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Chimpanzees

שו”תCategory: moralChimpanzees
asked 3 years ago

France de Val
Hello Rabbi,
I was recently exposed to Professor Frans de Waal’s books, Chimpanzee Politics and Our Inner Monkey – where he proves that chimpanzees/animals also have natural morality.
Don’t these facts weaken the evidence for the existence of God – from morality?


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0 Answers
מיכי Staff answered 3 years ago
I don’t see any connection. They have no morality because they act on instinct and not from a free decision. Morality has a survival value, as we know, and therefore evolution can assimilate it.

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מיכי Staff replied 3 years ago

On the contrary, if anything I would say it is strengthening. God caused even creatures without choice to act morally.

ניל ירדן replied 3 years ago

Perfect answer!
In one fell swoop you managed to:

– challenge the fact that moral behavior requires some connection to ”choice”,

– show that evolution has sufficient explanatory power for the existence of morality, which completely eliminates the need for divine morality or any metaphysical source for morality in general, and also

– create a situation in which it is impossible to distinguish between a creature that has “choice” and one that lacks it, which casts serious doubt on the existence of such a thing at all.

Bravo. What more can I add.

הפוסק האחרון replied 3 years ago

🙂

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