Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man?
—Friedrich Nietzsche1
I was born in Den Bosch, the Dutch city after which Hieronymus Bosch named himself.2 This doesn’t make me an expert on the painter, but having grown up with his statue on the market square, I have always been fond of his surrealist imagery, his symbolism, and how it relates to humanity’s place in the universe under a waning influence of God.
His famous triptych in which naked figures frolic around, The Garden of Earthly Delights, is a tribute to paradisiacal innocence. The middle tableau is far too happy and relaxed to fit the interpretation of depravity and sin advanced by puritan experts. It shows humanity free from guilt and shame either before the Fall or without any Fall at all. For a primatologist like myself, the nudity, the allusions to sex and fertility, the plentiful birds and fruits, and the moving about in groups are thoroughly familiar, and hardly in need of a religious or moral interpretation. Bosch seems to have depicted us in our natural state, while reserving his moralistic outlook for the right-hand panel, in which he punishes not the frolickers from the middle panel but monks, nuns, gluttons, gamblers, warriors, and drunkards. Bosch was no fan of the clergy and their avarice, which explains a small detail in which a man resists signing his fortune away to a pig veiled like a Dominican nun. The poor figure is said to be the painter himself.
Five centuries later, we remain embroiled in debates about the place of religion in society. As in Bosch’s day, the central theme is morality. Can we envision a world without God? Would this world be good? Don’t think for one moment that the current battle lines between fundamentalist Christianity and science are determined by evidence. One has to be pretty immune to data to doubt evolution, which is why books and documentaries aimed at convincing the skeptics are a waste of effort. They are helpful for those prepared to listen, but fail to reach their target audience. The debate is less about the truth than about how to handle it. For those who believe that morality comes straight from God the creator, acceptance of evolution would open a moral abyss. Listen to the Reverend Al Sharpton debating the late atheist firebrand Christopher Hitchens: “If there is no order to the universe, and therefore some being, some force that ordered it, then who determines what is right or wrong? There is nothing immoral if there’s nothing in charge.”3 Similarly, I have heard people echo Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, exclaiming, “If there is no God, I am free to rape my neighbor!”
Perhaps it’s just me, but I am wary of any persons whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior. Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for a livable society, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal? Humans must have worried about the functioning of their communities well before current religions arose, which occurred only a couple of millennia ago. Biologists are unimpressed by that kind of timescale.
In the lower right-hand corner of The Garden, Bosch depicted himself resisting a pig dressed like a nun, who tries to seduce him with kisses. She is offering salvation in return for his estate (hence the pen, ink, and official-looking paper). The Garden was painted around 1504, about a decade before Martin Luther galvanized protest against such church practices.
The Dalai Lama’s Turtle
The above introduced a blog entitled Morals without God? on the New York Times’ website, in which I argued that morality antedates religion and that much can be learned about its origin by considering our fellow primates.4 Contrary to the customary blood-soaked view of nature, animals are not devoid of tendencies that we morally approve of, which to me suggests that morality is not as much of a human innovation as we like to think.
This being the topic of the present book, let me lay out its themes by describing the week that followed my blog’s publication, including a trip to Europe. Right before this, however, I attended a meeting between science and religion at Emory University, in Atlanta, where I work. The occasion was a forum with the Dalai Lama on his favorite theme: compassion. Being compassionate seems to me an excellent recommendation for life; hence I welcomed the message of our honorable guest. As the first discussant, I was seated next to him surrounded by a sea of red and yellow chrysanthemums. I had been instructed to address him as “your holiness,” but to speak of him to others as “his holiness,” which I found sufficiently confusing that I avoided all forms of address. One of the most admired men on the planet dropped his shoes and folded his legs under him in his chair, put on a huge baseball cap color-matched to his orange robe, while an audience of over three thousand people hung on his every word. Before my presentation, I had been appropriately deflated by the organizers’ reminding me that no one had come to hear me speak, and that all those people were there only for his pearls of wisdom.
In my remarks, I reviewed the latest evidence for animal altruism. For example, apes will voluntarily open a door to offer a companion access to food, even if they lose part of it in the process. And capuchin monkeys are prepared to seek rewards for others, as we see when we place two of them side by side, while one of them barters with us with differently colored tokens. One token rewards only the monkey itself, whereas the other rewards both monkeys. Soon, the monkeys prefer the “prosocial” token. This is not out of fear, because dominant monkeys (who have least to fear) are in fact the most generous.
Good deeds also occur spontaneously. An old female, Peony, spends her days outdoors with other chimpanzees at the Yerkes Primate Center’s field station. On bad days, when her arthritis is flaring up, she has trouble walking and climbing, but other females help her out. Peony may be huffing and puffing to get up into the climbing frame in which several apes have gathered for a grooming session. But an unrelated younger female moves behind her, placing both hands on her ample behind to push her up with quite a bit of effort, until Peony has joined the rest.
We have also seen Peony get up and slowly move toward the water spigot, which is at quite a distance. Younger females sometimes run ahead of her, take in some water, then return to Peony and give it to her. At first, we had no idea what was going on, since all we saw was one female placing her mouth close to Peony’s, but after a while the pattern became clear: Peony would open her mouth wide, and the younger female would spit a jet of water into it.
Such observations fit the emerging field of animal empathy, which deals not only with primates but also with canines, elephants, and even rodents. A typical example is how chimpanzees console distressed parties, hugging and kissing them, which is so predictable that we have documented literally thousands of cases. Mammals are sensitive to each other’s emotions and react to those in need. The whole reason people fill their homes with furry carnivores, and not with, say, iguanas and turtles, is that mammals offer something no reptile ever will. They give affection, they want affection, and they respond to our emotions the way we do to theirs.
Up to this point, the Dalai Lama had listened attentively, but now he lifted his cap to interrupt me. He wanted to hear more about turtles. These animals are a favorite of his, because they supposedly carry the world on their backs. The Buddhist leader wondered whether turtles, too, know empathy. He described how the female sea turtle crawls onto land to look for the best spot to lay her eggs, thus showing concern for future young. How would the mother behave if she ever encountered her offspring? the Dalai Lama wondered. To me, the process suggests that turtles have been preprogrammed to seek out the best environment for incubation. The turtle digs a hole in the sand above the tide line, deposits her eggs and covers them, packing the sand tight with her rear flippers, and then leaves the nest behind. The hatchlings emerge a few months later to rush to the ocean under the moonlight. They never get to know their mother.
Empathy requires awareness of the other and sensitivity to the other’s needs. It probably started with parental care, like that found in the mammals, but there is also evidence for bird empathy. I once visited the Konrad Lorenz Research Station, in Grünau, Austria, which keeps ravens in large aviaries. These are impressive birds, especially when they sit on your shoulder with their powerful black beak right next to your face! It brought back memories of the tame jackdaws I had kept as a student: much smaller birds from the same corvid (crow) family. In Grünau, scientists follow spontaneous fights among the ravens and have seen bystanders respond to distress. Losers can count on some cozy preening or beak-to-beak nudging from their friends. At the same station, free-ranging descendants of Lorenz’s flock of geese have been equipped with transmitters to measure their heart rate. Since every adult goose has a mate, that offers a window on empathy. If one bird confronts another in a fight, its partner’s heart starts racing. Even if the partner is in no way involved, its heart betrays concern about the quarrel. Birds, too, feel each other’s pain.
If both birds and mammals have some measure of empathy, that capacity probably goes back to their reptilian ancestors. Not just any reptiles, though, because most lack parental care. One of the surest signs of a caring attitude, according to Paul MacLean, the American neuroscientist who named the limbic system the seat of the emotions, is the “lost call” of young animals. Young monkeys do it all the time: left behind by mom, they call until she returns. They look miserable, sitting all alone on a tree limb, giving a long string of plaintive “coo” calls with pouted lips directed at no one in particular. MacLean noted the absence of the “lost call” in most reptiles, such as snakes, lizards, and turtles.
In a few reptiles, however, the young do call when upset or in danger, so that mom will take care of them. Have you ever held a baby alligator? Be careful, because they have a good set of teeth, but they also utter throaty barks when upset, which may bring the cow (mother) flying out of the water. That will teach you to doubt reptilian feelings!
I mentioned this to the Dalai Lama, saying that we expect empathy only in animals with attachments, and that few reptiles qualify. I am not sure this satisfied him, because of course he wanted to know about turtles, which look so much cuter than those ferocious toothy monsters of the Crocodilian family. Appearances are deceptive, though. Some members of this family gently transport their young in their big jaws or on their backs and defend them against danger. They sometimes even let them snatch pieces of meat from their mouth. The dinosaurs, too, cared for their young, and plesiosaurs—giant marine reptiles—may even have been viviparous, giving birth to a single live offspring in the water, as whales do today. From everything we know, the smaller the number of offspring an animal produces, the better it will take care of them, which is why plesiosaurs are thought to have been doting parents. So, by the way, are birds, which science regards as feathered dinosaurs.
Pressing me even further, the Dalai Lama jumped to butterflies and asked about their empathy, upon which I couldn’t resist joking, “They don’t have time, they live just one day!” The short life of butterflies is actually a myth, but whatever these insects feel about each other, I doubt it has much to do with empathy. This is not to minimize the larger thrust behind the Dalai Lama’s question, which was that all animals do what is best for themselves and their offspring. In this sense, all life is caring, perhaps not consciously caring, but caring nonetheless. He was getting at the idea that compassion goes to the root of what life is all about.
Few reptiles have parental care, but the crocodile family does. A female alligator safely transports one of her young.
Greeting Mama
After this, the forum moved on to other topics, such as how to measure compassion in the brains of Buddhist monks who have meditated on it all their lives. Richard Davidson from the University of Wisconsin related how monks straight from Tibet balked at his invitation to submit to neuroscience since, clearly, compassion didn’t take place in the brain but in the heart! Everyone felt this was hilarious, and the monks in the audience shrieked with laughter. But the monks had a point. Davidson subsequently discovered the connection between mind and heart: compassion meditation brings about a quicker heart rate upon hearing sounds of human suffering.
I had to think of the geese. But I also sat there wondering at this auspicious meeting of minds. In 2005, the Dalai Lama himself had spoken about the need to integrate science and religion, telling thousands of scientists at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, in Washington, how much trouble society has in keeping up with their groundbreaking research: “It is all too evident that our moral thinking simply has not been able to keep pace with such rapid progress in our acquisition of knowledge and power.”5 What a refreshing departure from attempts to drive a wedge between religion and science!
This topic was on my mind as I prepared for Europe. I had barely received a blessing and a khata (a long white silk scarf) around my neck, and seen the Dalai Lama off in his limousine with heavily armed guards, and I was on my way to Ghent, a beautiful old city in the Flemish part of Belgium. This region is culturally closer to the southern part of the Netherlands, where I am from, than the part to the north that we call Holland. All of us speak the same language, but Holland is Calvinist, whereas the southern provinces were kept Catholic in the sixteenth century by the Spanish, who brought us the Duke of Alva and the Inquisition. Not the silly “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” of Monty Python, but one that would put actual thumbscrews on you if you so much as doubted Mary’s virginity. Not allowed to draw blood, the inquisitors loved the strappado, or reverse hanging, in which a victim is hung by wrists tied behind his back and a weight is attached to his ankles. This treatment is sufficiently debilitating that one soon abandons any preconceived notions about the link between sex and conception. Lately, the Vatican has been on a campaign to soften the Inquisition’s image—they did not kill every heretic, they followed Standard Operating Procedures—but the Jesuits in charge surely could have used some compassion training.
This ancient history also explains, by the way, why one will look in vain for Bosch paintings in the lowlands. Most hang in the Prado, in Madrid. It is thought that the Iron Duke obtained The Garden when, in 1568, he declared the Prince of Orange an outlaw and confiscated all of his properties. The duke then left the masterpiece to his son, from whom it went to the Spanish state. The Spanish adore the painter they call El Bosco, whose imagery inspired Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí. On my first visit to the Prado, I could not really enjoy Bosch’s work, since all I could think was “Colonial plunder!” To its credit, the museum has now digitized the popular painting at an incredibly high resolution so that everyone can “own” it through Google Earth.
After my lecture in Ghent, fellow scientists took me on an impromptu visit to the world’s oldest zoo collection of bonobos, which started at Antwerp Zoo and is now located in the animal park of Planckendael. Given that bonobos are native to a former Belgian colony, their presence in Planckendael is hardly surprising. Bringing specimens from Africa, dead or alive, was another kind of colonial plunder, but without it we might never have learned of this rare ape. The discovery took place in 1929, in a museum not far from here, when a German anatomist dusted off a small round skull labeled as that of a young chimp, which he recognized as an adult with an unusually small head. He quickly announced a new subspecies. Soon his claim was overshadowed, however, by the even more momentous pronouncement by an American anatomist that we had an entirely new species on our hands, one with a strikingly humanlike anatomy. Bonobos are more gracefully built and have longer legs than any other ape. The species was put in the same genus, Pan, as the chimpanzee. For the rest of their long lives, both scientists illustrated the power of academic rivalry by never agreeing on who had made this historic discovery. I was in the room when the American stood up in the midst of a symposium on bonobos to declare, in a voice quavering with indignation, that he had been “scooped” half a century before.
The German scientist had written in German and the American in English, so guess whose story is most widely cited? Many languages feel the pinch of the rise of English, but I was happily chatting in Dutch, which despite decades abroad still crosses my lips a fraction of a second faster than any other language. While a young bonobo swung on a rope in and out of view, getting our attention by hitting the glass each time he passed, we commented on how much his facial expression resembled human laughter. He was having fun, especially if we jumped back from the window, acting scared. We now find it impossible to imagine that the two Pan species were once mixed up. There is a famous photograph of the American expert Robert Yerkes, with two young apes on his lap, both of whom he considered chimps. This was before the bonobo was known. Yerkes did remark how one of those two apes was far more sensitive and empathic than any other he knew, and perhaps also smarter. Calling him an “anthropoid genius,” he wrote his book Almost Human largely about this “chimpanzee,” not knowing that he was in fact dealing with one of the first live bonobos to have reached the West.
The Planckendael colony shows the difference with chimpanzees right away, because it is led by a female. The biologist Jeroen Stevens told me how the atmosphere in the group had turned more relaxed since their longtime alpha female, who had been a real iron lady, had been sent off to another zoo. She had terrified most other bonobos, especially the males. The new alpha has a nicer character. The exchange of females between zoos is a new and commendable trend that fits the natural bonobo pattern. In the wild, sons stay with their mothers through adulthood, whereas daughters migrate to other places. For years, zoos had been moving males around, thus causing disaster upon disaster, because male bonobos get hammered in the absence of their mom. Those poor males often ended up in isolation in an off-display area of zoos in order to protect their lives. A lot of problems are being avoided by keeping males with their mothers and respecting their bond.
During human evolution, bipedal locomotion demanded longer legs. Of all the apes, the arm-to-leg ratio of bonobos most resembles that of our ancestor Ardipithecus (drawing not to scale: modern humans are taller than the rest).
This goes to show that bonobos are no angels of peace. But it also indicates how much the males are “mama’s boys,” something not everyone approves of. Some men feel affronted by matriarchal apes with “wimpy” males. After a lecture in Germany, a famous old professor in my audience barked, “Was ist vrong with those males?!” It is the fate of the bonobo to have burst on the scientific scene at a time when anthropologists and biologists were busy emphasizing violence and warfare, hence scarcely interested in peaceful primate kin. Since no one knew what to do with them, bonobos quickly became the black sheep of the human evolutionary literature. An American anthropologist went so far as to recommend that we simply ignore them, given that they are close to extinction anyway.6
Holding a species’ imminent demise against it is extraordinary. Is something the matter with bonobos? Are they ill adapted? Extinction says nothing about initial adaptiveness, though. The dodo was doing fine until sailors landed on Mauritius and found these flightless birds an easy (if repugnant) meal. Similarly, all of our ancestors must have been well adapted at some point, even though none of them is around anymore. Should we stop paying attention to them? But we never stop. The media go crazy each time a minuscule trace of our past is discovered, a reaction encouraged by personalized fossils with names like Lucy and Ardi.
I welcome bonobos precisely because the contrast with chimpanzees enriches our view of human evolution. They show that our lineage is marked not just by male dominance and xenophobia but also by a love of harmony and sensitivity to others. Since evolution occurs through both the male and the female lineage, there is no reason to measure human progress purely by how many battles our men have won against other hominins.7 Attention to the female side of the story would not hurt, nor would attention to sex. For all we know, we did not conquer other groups, but bred them out of existence through love rather than war. Modern humans carry Neanderthal DNA, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we carry other hominin genes as well. Viewed in this light, the bonobo way doesn’t seem so alien.
Leaving those gentle apes behind, I next stopped at the Arnhem Zoo, in the Netherlands, where I began my career with the other Pan species. The German professor would love chimpanzees, since males rule supremely and are constantly vying for position, so much so that I wrote an entire book, Chimpanzee Politics, on their schmoozing and scheming. As a student, I began to read Niccolò Machiavelli to gain insights that biology textbooks couldn’t offer me. One of the central male characters of that tumultuous period, now four decades in the past, was murdered while I was still there, an event that continues to haunt me, not least because of the gruesome removal of his testicles by the attackers. The other male characters have all died over the years, but the colony still includes their adult sons, who not only look unnervingly like their fathers but also sound like them when they hoot or scream. Chimps have distinctive voices: I used to be able to tell all twenty-five of them apart by their calls alone. I feel very much at home with these primates and consider them absolutely fascinating, but I never have any illusions about how “nice” they are, even if they look like it to most people. They take their power games very seriously and are ready to kill their rivals. That they sometimes kill humans, or bite off their face, as has happened with pet chimps in the United States, is what you can expect if you keep a wild animal in a situation in which sexual jealousy and its dominance drive risk being aroused by our own feeble species. A single adult male chimpanzee has such muscle power (not to mention his daggerlike canine teeth and four “hands”) that even a team of five hefty men would never be able to hold him down. Chimps raised around people know this all too well.
The females I knew in Arnhem are still around, however, especially the impressive matriarch of the colony, named Mama. She was never like a bonobo matriarch, who rules the place, but has been alpha among the females for as long as I remember. In her heyday, Mama was an active player in male power struggles. She would rally female support for one male or another, who would be in her debt if he managed to get to the top. This male would do well to stay on her good side, because if Mama turned against him, his career might be over. Mama went so far as to punish females who dared side with males she did not approve of, acting like a party whip. Chimpanzee males physically dominate females, but it is not as if females know nothing about politics or stay out of it. Females in wild communities often do, but on the island in Arnhem this isn’t an option. The result is a reduced power gap between the sexes. Since all females are present all the time, actively supporting each other, it is impossible for any male to get around the female power block.
I have always been close to Mama, who greets me with a mixture of respect and affection each time she sees me. She did so already all those years ago, and still does so each time she detects my face in a crowd of visitors. I have been to the zoo every couple of years, and sometimes engage in a bit of friendly grooming with her, but this time I arrived with almost one hundred people in tow, attendees of a symposium at the zoo’s convention center. As we walked up to the chimp island, both Mama and another old female, Jimmy, hurried forward to greet me: they gave a series of low grunts, and Mama stretched out a hand to me from a distance. Females typically use this “come here” gesture when they are about to move and want their offspring to jump on their back. I made the same gesture back at her and later helped the caretaker feed the chimpanzees by throwing fruit across the water moat, making sure that Mama, who walks slowly and isn’t as skilled as the others at plucking flying oranges out of the air, got enough.
Jealousy was on display right then and there, because Mama’s adult daughter, Moniek, snuck up on us to lob a heavy stone from a distance of about forty feet. Moniek’s parabolic launch would have hit me in the head had I not kept an eye on her. I caught the rock in the air. Moniek was born while I still worked at the zoo, and I have seen many times how she hates her mother’s attention for me. She probably doesn’t remember me, hence has no clue why Mama greets this stranger like an old friend. Better throw something at him! Since aimed throwing is viewed by some scholars as a human specialization related to language evolution, I have invited proponents of this theory to experience firsthand what chimps are capable of, but never had any volunteers. Perhaps they realize that stones may be replaced by smelly body products.
Moved by the reunion between Mama and myself, the symposium participants wondered how well chimpanzees recognize us and how well we recognize them. For me, ape faces are as distinct as human faces, even though both species have a bias for their own kind. This bias was ignored not too long ago when only humans were considered good at face recognition. Apes had done poorly on the same tests as applied to humans with the same stimuli, which meant that the apes had been tested on human faces. I call this the “anthropocentric bias” in ape research, which is responsible for much misinformation. When one of my co-workers in Atlanta, Lisa Parr, used the hundreds of photographs I had shot in Arnhem to test chimpanzees on portraits of their own species, they excelled at it. Seeing the portraits on a computer screen, they were even able to tell which juveniles were offspring of which females, doing so without personally knowing the pictured chimps. In the same way, leafing through a photo album, we can tell from the faces alone which humans are blood relatives.
We live in a time of increasing acceptance of our kinship with the apes. True, humanity never runs out of claims of what sets it apart, but it is a rare uniqueness claim that holds up for over a decade. If we consider our species without letting ourselves be blinded by the technical advances of the last few millennia, we see a creature of flesh and blood with a brain that, albeit three times larger than a chimpanzee’s, doesn’t contain any new parts. Even our vaunted prefrontal cortex turns out to be of rather typical size compared with that of other primates. No one doubts the superiority of our intellect, but we have no basic wants or needs that are not also present in our close relatives. Just like us, monkeys and apes strive for power, enjoy sex, want security and affection, kill over territory, and value trust and cooperation. Yes, we have computers and airplanes, but our psychological makeup remains that of a social primate.
This is why we had an entire symposium at the zoo on what health care professionals and social scientists might learn from primatology. I was the primatologist, of course, but learned something myself from a discussion on the side. We were talking about where morality gets it justification. If the weight behind it doesn’t come from above, who or what provides it? A colleague noted that while the Dutch had become quite secular over the past few decades, there is a growing problem with moral authority. No one publicly corrects anyone anymore, and people have become less civilized as a result. I saw heads nodding around the table. Was this just a frustrated rant by the older generation, always ready to complain about the younger one? Or was there a pattern? Secularization is all around us in Europe, but its moral implications are poorly understood. Even the German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas—an atheist Marxist if there ever was one—has come to regard the loss of religion as perhaps not altogether beneficial, stating that “something was lost when sin became guilt.”8
The Atheist Dilemma
I am not convinced that morality needs to get its weight from above, though. Can’t it come from within? This would certainly work for compassion, but perhaps also for our sense of fairness. A few years ago, we demonstrated that primates will happily perform a task for cucumber slices until they see others getting grapes, which taste so much better. The cucumber eaters become agitated, throw down their veggies, and go on strike. A perfectly fine food has become unpalatable as a result of seeing a companion get something better. We labeled it inequity aversion, a topic since investigated in other animals, including dogs. A dog will repeatedly perform a trick without rewards, but refuse as soon as another dog gets pieces of sausage for the same trick.
Such findings have implications for human morality. According to most philosophers, we reason ourselves toward moral truths. Even if they don’t invoke God, they’re still proposing a top-down process in which we formulate the principles and then impose them on human conduct. But do moral deliberations really take place at such an elevated plane? Don’t they need to be anchored in who and what we are? Would it be realistic, for example, to urge people to be considerate of others if we didn’t already have a natural inclination to be so? Would it make sense to appeal to fairness and justice if we didn’t have powerful reactions to their absence? Imagine the cognitive burden if every decision we took had to be vetted against handed-down logic. I am a firm believer in David Hume’s position that reason is the slave of the passions. We started out with moral sentiments and intuitions, which is also where we find the greatest continuity with other primates. Rather than having developed morality from scratch through rational reflection, we received a huge push in the rear from our background as social animals.
At the same time, however, I am reluctant to call a chimpanzee a “moral being.” This is because sentiments do not suffice. We strive for a logically coherent system and have debates about how the death penalty fits arguments for the sanctity of life, or whether an unchosen sexual orientation can be morally wrong. These debates are uniquely human. There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves. The great pioneer of morality research, the Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck, explained that moral emotions are disconnected from one’s immediate situation. They deal with good and bad at a more abstract, disinterested level. This is what sets human morality apart: a move toward universal standards combined with an elaborate system of justification, monitoring, and punishment.
At this point, religion comes in. Think of the narrative support for compassion, such as the parable of the good Samaritan, or the challenge to our sense of fairness, such as the parable of the workers in the vineyard with its famous conclusion “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” Add to this an almost Skinnerian fondness of reward and punishment—from the virgins to be met in heaven to the hellfire awaiting sinners—and the exploitation of our desire to be “praiseworthy,” as Adam Smith called it. Humans are in fact so sensitive to public opinion that we only need to see a picture of two eyes glued to the wall to respond with good behavior. Religion understood this long ago and uses the image of an all-seeing eye to symbolize an omniscient God.
But even assigning such a modest role to religion is anathema for some. Over the past few years, we have gotten used to a strident atheism arguing that God is not great (Christopher Hitchens) or is a delusion (Richard Dawkins). The neo-atheists call themselves “brights,” thus implying that believers are not as bright. They have replaced Saint Paul’s view that nonbelievers live in darkness by its opposite: non-believers are the only ones to have seen the light. Urging trust in science, they wish to root ethics in the naturalistic worldview. I do share their skepticism regarding religious institutions and their “primates”—popes, bishops, megapreachers, ayatollahs, and rabbis—but what good could possibly come from insulting the many people who find value in religion? And more pertinently, what alternative does science have to offer? Science is not in the business of spelling out the meaning of life and even less in telling us how to live our lives. The British philosopher John Gray put it as follows: “. . . science is not sorcery. The growth of knowledge enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are.”9 We scientists are good at finding out why things are the way they are, or how they work, and I do believe that biology helps us understand why morality looks the way it does. But to go from there to offering moral advice is a stretch.
Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christianity. The increasingly secular northern Europeans, whose cultures I know firsthand, consider themselves largely Christian in outlook. Everything humans have accomplished anywhere—from architecture to music, from art to science—developed hand in hand with religion, never separately. It is impossible, therefore, to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause.
Bosch struggled with the same issue—not with being an atheist, which was not an option, but with science’s place in society. The little figures in his paintings with inverted funnels on their heads or the background buildings in the form of distillation bottles and furnaces reference chemical equipment. However we view science now, it is good to realize that it didn’t start out as a very rational enterprise. Alchemy was gaining ground in Bosch’s days, yet mixed with the occult and full of charlatans and quacks, which the painter depicted with great humor in front of their gullible audiences. Alchemy turned into empirical science only when it liberated itself from these influences and developed self-correcting procedures. But how science might contribute to a moral society remained unclear.
Bosch’s paintings abound with references to alchemy, the mystic forerunner of chemistry. The Garden’s most recognizable figure—known as the “egg man” or “tree man”—carries a carrousel on his head with a smoking bagpipe-like contraption commonly used as an alchemical vessel.
Other primates, of course, have none of these problems, but even they strive for a certain kind of society. In their behavior, we recognize the same values we pursue ourselves. For example, female chimpanzees have been seen to drag reluctant males toward each other to make up after a fight, while removing weapons from their hands. Moreover, high-ranking males regularly act as impartial arbiters to settle disputes in the community. I take these hints of community concern as a sign that the building blocks of morality are older than humanity, and that we don’t need God to explain how we got to where we are today. On the other hand, what would happen if we were to excise religion from society? I have trouble seeing how science and the naturalistic worldview could fill the void and become an inspiration for the good.
At the end of my weeklong transatlantic excursion, I found time on the plane back to read through the nearly seven hundred responses generated by my blog Morals without God? Most comments were constructive and supportive, expressing belief in shades of gray when it comes to the origins of morality. But atheists couldn’t resist the occasion to make more digs at religion, thus bypassing my intentions. For me, understanding the need for religion is a far superior goal to bashing it. The central issue of atheism, which is the (non)existence of God, strikes me as monumentally uninteresting. What do we gain by getting in a tizzy about the existence of something no one can prove or disprove? In 2012, Alain de Botton raised hackles by opening his book Religion for Atheists with the line “The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true—in terms of being handed down from heaven to the sound of trumpets.”10 Yet, for some this remains the only issue they can talk about. How did we reach this small-mindedness, as if we’ve joined a debating club, where all one can do is win or lose?
Science isn’t the answer to everything. As a student, I learned about the “naturalistic fallacy” and how it would be the zenith of arrogance for scientists to think that their work could illuminate the distinction between right and wrong. This was not long after World War II, mind you, which had brought us massive evil justified by a scientific theory of self-directed evolution. Scientists had been very much involved in the genocidal machine, conducting unimaginable experiments. Children had been sown together to create conjoined twins, live humans had been operated on without anesthesia, and limbs and eyes had been surgically relocated on people’s bodies. I have never forgotten this dark postwar period, during which every scientist who spoke with a German accent was suspect. American and British scientists were not innocent, however, because they were the ones who earlier in the century had brought us eugenics. They advocated racist immigration laws and forced sterilization of the deaf, blind, mentally ill, and physically impaired, as well as criminals and members of minority races. Surgeries to this effect were secretly performed on victims visiting the hospital for other reasons. For those who do not wish to blame this sordid history on science, and prefer to speak of pseudoscience, it will be good to consider that eugenics was a serious academic discipline at many universities. By 1930, institutes devoted to it existed in England, Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, America, Germany, and Norway. Its theories were supported by prominent figures, including American presidents. Its founding father, the British anthropologist and polymath Sir Francis Galton, became a fellow of the Royal Society and was knighted well after having espoused ideas about improving the human race. Notably, Galton felt that the average citizen was “too base for the everyday work of modern civilization.”11
It took Adolf Hitler and his henchmen to expose the moral bankruptcy of these ideas. The inevitable result was a precipitous drop of faith in science, especially biology. In the 1970s, biologists were still commonly equated with fascists, such as during the heated protest against “sociobiology.” As a biologist myself, I am glad those acrimonious days are over, but at the same time I wonder how anyone could forget this past and hail science as our moral savior. How did we move from deep distrust to naïve optimism? While I do welcome a science of morality—my own work is part of it—I can’t fathom calls for science to determine human values (as per the subtitle of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape).12 Is pseudoscience something of the past? Are modern scientists free from moral biases? Think of the Tuskegee syphilis study of just a few decades ago, or the ongoing involvement of medical doctors in prisoner torture at Guantánamo Bay.13 I am profoundly skeptical of the moral purity of science, and feel that its role should never exceed that of morality’s handmaiden.
The confusion seems to stem from the illusion that all we need for a good society is more knowledge. Once we have figured out the central algorithm of morality, so the thinking goes, we can safely hand things over to science. Science will guarantee the best choices. This is a bit like thinking that a celebrated art critic must be a great painter or a food critic a great chef. After all, critics offer profound insights in regard to particular products. They possess the right knowledge, so why not let them handle the job? A critic’s specialty, however, is post hoc evaluation, not creation. And creation takes intuition, skill, and vision. Even if science helps us appreciate how morality works, this doesn’t mean it can guide it anymore than that someone who knows how eggs should taste can be expected to lay one.
The view of morality as a set of immutable principles, or laws, that are ours to discover ultimately comes from religion. It doesn’t really matter whether it is God, human reason, or science that formulates these laws. All of these approaches share a top-down orientation, their chief premise being that humans don’t know how to behave and that someone must tell them. But what if morality is created in day-to-day social interaction, not at some abstract mental level? What if it is grounded in the emotions, which most of the time escape the neat categorizations that science is fond of? Since the whole point of my book is to argue a bottom-up approach, I will obviously return to this issue. My views are in line with the way we know the human mind works, with visceral reactions arriving before rationalizations, and also with the way evolution produces behavior. A good place to start is with an acknowledgment of our background as social animals, and how this background predisposes us to treat each other. This approach deserves attention at a time in which even avowed atheists are unable to wean themselves from a semireligious morality, thinking that the world would be a better place if only a white-coated priesthood could take over from the frocked one.