecological description of the love of parents and extended family for children captures the meaning of the Greek concept of love as storge. If evolutionary ecology is correct, storge, or kin altruism, is a foundational element in all love.17 If the primary parental investment is not made in a person, that person does not develop the other forms of love. Now comes an important twist that throws light on the evolutionary origins of what we call the male and female problematics. The strategies of inclusive fitness and parental investment are quite different for males than for females of mammalian species. Females, because of their limited periods of childbearing capacity and the energy required to carry infants to birth, put their investment in relatively few offspring. The males of most mammalian species, however, follow a different strategy. They are inclined to mate with several females to produce as many offspring as their life span permits, a potentially limitless number.18 Males of almost all mammalian species make little or no paternal investment in their offspring. For the males of most species, inclusive fitness is enhanced by inseminating as many females as possible and letting the females raise the offspring. It is tempting to believe that none of these behavior tendencies applies to humans. But the evidence is against such self-congratulation. These asymmetrical patterns appear to explain some of the sexual behavior patterns of socialization, be they traditional, egalitarian, or feminist. David Buss’s The Evolution of Desire (1994) summarizes a vast new scientific literature documenting behavioral differences between males and females in sexual and reproductive matters.19 Buss’s work uncovers patterns based on the study of more than ten thousand people of all ages from thirty-seven cultures. These patterns parallel the antagonistic” reproductive strategies between males and females outlined above. Males seek more sexual variety; females are comparatively more cautious in their sexual selections, although under certain circumstances they too can be interested in variety.20 Males are aroused more easily, especially by visual stimuli; females require more intimacy and touching for arousal. Males are sexually attracted to females that are young and appear fertile; females tend to be attracted to males who have qualities relevant to fatherhood – men who command resources, are intelligent, and are stable.21

Notes:
  1. 17 Stephen Post, Spheres of Love: Toward a New Ethics of the Family (Dallas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1994), 63-66. For an explicit grounding of ethics in kin altruism, see James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993).
  2. 18 Van den Berghe, Human Family Systems, 20-21; Helen Fisher, Anatomy of Love (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992), 63.
  3. 19 David Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
  4. 20 The theory and evidence of evolutionary psychology indicates that women’s desire for sexual variety, on the whole, is more associated with maximizing material benefits for themselves or present or future offspring. Variation is less likely to be pursued as an end in itself, as it appears to be for most men. See Buss, Evolution of Desire, 86-91.
  5. 21 Ibid., 76-79.
Author 
Source 
Subjects 
Year of Publication

1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 109:

The theories of inclusive fitness and kin altruism have relevance for understanding the grounds of parental investment, or, if you prefer, parental commitment. Investment is the word used by evolutionary psychologists and has the advantage of fitting a wide range of species for which the term commitment seems too anthropocentric. Parental investment is a concept developed by biologists Ronald Fisher and Robert Trivers (1972). Trivers defines it as any investment by the parent in an individual offspring that increases the offspring’s chance of surviving…at the cost of the parent’s ability to invest in other offspring.”16 To say it simply, energy put into one child not only takes that energy away from a parent but limits that parent’s ability to nurture another possible child. In short, keeping offspring alive and thriving is a tremendous endeavor but at the same time one of the many expressions of eros or desire. Why do parents do it? They do it partly for themselves. This may seem inconsistent with Christian parental love. Indeed, in contrast to what evolutionary psychology imagines, Christians and Jews also care for their children because these children reflect the image of God.

Notes:
  1. 16 Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Sex, Evolution and Behavior (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1978), 56; Robert Trivers, “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection,” in Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man, ed. B. Campbell (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1972), 139.
Author 
Source 
Subjects 
Year of Publication

1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) pages 108-109:

Rough biological judgments – some powerful, some mistaken – were in the background of Aristotle’s thinking on the family.12 Aristotle, in turn, influenced early Christianity and both Thomas Aquinas’s and Luther’s theology of the family. In short, implicit biological assumptions, both mistaken and accurate, are part of the theological tradition – part of its view of human eros, desire, and striving. Evolutionary psychology’s central contribution to family theory is its theory of the asymmetrical reproductive patterns of male and female mammals. This theory accounts for the strikingly different ways males and females go about reproducing themselves. Three concepts explain how these asymmetrical patterns work and especially how human males came to care for their children in the course of evolution: the theories of inclusive fitness, kin altruism, and parental investment. Inclusive fitness is the key concept. It has replaced an older idea in evolutionary theory which held that natural selection works only on the individual. Early evolutionary theory taught that it was individuals – or more properly their genes – that successfully reproduced themselves (were naturally selected) when they stood up to the pressures of the environment. The theory of inclusive fitness alters this formulation. Since the monumental work of W.D. Hamilton in 1964, the individual – this basic unit of evolutionary change – is seen to be more complicated than was earlier thought. According to the theorgy of inclusive fitness, the individual includes the genes that he or she shares with close kin (50 percent with one’s siblings, parents, and children; 25 percent with nephews, nieces, and grandchildren; 12.5 percent with first cousins, and so on).13 Individuals, according to this perspective, do not fight just for their own survival; they also work for the survival and flourishing of the biological relatives who carry their genes. They do this because these genetically related individuals are literally extensions of themselves. Inclusive fitness is not just the fitness of the individual, it is the fitness of the extended family. This leads to the second basic concept – the theory of kin altruism or kin selection. Under some circumstances, individuals are willing to sacrifice their own inclusive fitness on behalf of a relative, and they tend to do this in proportion to the degree of relatedness of the relative. Since parents and their biological children share 50 percent of the same genes, people are more likely to sacrifice for a son or daughter than for a nephew or niece, although they will often do that as well. Biologically related siblings are more likely to sacrifice for one another than for a cousin, although that too can happen. Age has something to do with these calculations of sacrifice. Children, for instance, are less likely to sacrifice for their parents because their parents have little reproductive life before them.14 Evolutionary psychology tells us why both biological parents and members of the extended family are so important to a child’s well-being. It is kin who are most likely to contribute to the flourishing and defense of children. It is not just mother and father who are important to children but the whole crowd: grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, and so on. They all tend to be concerned, at least more than other people, about the children to whom they are related. This explains, even today, why the great bulk of childcare not done by parents is done by members of the extended family.15

Notes:
  1. 12 Aristotle, The History of Animals”, Book 9, chap. 1 and “On the Generation of Animals”, Book 1, chaps. 20-23, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941).
  2. 13 Pierre Van den Berghe, Human Family Systems (New York: Elsevier, 1979).
  3. 14; William D. Hamilton, “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior, II,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964): 17-52. 114 Hamilton, “Genetical Evolution,” 17.
  4. 15 James Levine and Edward Pitt, New Expectations: Community Strategies for Responsible Fatherhood (New York: Families and Work Institute, 1995), 20.
88 / 90