The most obvious stumbling blocks are human altruism and cooperation.
If natural selection is a “zero sum game,” that is, if your selfish gene
wins, then my selfish gene loses, why should I bother to cooperate with
you?
Attempts to get around this problem have amounted to little more than
“just so stories”: “unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative
explanations,” often involving saber-tooth cats.
Here’s the latest case in point: a solution that invokes, of all things, belief in God, or at least a god.
A paper recently published in the journal Nature concludes that the
behaviors such as treating other people with fairness and impartiality
made possible the creation of “large-scale cooperative institutions,
such as trade and markets.” The paper then goes on to say that these
less-selfish behaviors were the result of “the fear that a punitive God
is watching.”
This religiously driven “magnanimous behavior . . . [may have been] what helped foster the trust needed for humanity’s growth.”
But how do we know whether this is, in fact, the case? After all, the
people who were around during the creation of “large-scale cooperative
institutions, such as trade and markets” aren’t around to be
interviewed.
The authors’ answer lies in, of all things, the results of a series of games.
They gathered 600 people from around the world representing different
faiths—including Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, animism, and ancestor
worship—with “widely varying attitudes to divine retribution.” They
asked the participants to play a game “where they could offer a limited
number of real coins to their own community, or to a group of fellow
believers in a distant place who they had never met.”
“The game was carefully designed to allow each participant to follow
their own conscience in deciding which cup to put their coins.”
They found that “When people report not knowing if a god punishes, they
put considerably fewer coins in the cups of distant co-religionists.”
From this they hypothesize that belief in a punitive god gave rise to
treating people with fairness and impartiality.
They hastened to add that we should not draw “too strong a conclusion about the kindness of people of faith.”
Of course not.
One obvious problem is that none of our very distant ancestors were
Christians, Hindus, or Buddhists—these faiths arose long after the rise
of agriculture and civilization. So what a modern Christian or Buddhist
has to teach us about prehistoric people is very limited.
What the experiment actually shows is that some beliefs held by people
today influence how they treat other people, which is, well, obvious.
Furthermore, what’s being described is not altruism or even generosity.
It isn’t even trust. It doesn’t explain the actions of a Mother Theresa
or the missionary doctors who ministered to Ebola patients during the
recent outbreak.
In the biblical tradition, to say we “fear” God—the Hebrew word yare’—means
that we revere Him. Part of this reverence includes treating other
people with kindness and generosity. Furthermore, as beings created in
the image of a kind, generous, and magnanimous God, we are capable of
these qualities.
It is this, and not primal fear bordering on superstition, that
accounts for what Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature.”
Eric Metaxas is a co-host of BreakPoint Radio and a best-selling author whose biographies, children's books, and popular apologetics have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
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