Genes, Determinism and God

In this magisterial elaboration of his St Andrews Gifford Lectures, Denis Alexander critically explores the implications of advances in developmental biology and genetics for the dichotomous debate between nature and nurture. With his background as a research scientist and a specialist in the science/religion interface - he is the founding director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion in Cambridge - Denis is ideally placed to cover this field and consider emerging understandings of the human person. After an initial highly informative historical background, he examines in detail how contemporary biology is changing our landscape of ideas in a series of chapters covering the main developments and their implications for understanding behaviour. The picture that emerges is one of complex integration that defies journalistic simplification in locating single genes as determinants of behaviour or opinion – a much more nuanced view is required, which he himself elaborates within his own theoretical framework. It is hard to isolate single factors from a complex integrated system.

Denis applies his thinking to the vexed question of free will, defining it as 'the ability to intentionally choose between courses of action in ways that make us responsible for what we do.' In a later chapter, he gives a very interesting example using Daniel Kahneman's System 2 - the deliberative system, applied to a complex issue involving a free vote in Parliament, where it is clear that each member would have the option to vote either way, depending on their own thinking and background. Towards the end, there are sophisticated chapters on the use of genetics in the legal system, as also applied to responsibility; then the hard philosophical issues of causality and freedom already referred to (from a viewpoint of non-reductive physicalism), and finally a chapter at the interface between theology and genetics, discussing the human person as the image of God. All in all, this is a remarkable and highly informative overview.