Natural Theology for Chimps

It's long been just understood that humans are unique among all animals in their capacity to engage in altruism, the expenditure of energy and or resources to aid others who are not closely related or otherwise capable of providing reciprocal value. A mother duck will act injured and try to distract an approaching predator away from her ducklings, an unselfish, and possibly sacrificial act, ostensibly, but we understand that this is not really altruistic in the intended sense; her efforts align neatly with the imperative for her offspring (and thus her genes) to survive. In other cases, we observe that some animal species engage in sharing, but this too is accounted for as "self-interested sharing". Sharing food from a kill with others in the group creates a context for reciprocity, and allows the successful hunter who shares to participate in the successful kills of others in the group when he is hungry and did not manage a kill on his own.

Altruism, though, is a kind of shibboleth for humans, and particularly for Christians. Our "better angels" have always been a key distinction for humans, an unbridgeable ontological chasm between the rest of creation, and man, endowed by God with the imago dei. Christian writers from Paul in the first century to C.S. Lewis in the 20th century have made much of this unique sense of man, of which altruism was a distinguishing sign. Man not only knew God was his creator intuitively just by surveying the world around him, man had an innate moral conscience, a built in sense of ought that was utterly intractable as a matter of biology. Christians commonly wonder, bemused at the thought, how evolution could account for something so... self-defeating as selfless charity and self sacrifice. Humans, for instance, send money, food and medicine to the other side of the world, to aid people they've never met, never will meet, and couldn't be more perfect strangers, genetically or otherwise. What's the selective imperative for that, they demand.

This is an important point for Christians, as Christ is understood to be a kind of apotheosis of this idea. God is supposed to have became flesh and sacrificed himself through no fault of his own, perfect in his being, in need of nothing, just giving of himself as a reprieve to (believing) man because that is his nature. Jesus instructed those who listened to love their enemies, another rendering of altruism, becoming less, being vulnerable in services of a higher good on the Christian view. Modern apologists rely heavily on the "moral argument", the idea that man cannot account for his moral sense, or moral convictions without positing God as creator, divinely provisioning them. It's just unthinkable, in contrast, that man would evolve in an impersonal universe with this innate moral sense, in their view.

What do we make, then, of research like this study done last year which investigated and compared the altruistic capabilities and tendencies of chimpanzees and human children? Here's the author's summary of the research:

Debates about altruism are often based on the assumption that it is either unique to humans or else the human version differs from that of other animals in important ways. Thus, only humans are supposed to act on behalf of others, even toward genetically unrelated individuals, without personal gain, at a cost to themselves. Studies investigating such behaviors in nonhuman primates, especially our close relative the chimpanzee, form an important contribution to this debate. Here we present experimental evidence that chimpanzees act altruistically toward genetically unrelated conspecifics. In addition, in two comparative experiments, we found that both chimpanzees and human infants helped altruistically, regardless of any expectation of reward, even when some effort was required, and even when the recipient was an unfamiliar individual—all features previously thought to be unique to humans. The evolutionary roots of human altruism may thus go deeper than previously thought, reaching as far back as the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.

(emphasis mine)

There are (at least) two important implications of this kind of finding. First, it assaults the ancient shibboleth, the distinction of man as uniquely equipped and aware in the enterprise of altruism. To be sure, the experiment does not find chimpanzees organizing global relief efforts for men or monkeys if far off lands, and by no means would we mistake these findings for some kind of altruism in chimps that places them in parity with humans, by quality or quantity of their altruism. But here you have a structured set of tests that show that our closest relatives manifest behaviors of the kind that has always put man alone on one side of the "moral chasm", with every other living thing on the other. Now, it seems, in light of recent investigations, that maybe we need to make some room on our side of the moral divide for our chimpanzee cousins (and who knows who else might get added to the list).

Second, its hard to read the article and not be struck by the similarities demonstrated between chimps and small (human) children. In both cases, when the researcher doesn't demonstrate distress, chimps and kids aren't distressed either, and don't help out, as ostensibly no help is needed. When the researcher sends clear signals that they need help, help that the chimp or kid might render, they do, much more often then when no "need-state" is in view. We humans, being humans, intuitively understand this; if someone is having trouble, you ought to consider helping, even if there's no reward in view, immediately or ever. As the study affirms, this isn't something we must be taught in class to develop, but something that is innate at some low level.

That's not strange to most humans. But it is strange to see the same kind of response from chimpanzees when your worldview says that that "ought" can only come from God, and can only come to man. For the chimp who has perfectly nothing to gain (on the caricatured view of evolution as seen by most Christians) in helping someone reach something just beyond their grasp, whence the "ought" that prods them to help? Does God spare a little moral sense, sense unto altruism, even if in rudimentary form, for the chimp?

If so, it's a spotty application. Chimpanzees are notorious for their inclination for infanticide, the brutal killing of infants in the group, sometimes resulting in cannibalism of the young as a follow up to the frenzy (see here, for example). If there is some kind of natural theology for chimps, it seems much more compartmentalized that it is even for (allegedly) fallen, depraved humans. I won't even bother to recount the illustrious sex life of the average chimp, Google that up some time if you are not aware and inclined to think just maybe God dished out a helping of the same sense of "objective moral values" he designed for man, to use a favorite (if problematic) term from William Lane Craig.

Infanticide and sexual promiscuity the likes which might make Larry Flynt blanch aren't a problem from a naturalistic standpoint. There are both plausible (and to increasingly evidentially supported) explanations for such features of chimp behavior, and no "moral chasm" to bridge. Man is a moral being and capable of ethical reasoning in ways that no other animal is, as best we can tell. But while we stand apart, we stand apart by degree and by circumstance on the naturalistic view. For the Christian, man stands apart in kind, in essence. If we are to find, as this study suggests, that that degree isn't nearly so different from our closest genetic relatives, it's interesting and informative, but it fits the model. Chimps and man shared a common ancestor some time long ago, and the discovery of chimp altruism just points us back to our common heritage, a developmental history where we shared the "proto-ethics" that later developed into the concrete forms we see in chimps and humans today.

On the Christian view, though, it's hard to know what to make of such findings. There's always the trusty "common design" hobby horse to trot out whenever parallels and isomorphisms are identified in biology between disparate species. But common design, weak as it is, just utterly fails in this case, as mankind is sui generis in terms of his moral conscience, per Christianity, a "bespoke design" as a British friend recently called it. The sensus divinitatus is what makes man different from all other creatures for the Christian, and it is this that man draws upon, even and especially the unregenerate man in acting on moral impulses.

This is why morality as a matter of biological evolution is flatly, unequivocally rejected by Christianity. If morality emerges as the output of evolution, then it's as available to the chimp or the dolphin as it is to man. It's different for the same reasons the species themselves are different: they occupy different ecological niches, and have unique paths that brought them where they are as social animals. The more we learn though, the more the evidence accumulates that works right against the "moral chasm", against the sensus divinitatus, and toward the idea that morality fits right into the unifying principles and dynamics of evolution. If morality is supported as an integral part of the impersonal biological processes of man's development, one of the load-bearing beams of Christian apologetics, and the appeal of Christianity itself, falls apart.

The Warneken et al study is not the final word, of course, but just a piece of the puzzle. Chimps being helpful, even at some cost, without a basis for reciprocity or any kind of compensation, doesn't quite rise to the commitments of say, a Mother Teresa (Hitchens' objections to her notwithstanding). It's representative of the "pebbles" that are ever accumulating into what has grown now to be a significant pile of data that supports the idea that the "moral instinct", or the "moral grammar" as Marc Hauser would call it (with a hat tip to Chomsky), is a natural byproduct of evolution. No imago dei, no sensus divinitatus provisioned by a supernatural deity needed. A very good amount of the moral finger-wagging by Christian apologists depends on this message: you can't be moral without God. Or, more recently, a slightly more sophisticated revision: you can be moral, but you can't justify your morality without God. The more we learn, the more clearly plausible and evident becomes the picture of man as a moral being by virtue of his evolutionary biology.

So long as man is the only "altruist" -- the only one on the "moral" side of the moral chasm -- that's not a big problem for Christianity. A theistic evolutionist can nod at all the evidence for man developing a moral sense in the context of evolution. In her view, God is working, invisibly, behind the scenes, pulling invisible strings to steer man's nature toward its proper, intended moral constitution. But the identification of that kind of moral development, the emergence of even such sublime features as moral, conscious altruism in other animals, is problematic. That kind of evidence is a disconfirmation of the idea that man is unique, alone in his moral endowments. If we find emergent morality and ethics in other species of the very same kind we find more fully developed in man, the chasm is bridged, and this works strongly against the idea that man is ontologically distinct from the rest of life on earth.

Natural theology for chimps is a problem for the Christian worldview.