God and gorillas

Anthropologist Barbara J. King explains what our distant cousins can tell us about religion and why it's OK for scientists to believe in God.

By Steve Paulson

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Jan. 31, 2007 | Every human culture has believed in spirits, gods or some other divine being. That's why human beings have often been called Homo religioso. Some people take this long history of belief in the otherworldly as evidence for God; doesn't it explain why religion continues to be so pervasive? But many scientists are coming up with their own, decidedly secular, theories about the origins of faith. In fact, over the last few years, a small cottage industry made up of scientists and philosophers has devoted itself to demystifying the divine.

Take Daniel Dennett, the philosopher who has proposed that religion is a meme -- an idea that evolved like a virus -- that infected our ancestors and continued to spread throughout cultures. By contrast, anthropologist Pascal Boyer argues that religious belief is a quirky byproduct of a brain that evolved to detect predators and other survival needs. In this view, the brain developed a hair-trigger detection system to believe the world is full of "agents" that affect our lives. And British biologist Lewis Wolpert, with yet another theory, posits that religion developed once hominids understood cause and effect, which allowed them to make complex tools. Once they started to make causal connections, they felt compelled to explain life's mysteries. Their brains, in essence, turned into "belief engines."

Of course, these thinkers are either religious skeptics or outright atheists who mean to imply that we've been duped by evolution to believe in supernatural beings when none, in fact, exist. That's what makes Barbara J. King, an anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, so unique. She has no desire to undermine religion. In fact, she's been deeply influenced by the religious writers Karen Armstrong and Martin Buber. But her main insights about the origins of religion come not from researching humans' deep history, but from observing very much alive non-human primates.

For the last two decades, King has studied ape and monkey behavior in Gabon and Kenya, and at the Smithsonian's National Zoo. In her new book, "Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion," King argues that religion is rooted in our social and emotional connections with each other. What's more, we can trace back the origins of our religious impulse not just to early cave paintings and burial sites 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, but much earlier -- back to our ancient ancestors millions of years ago. And today, King says, we can see the foundations of religious behavior in chimpanzees and gorillas; watching our distant cousins can do much to explain the foundations of our own beliefs.

I spoke with King by phone about the ape's capacity for empathy and imagination and why religious belief may have given our ancestors the competitive edge to wipe out their Neanderthal rivals.

Why would an anthropologist who studies apes be interested in religion?

I think religion is all about emotional engagement and social action. And we can get a whole new read on the evolutionary history of religion by asking the kinds of questions that we ask of language and culture. We can see that way back in our past -- literally, millions of years ago -- some practices are visible in the archaeological record that reflect the deepest roots of religion. And apes today are pretty good stand-ins for those very early human ancestors. So when I go to the National Zoo in Washington, or spend time in Kenya looking at monkeys, what I see is very social. It's about emotional connection that's at the very ancient roots of religion.

So you're not saying that the great apes you study are religious -- or have spiritual lives -- but they show behaviors that are required if you're going to develop religion.

That's right. I'm not suggesting that apes are religious. In fact, I have to say that, because Jane Goodall, who is such a renowned and loved figure for her chimpanzee studies, has said very provocatively that chimpanzees may have an incipient sense of religious awe. For example, when she comes upon them looking at a waterfall -- something in nature that is amazing -- they're riveted. She's wondering what's going through their minds and if they may be spiritual in some sense. That's a fascinating idea, but that's not my approach. I don't look for things in apes that are religious. I look at how their behavior relates to the very foundation of what later became religion. For me, the question turns on how I understand religion. I want to be very careful to differentiate between what we think about religion today and how it evolved. I'm really talking about the earliest origins of religion, which was a social and emotional process.

So you're not talking about a set of beliefs? I think that's how most people think about religion.

I'm not talking about a set of beliefs. When I think about religion, what comes to mind are personal relationships with the supernatural, with God or with spirits, and compassionate action. Not necessarily books or texts that you read, but some sort of action in the world. This is coming from Karen Armstrong's work, who has helped me let go of the idea that religion is about a bunch of things in our head that we have to feel and believe. So if I'm going to think about religion as compassionate action, how do you look for that in prehistory? That's the real question that I face as an anthropologist. And the way I approach that is to look at the active expression of this emotional connection in something that I can identify as a spiritual realm.

I understand you don't want to get caught up in modern debates over belief and what we think about God. But isn't the core of religion the sense that there is some transcendent realm out there -- something that's separate from our world of everyday experience?

Oh yes, definitely. But the emotional connection to that transcendent realm is what I'm looking for, rather than a mental or rational formulating of beliefs about such a realm. A word that's so important to me is "embodied." It's an embodied religion. Religion is based in our senses, in our emotions.

What kinds of behavior do you see in the great apes that show us how religion evolved?

I look at four different kinds of behavior -- meaning-making, imagination, empathy and following the rules. Together, I think they give us a sense of what religion might have started out to be. The apes have bits and pieces of all these four things, but not in a coherent pattern that adds up to religious behavior. To my mind, apes are conscious beings and they do these four things in incredibly fascinating ways.

It's a provocative idea to say apes create meaning. How do they do this?

Typically, ape communication is viewed as the exchange of messages. You know, one hoots and the other responds. I don't see it that way at all. I see them really transforming each other as they act. The smallest gesture or eye gaze can cause one ape to shift its behavior toward the other, until they converge on a shared action or maybe decide to avoid each other. That's what I call meaning-making.

What's an example of this?

There's often some conflict over food in the gorilla group I've been studying. There may be a fight or a tussle. But things don't play out the same way every time. So let's say a female and a male are fighting with each other, then the male runs off with the food, and the female hits him as he goes by. This is fairly typical with gorillas -- the female will try to get in a swat at the male. What happens next depends very much on the mood of the two participants -- what happened that morning, how much sleep they had, how feisty they're feeling. So the female may walk up to the male, put her arm around his shoulders and look in his eyes. That's a very reconciling gesture. Alternatively, the male may be really annoyed and start hitting back at the female, and that may escalate into a fight. In other words, they affect each other every minute, and they shift in very subtle ways. And together, that's meaning-making.

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