The fallout from being made

The problem began with Creation.

I was sitting there in the Symposium on Homosexuality and the Church getting a little restless as the speaker came on strong with the question, "What was God's intent in making Man, in making Woman?"

"What's the purpose of this polarity and complimentarity between a female body and a male body?"

Oh dear! What's with all this obsession with intent and purpose? Why must everything have a purpose? And who is he to tell us what that purpose is, such that if we do something with our willy, among other bodily parts, that is not the intended purpose as divined by him, we're supposed to feel fathomless guilt. Why can't things just be? For no purpose at all.

Then I realised why they can't. Yup, it all began with Creation.

The three religions of the Book, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, share a creation story. Some branches of these religions take it more literally, others less so. But whether literally or metaphorically, they have a fundamental belief that this world (meaning the universe) was created by their God. It was made. It was manufactured.

Other religions have altogether different explanations for how the world came about, if any explanation at all. If they have their version of a creation story, like the Hindus, it is generally a lot more complex and multistaged compared to the Biblical creation story.

Another characteristic of the belief system from the Biblical story is that there was design involved in the creation of the world. Design by an infinitely superior intelligence. Again, this is an unusual idea, not always found in other religions.

So Christians conceive of this world as a designed and manufactured one, not something that came together by sheer chance, let alone something that has inexplicably always existed. Once you see the world as designed and manufactured, you risk getting your mind into a rut, because it becomes all too easy to use convenient metaphors from the world of manufactured goods around us. After a while, no one stops to ask why such metaphors should be valid in the first place. That is why we have theologians who, pointing out that dryers are for drying, go on to decree that, likewise, this must be for this purpose and that must be for that purpose. And no one in the audience laughs.

One of the features about design and manufacture is that to make an object work, all the parts that are needed have to be put in, but no more. You wouldn't put in unnecessary parts. They risk spoiling the final product. Taking the logic in reverse, if the product is any good, every component you see when you examine it, has a specific role to play. And no component does anything else other than its intended role. Otherwise it would screw things up.

Even when you bake a cake, every ingredient you put in has a purpose. And you don't put in unwanted ingredients. When you write a novel, every word is chosen with care to add something, some quality, some narrative, to the story. This is the nature of designed and manufactured things.

Another feature to note is that the product as a whole has a functional goal; it is meant to do something. A cake is meant to be eaten. A novel is meant to be read and enjoyed. A dryer dries.

You see where I am leading to? By conceiving of this world as designed and manufactured, we often -- inadvertently -- load in the features that come with other designed and manufactured goods. The designer must have intent. The world must have a purpose. Each component we discover within it must have a role to play, an intended function. Theologians set out to search for these intentions and purposes. What they decide to be the intent and purpose, they call it intended nature: this object here is supposed to behave like that -- it is its intended nature. If it doesn't do that, then the object is behaving "unnaturally". In the wild, some male chimpanzees mount other males. It occurs in nature. But since that is not the intent of the sex drive God gave to the chimpanzees, all this that we observe in nature, is unnatural. That which exists in nature is not necessarily natural. No, no, no. What the theologians pronounce to be natural, ah, indeed, that is natural.

From here, it is a short hop to human sex. A lot of time and effort has been spent figuring out the intent behind the creation of our bodies and our capacity for sexual pleasure. The thunderous verdict from most Christian churches is that the male body is intended for coupling with one female body in a lifetime, and vice versa, and the whole purpose of this coupling is to produce babies. Anything else is unnatural. To support this belief, they produce 'evidence' in terms of the shape of the male anatomy and female anatomy, the ability to feel pleasure in sex, the capacity to love each other completely, the 'natural' interest men show in svelte women and women in well-built men, and so on. The opposite-sex marital bond, because it can produce babies, is elevated to nearly sacrosanct. Anything else is 'unnatural'.

Unfortunately, human reality does not fit this model too well.

Opposite-sex couples do not always produce children. Some can't, some won't. Some singles produce children non-stop, but won't tie themselves to any spouse.

Then there are same-sex couples. Again some can't have children, some just won't. But, some do and they go about raising and loving them.

But most striirking of all about human behaviour -- in the real world -- is how much sex humans have, just for the pleasure of it, without any intention of producing babies. In fact, they often take precautions to ensure that pregnancy doesn't result.

Amidst this diversity of human experience, the Churches try to cajole or compel people into the straight and narrow. Despite people's happiness in their (nature-)natural state, they are expected to renounce it all and pigeonhole themselves into the (as-intended-by-God-)natural state. Common sense tells you there is something absurd about it. It would be high farce if not for the enormous misery inflicted by such thinking, the result of being misled by the paradigm of a designed and manufactured world: that there is intent behind everything and a purpose for everything. If things do not fit the 'intent' or 'purpose' as pronounced by the worthies, those things just cannot be. Renounce! Repent!

Fortunately, many Christians can think for themselves. They bring their critical faculties to bear on what they hear from their church officials. As one of them said, they remain Christians "despite the Church".

Now let's try some thinking from two other angles.

You could subscribe to the idea that God created the world. You could subscribe to the idea that there is intent and purpose, but you don't have to swallow wholesale the intents and purposes as expounded by some theologians. They are human, they can be wrong. You could take the view that God's intent is at a level that is not simple to grasp. It would be foolish and overly proud of ourselves to think God's plan is so easily knowable to us. We cannot take an overly mechanistic view of the world. Just because "the parts don't fit" does not mean that God did not intend so. A significant minority of people are created homosexual or bisexual in inclination. Many of them find their greatest love with others of the same sex. It is too lazy intellectually to simply condemn these persons, their disposition and their behaviour which follows naturally from their disposition, as not part of God's plan. For they too were made by God.

Another approach -- though I'm not sure if you could still remain a Christian if you took this approach -- would be to say that perhaps there is no intent behind the world. Nothing in this world has any specific purpose. Things just are. The components interact and evolve. Plants grow or die in response to light and nutrients. Volcanoes erupt, spew lava and kill thousands, not because of some cosmic plan, but because magma welled up, which in turn was due to the continental plates shifting a few centimetres. Male nipples serve no purpose, they're just left over from evolution, but nerve endings still terminate there, and gay men, taking advantage of this, play with them while having one night stands. Jennifer falls in love with Siew May because by chance they met and found each other right, but also partly because they're tired of looking, tired of the 'scene'.

Perhaps the world is not clockwork, designed and made by a supreme clock-maker, with every tiny part playing a singular assigned role. Perhaps the world is more wondrous than that, with every quark linked to everything else, past, present and future, yet with all possibilities open to thought, discovery, experience and hope.

© Yawning Bread 

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