On December 30, Richard Dawkins resigned from the honorary board of the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) after it retracted an article arguing that gender is based on biology. Steven Pinker, who also resigned, accused the foundation of “imposing” a “new religion” — trans ideology.
Debbie Hayton, in the U.K. Spectator, was quick to argue that Dawkins’s longstanding polemics against religion are not incidental to the world where trans ideology has become so plausible: “Maybe the key lesson from this sorry debacle is that it is not so easy to expunge the need for religion from human beings than atheists might like to think. If there is a God-shaped hole in us then without established religion, something else is likely to take its place.” (Hayton, curiously, is a man who identifies as a woman but is critical of transgender ideology.) Dawkins understandably bristled at this, a useful reminder that he considers himself a “cultural Christian” only in a highly qualified sense.
As Dawkins has admirably stated elsewhere, sex is biological. I am myself grateful for his clarity and courage on this point. It does not matter how sincerely someone believes that he is a woman trapped in the wrong body — every cell of that body indicates the opposite. One need not be a theist of any variety to understand and acknowledge that.
And yet, there is an issue here. The concepts of maleness and femaleness typically do a lot more than refer to biological differences. When we think of “man” and “woman,” we generally do not think purely in terms of chromosomes or genitalia. We think of social and cultural roles as well. The authority that Dawkins appears to grant to the body is itself not a matter of purely empirical analysis. The question of what the body is for is rather different from the question of what the body is. Or, to reframe the issue: Once one adopts an approach to the body that radically detaches the former question from the latter, Dawkins’s obvious truth-telling starts to look somewhat less convincing.
Gender roles relate to the teleological significance of biological sex. The question is: Are they intrinsic to it or socially constructed and mapped onto it by cultural forces?
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A significant part of the answer to that question has historically related to the possibilities offered by the technology available at any given time. For example, a thirteenth-century woman would have a hard time being a blacksmith, given the raw physical strength involved. And it has thus far proved impossible for men to bear children due to their lack of ovaries and wombs.
But advanced modern technology — technology rooted in rational, scientific principles just as much as anything Dawkins has ever pursued — presents a challenge to the body and its authority. Medicine is quite capable of taking bodies that had erstwhile terminal illnesses and making them healthy again. It can replace a limb lost in a workplace accident. It can save lives by transplanting vital organs that have failed. And, if science can do these things, it can also take a body that possesses mere average human strength and make it super strong, as with steroids. It could, in theory, add a third leg to a body born with two. And it aspires to enhance the power of the brain through fusion with computers.
Dawkins wants science — or that narrow strand of science that he favors — to be normative. But why should the body be granted such authority over the feelings or ambitions of the mind regarding sex and gender? It is here that Christianity has an answer that, if rejected by Dawkins, at least needs to be replaced with something else. Christianity’s answer is that the human body has an end, or a set of ends. Hence, one of the normative ends of the female body is gestation, a natural telos. Connected to this is the notion of the Image of God: Human beings, male and female, are made in God’s image, and one of the aspects of this is their creative capacity to produce further image bearers. Christian theology ties natural ends — for example, sexual intercourse and reproduction — to a supernatural end, such that this life is given shape and meaning because it prepares us for the next. The normative authority of biology is therefore grounded in something beyond itself: the notion of God as creator and human beings as his creatures, bearing his image.
Dawkins regards this as nonsense, which may well be the default position in the modern West. He is entitled to do so. But, as Hayton rightly observes, his own position comes with consequences, one of which is (perhaps ironically) a dramatic reduction in the importance of biology. In a technologically advanced world like ours, biology can easily be regarded as a problem or a challenge to be overcome. Wherein, then, lies the difference between male and female?
That’s when gender theory can re-emerge to press its case. Yes, we can agree that chromosomes exist. But the more important question is: What purpose do they serve? And why should we grant them decisive authority when we do not grant such authority to other things that also exist — cancers, viruses, even baldness — against which we do not hesitate to use technology? Why should we not treat the difference in biological makeup and functions between men and women as just another set of problems for technology to dispatch to the dustbin of history? Gender theory may seem far-fetched, but if the body has no intrinsic telos and evolution grants authority only to efficient causality, it is hard to understand why an evolutionary scientist would necessarily regard it as problematic.
The simple assertion that “biology is true” sidesteps the critical question of why we should grant biology, particularly that of certain aspects of the human body, such decisive significance in the first place. Christians have an answer. One can dismiss it as a ridiculous one, but one must then replace it with something that fulfills an analogous role.
Perhaps Hayton overstates the case for the connection between Dawkins’s anti-Christian stance and trans ideology. But commitment to a version of evolutionary theory that is predicated on efficient causality alone does not offer the robust response to trans ideology and gender theory that we need.
Originally published at First Things.
Carl R. Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is an esteemed church historian and previously served as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life at Princeton University. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including The Rise and Triumpth of the Modern Self, The Creedal Imperative, Luther on the Christian Life, and Histories and Fallacies.
