I had the pleasure of meeting
Frans de Waal when I attended a six week seminar at Dartmouth College in the 90’s
and again when he accepted my invitation to a panel I organized. He is a very gracious and thoughtful scholar,
exactly what all of us academics should aspire to be. He is, temperamentally I would guess and
intellectually I am sure, a partisan of moderation.
His new book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, is
apparently drawing some fire from the latter.
I gather the bonobo has not yet responded. De Waal has a couple of very interesting
essays at
Salon and at
This View of Life. Here is a bit
from the latter:
In order to discuss the biological origins of morality,
which is its central theme, I need to get two groups out of the way. One is
fundamentalist religion, for which morality comes from God. The other are the
neo-atheists who, by labeling themselves rational and everyone else irrational,
have closed the door to open and tolerant debate. Calling believers idiots
can't possibly be a good discussion opener. This explains my stance against
militant atheism (a label that is not mine, but Dawkins' by the way).
This strikes me as dead spot
on. I have been teaching a class called
Human Nature and Human Values for over a decade now. The focus is Darwinian explanations of human
moral and political behavior. This
course occasionally arouses the ire of two kinds of students. The most obvious friction is generated when
students with traditional religious backgrounds are confronted with full blown
Darwinian theory. Another source of
friction occurs when students with leftist political leanings here that human
beings have evolved instincts. What I
find is that, in general, students with religious objections tend to be more
open than those with political objections.
I have found the same to be
true among academics. Religious
conservatives are congenitally suspicious of Darwinian explanations but
generally willing to listen and to allow that there might be something worth
looking at there. Confirmed Darwinists tend
to be utterly contemptuous of religion and religious persons. I think that impedes the acceptance of
Darwinian science among the population at large.
Frans de Waal thinks that
militant atheism impedes the development of a “bottom up” account of morality.
Atheism will need to be combined with something else, something
more constructive than its opposition to religion, to be relevant to our lives.
The only possibility is to embrace morality as natural to our species.
Otherwise atheism will end up in the Big Black Hole that Thomas Henry Huxley
created for himself in the 19th Century. He did not believe morality came from
God, but also denied its possible evolution. He could not explain where it came
from except for saying that we had to fight very hard against our own nature to
become moral (which is of course an ancient Christian position related to
original sin, and so on). In this, Huxley went against Darwin himself, who did
see room for moral evolution, as explained in "The Descent of Man."
To debate these important issues we all need to step back, stop shouting, and
move beyond unanswerable questions about the existence of God. Atheists should
be interested in this debate and I hope they will join in.
I think de Waal is right about
this. However, I also come to the table
from the direction of philosophy. While
I am a confirmed Darwinist and I emphatically agree with de Waal’s bottom up
approach to morality, I also know what I do not know. We have a pretty good idea now, thanks to
contemporary Darwinian biology, how complex species emerged from simpler ones
over time. We have no idea how the first
replicators emerged from inorganic matter.
We have no idea how the Kosmos happened to be arranged so as to allow the
possibility of atheists and bonobos. On
these broad questions, the pious have the advantage.
Frans de Waal moves in favor of
moderation. I second the motion.
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