Beatrice Marovich uses Frans de Waal’s work on the moral lives of primates to question the way we typically think about religion:
Public debates about religion in the contemporary U.S. are still rooted in debates about belief. Prominent public atheists like Richard Dawkins speak about religion as though it’s something we need to understand rationally. How would these public debates change if we were to start thinking about the animal edges of religious life—the ways in which religious life has more to do with so-called animal instinct than we’ve often imagined? This is, precisely, where primatologist Frans de Waal’s new book The Bonobo and the Atheist (W.W. Norton, 2013) appears to be intervening into these hot-button conflicts.
People like Dawkins, says de Waal, are going about things in the wrong manner. “The question is not so much whether religion is true or false,” he writes, “but how it shapes our lives, and what might possibly take its place if we were to get rid of it the way an Aztec priest rips the beating heart out of a virgin.” What this violent metaphor is meant to gesture towards is “the gaping hole” that would be left by “the removed organ’s functions.” It seems to suggest that religion is some serviceable physiological element in the human body politic.
The broader drift of de Waal’s arguments:
The big targets for de Waal are what he calls “top down morality” and human exceptionalism. Top down morality is linked to the assertion that morality comes to human life from somewhere “on high,” which might be taken to mean that human life receives its morality from a transcendent, out-of-this-world, divine.
But de Waal notes that top down morality isn’t a purely religious problem. He attacks, for example, the philosophical presumption mentioned earlier, that morality is a matter of reasoning—that we reason our way “up” to moral action or decision. Likewise, de Waal takes issue with human exceptionalism—the idea that morality is something that only humans are capable of—regardless of its origin. Religion is a target, for de Waal, to the extent that it supports each of these presumptions.
The Dish 