Q&A: Chimpanzees
Chimpanzees
Question
Frans de Waal
Hello Rabbi,
Recently I came across the books of Professor Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics and Our Inner Ape—where he argues that chimpanzees/animals also have a natural morality.
Don’t these facts weaken the proof for the existence of God from morality?
Answer
I don’t see any connection at all. They don’t have morality, because they act according to instinct and not out of free choice. Morality has survival value, as is well known, and therefore evolution can instill it.
Discussion on Answer
A perfect answer!
In one stroke you managed:
– to undermine the idea that moral behavior requires any connection to “choice,”
– to show that evolution has sufficient explanatory power for the existence of morality, which completely makes any divine gift of morality—or any metaphysical source of morality at all—superfluous, and also
– to create a situation in which it’s 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 in the first place.
Bravo. What could I possibly add.
🙂
On the contrary, if anything I would say it strengthens it. God caused even creatures without choice to act morally.