The following excerpt is from the book The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates by Frans de Waal (I will comment at the end in italics)
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." 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."
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 naive optimism? While I do welcome 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). 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 Guantanamo Bay. 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.
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* I am currently reading this engrossing book and I can't get enough of it. The author offers countless true tales of altruism in all kinds of animals species - providing proof that morality is not strictly a human construct and it is most definitely not top-down but bottom-up through our evolutionary past. However, the passage above smacked me square in the face. I read it over and over again. Stopping to think. Think about myself and what I'm all about. It made me reevaluate my entire perspective on science. I admit that at times I lean towards what is called scientism. It's an overreach that naturally happens, for me, when I stumble across new information. I take it to the extreme. My thirst for more scientific knowledge to help me understand this cosmos is a healthy thing but at times it can be taken too far. In some respects, it may have to do with me not ever reading a book by Daniel Dennett. I have heard him speak multiple times; he is an outspoken atheist, philosopher but is fascinated by religion and wants it studied as a natural phenomenon. This is essentially what it appears Frans de Waal thinks as well. The Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins style atheism sees no need for religion. Hitchens was devoutly anti-theist, making us laugh with tales of the horrific dictator in the sky. While I agree mostly with the Hitchens crowd (if there was a God - as described in the holy books, how awful that would be!) ... I must say that this part of Waal's book shook me a bit.
Perspective is something that is crucially important when trying to make a model of reality. And historical perspective is key. In a cosmic scale we have 13.8 billion years of perspective, for the Earth we have 4.5 billion years of perspective. So we can brush off claims with no evidence like Young Earth Creationism obviously, but what we also must keep in mind is the history of science as well, which rose from religions. alchemy was an early form of chemistry. Science, just as religion, has had a dark past as the author pointed out and we atheists do ourselves a disservice for not admitting that. I for one have been altered by reading this book (especially the above passage). I hope that the evolution of my thinking is reflected in my upcoming blog posts. In the past I put too much emphasis on science solving ALL of our problems. This is naive optimism (as the author puts it correctly). This is an overreach and something that I must reel in on in my own head. The issue with growing up deeply religious as I did is that I tend to push too hard the other direction once I found countless flaws in the "holy books". I may have reached too far with science. I am changing and correcting myself from now on, just like good science does.
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