Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, and the Evolution of Religion and Morality in Bogota

 

                                           The Church on Monserrate Peak Overlooking Bogota

The Statue of Jesus Christ on Monserrate Overlooking Bogota

                                                               Universidad de los Andes

                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Recently I returned from Bogota, Colombia, where I participated in a conference at the Universidad de los Andes organized by the International Adam Smith Society (IASS).  The University of the Andes is located near the old colonial center of Bogota at the foot of Monserrate Mountain.  The University was founded in 1948 as the first private nonsectarian (that is, not affiliated with the Catholic Church) and politically neutral university, which was designed to emulate an American liberal arts university.  It is now regarded as the best university in Colombia and one of the best in all of Latin America.

Bogota is a huge city of almost 10 million people.  At an elevation of 8,400 feet, it is the largest city in the world above 8,000 feet elevation.  Overlooking the Bogota savannah, Monserrate peak rises to 10,300 feet.

IASS has posted online the program for the conference, which has links to the papers.

I was a commentator on Ivan Sternick's paper: "Society as a Moral Order: Adam Smith's Theory of Sociability as a Response to Mandeville and Rousseau."  I also presented my own paper: "The Three Waves of Adam Smith's Darwinian Liberal Moral Theory."  I have previously posted some portions of my comments on Sternick's paper, in which I suggested that Smith was an esoteric writer who agreed with Mandeville's satiric criticism of Christian ethics.

The responses to my paper were more favorable than I had expected.  There was almost no criticism of my argument that Smith's theory of the moral sentiments has been confirmed and deepened by Darwinian evolutionary moral psychology.  The commentator on my paper--Dirk Schuck--agreed with my argument, although he admitted that he knew little about the evolutionary science to which I was appealing.

I did detect, however, that some people were reluctant to accept my claim about Smith as an esoteric writer who hid his irreligious skepticism from his religious readers, but who momentarily dropped the cloak of esotericism when he praised David Hume as a "wise and virtuous man," which revealed his secret teaching that religious belief was not necessary for the morality of philosophers like Hume and Smith.

Smith does often appeal to God as the moral lawgiver and divine judge of the world, particularly in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.  But the Adam Smith scholars have long debated the question of whether Smith was sincere in his religious teaching or whether he taught this only to satisfy his religious readers, while he himself was a skeptic like his friend Hume.

Shinji Nohara surveyed this debate in his paper--"Adam Smith as a Moralist"--and then he took the side of those who claim that Smith was a sincere religious believer.  "For Smith," Nohara concluded, "the Deity provided human beings with the moral distinction between right and wrong," and thus "only the Deity could be the implicit foundation of morality" (22-23).

But people questioned Nohara as to why he relied so heavily on Smith's "atonement passage" for explaining "Smith's theodicy" (14-22).  The problem is that Smith removed this passage from the 6th and final edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which was published in 1790, a few weeks before Smith's death.

This passage, which had appeared in the first five editions of TMS, was the only place in all of Smith's writing where he spoke of how man facing the judgment of God in the afterlife must appeal not to God's justice, because no man can be justified by his past conduct, but to God's mercy; and to win that mercy, man needs "the most powerful intercession," so that "the most dreadful atonement has been paid for our manifold transgressions and iniquities" (TMS, 92).  Without explicitly mentioning Jesus Christ, this sounds like a statement of the core doctrine of orthodox Christianity that the original sin of all mankind makes it impossible for men to earn salvation without the intercession of Jesus who was crucified to provide atonement for the sins of mankind.  Moreover, it was only here and in one other passage that Smith has used the word "revelation," which was the one word commonly understood to mean the communication of knowledge by divine or supernatural means (TMS, 92, 128).  But Smith eliminated both of these passages in the 6th edition of TMS.

Many of Smith's Christian readers quoted the "atonement passage" as evidence that Smith was a devout Christian who accepted the New Testament teaching about how the sacrifice of Christ on the cross had redeemed mankind from original sin.  So when some of these Christian readers noticed that Smith had dropped this passage from the 6th edition, they were disturbed.  For example, William Magee, the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, published a book of Discourses on the Scriptural Doctrines of Atonement and Sacrifice, in which he quoted from Smith's atonement passage as showing that a distinguished philosopher had endorsed the Christian doctrine of Atonement; but then he expressed his surprise that Smith had spoken of Hume the infidel as "a perfectly wise and virtuous man," in the 1776 letter on Hume's life and death.

After someone pointed out to Magee that Smith had withdrawn this atonement passage from the last edition of TMS, Magee added a footnote to his book attributing Smith's withdrawal to "the infection of David Hume's society . . . one proof more . . . of the danger, even to the most enlightened, from a familiar contact with infidelity," and then Magee again quoted Smith's offensive praise of Hume in his obituary letter.  D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie have told this story in an Appendix to their Oxford/Liberty Fund edition of TMS (383-401).

These two actions of Smith that his Christian readers found offensive--his praise of Hume as wise and virtuous and his withdrawal of the atonement passage--are the two moments when Smith revealed his secret teaching--that while religious belief is necessary to reinforce the morality of the religious man, it is not necessary for the morality of irreligious skeptical philosophers like Hume and Smith.

Although I call this Smith's "secret teaching," there are a few passages in TMS where Smith comes close to stating this openly.  Consider, for example, this passage:

"When the general rules which determine the merit and demerit of actions, come thus to be regarded as the laws of an All-powerful Being, who watches over our conduct, and who, in a life to come, will reward the observance, and punish the breach of them; they necessarily acquire a new sacredness from this consideration.  That our regard to the will of the Deity ought to be the supreme rule of our conduct, can be doubted of by nobody who believes his existence. . . ."

"It is in this manner that religion enforces the natural sense of duty; and hence it is, that mankind are generally disposed to place great confidence in the probity of those who seem deeply impressed with religious sentiments.  Such persons, they imagine, act under an additional tie, besides those which regulate the conduct of other men.  The regard to the propriety of action, as well as to reputation, the regard to the applause of his own breast, as well as to that of others, are motives which they suppose have the same influence over the religious man, as over the man of the world.  But the former lies under another restraint, and never acts deliberately but as in the presence of that Great Superior who is finally to recompense him according to his deeds.  A greater trust is reposed, upon this account, in the regularity and exactness of his conduct.  And wherever the natural principles of religion are not corrupted by the factious and party zeal of some worthless cabal; wherever the first duty which it requires, is to fulfil all the obligations of morality, wherever men are not taught to regard frivolous observances, as more immediate duties of religion, than acts of justice and beneficence; and to imagine, that by sacrifices, and ceremonies, and van supplications, they can bargain with the Deity for fraud, and perfidy, and violence, the world undoubtedly judges right in this respect, and justly places a double confidence in the rectitude of the religious man's behaviour" (TMS, 170).

Notice how the "religious man" who believes in the existence of God is set apart from "other men" or "the man of the world."  While some men are motivated to be moral purely by "the natural sense of duty," the religious men are motivated by this but also by "an additional tie"--their belief that moral laws are the sacred laws of the "Great Superior."  But this works only as long as the religious men follow the "natural principles of religion," which are concerned with the obligations of morality, rather than "frivolous observances," "sacrifices," or "ceremonies," that have nothing to do with morality.  And notice the implication that "the man of the world" can be naturally motivated to be moral even though he is not a religious believer.  Notice also that the "natural principles of religion" enforce the same "natural sense of duty"--the same natural morality--that is recognized by the irreligious "man of the world."

We should also see here two more important features of Smith's account of religion and morality.  First, this natural religious morality does not depend on any supernatural revelation.  Second, the enforcement of this natural religious morality does not depend on any political enforcement of a religious establishment that would deny religious liberty and toleration.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "revelation" denotes "the communication of knowledge by divine or supernatural means."  As I have already indicated, the two passages in TMS that used the word "revelation" were withdrawn by Smith in the 6th edition.  Thus, Smith is silent about the reason/revelation debate between those who seek truth by purely natural reason and those who seek truth from supernatural revelation, but Smith is clearly on the side of reason rather than revelation.  That is why he withdrew the passage on atonement, because the doctrine on atonement depends on faith in the revelation of the supernatural miracle of Christ's Resurrection.  In the original passage on atonement, Smith had said that "the doctrines of revelation coincide, in every respect, with those original anticipations of nature" (TMS, 92).  But that cannot be true, because the doctrine of Atonement depends on faith in the revelation of a supernatural truth.

The publication in 1779 of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, three years after his death, turned the secret debate over reason and revelation into a public debate, which indicated the success of the Liberal Enlightenment in making esoteric writing unnecessary.   Previously, I have written about how this allowed Darwin and Leo Strauss to openly debate reason and revelation here, here, here, here, and here.

Smith refused to consider the possibility that religious faith could be based on the supernatural truth of revelation.  Instead, like Hume in his Natural History of Religion, Smith explained religious belief as a natural psychological propensity for anthropomorphic projection of human mental experience, so that human beings imagine that there are invisible spirits with minds like their own.  And since human beings have moral sentiments and passions, they imagine that these divine beings have the same moral sentiments and passions.  In this way, religion sanctions morality as sacred law, and thus provides religious support for a natural sense of moral duty (TMS, 163-64).  (I have written previously about this Humean and Darwinian explanation of religious belief as rooted in evolved human nature here and here.)

Smith's refusal to take seriously any claim of faith in the supernatural truth of revelation explains why in his account of the religious supports for morality, he is silent about the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity (love).  As Thomas Aquinas explained it, the natural virtues (such as justice, temperance, courage, and prudence) are directed to man's natural happiness, and they can be known by his natural principles.  But the supernatural or theological virtues (as identified by Paul in the New Testament) are directed to man's supernatural happiness--his eternal salvation and knowledge of God--and this surpasses human nature, because it requires divine revelation: these theological virtues "are not made known to us, save by Divine revelation, contained in Holy Scripture" (Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 62, a. 1).

Since Smith has no interest in the possibility of supernatural happiness, he is only concerned about how religious belief might support those natural virtues that promote natural human happiness in our earthly life.  For Smith, religious belief seems to be both supportive and subversive of our moral sentiments.  The religious belief that God shares our natural moral sentiments can strengthen our morality.  But religious fanaticism can promote violence and intolerance taht corrupt our morality.  What we need, then, Smith argues in The Wealth of Nations, is "that pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism, such as wise men have in all ages of the world wished to see established" (793).  This could be achieved if government dealt equally and impartially with all religious sects, and everyone was free to choose his own religion.  There might be a free marketplace of religions, with hundreds or thousands of different religious sects competing for believers; and if no sect was allowed to use violent coercion against any others, the competition for believers could induce "philosophical good temper and moderation," such as one could see in Pennsylvania, where the Quakers had established religious liberty, and the law does not favor one sect over others.  Thus did Smith embrace John Locke's policy of religious toleration, but unlike Locke, Smith did not deny toleration for atheists.

As I toured Bogota and read about the history of Colombia, I wondered about whether the evolution of religion in Bogota might illustrate Smith's natural history of religious morality.  My wife and I travelled to Zipaquira, a city about 30 miles outside of Bogota, to see the Salt Cathedral, an underground cathedral carved out of salt in an old salt mine.  I later learned that one of the oldest archaeological sites in Latin America--El Abra--is located on the eastern edge of Zipaquira.  This is a rock shelter and cave system for hunter-gatherers that is dated at around 12,400 years BP (Gomez Mejia 2012).  They lived by hunting mammals such as deer, fishing, and gathering plants.  There is also evidence within this occupation zone that beginning about 5,000 to 3,000 years BP, the people here began cultivating and domesticating plants.

There is some evidence of religiosity in their funeral burials, which include artifacts associated with offerings.  As I have indicated in some previous posts, the evolutionary history of religious belief and morality beginning with hunter-gatherers is complicated.  The anthropological evidence--as surveyed by John Lubbock and others--suggested to Darwin that our earliest human ancestors in foraging societies had no belief in any omnipotent, moral God who was "a Creator and Ruler of the universe."  In that sense, they had no moralistic religion.  But they did show the nascent religiosity of animism--the belief that all of nature is animated by unseen spiritual agencies--although these unseen spirits did not actively intervene in the lives of foragers to enforce morality.  At the earliest stage of religiosity, Darwin observed, "anything which manifests power or movement is thought to be endowed with some form of life, and with mental faculties analogous to our own" (Darwin 2004, 116-117).  This anthropomorphic animism as the original source of religiosity was also suggested by Smith: "Those unknown intelligences which they imagine but see not, must necessarily be formed with some sort of resemblance to those intelligences of which they have experience" (TMS, 164).

Recent surveys of the studies of hunter-gatherer societies have shown that some form of animism is universal.  Belief in an afterlife and shamanism are almost universal--in about 80% of these foraging bands (Peoples, Duda, and Marlowe 2016; Sanderson 2018).  Of course, the hunter-gatherers that have been studied by anthropologists over the past 200 years are not necessarily direct analogues or direct descendants of our Pleistocene ancestors, but they do at least provide a window onto those earliest human ancestors (Marlowe 2005).  Belief in an afterlife is the belief in the survival of the individual personality after death (Bering 2006).  Shamanism is the belief that a shaman has access to an unseen world of spirits, that he can enter into a trance state in a ritual to practice divination and healing, and thus mediate between the earthly and spirit worlds (Eliade 1964; Singh 2018).

Notice that this animistic and shamanistic religiosity of our original hunter-gatherer ancestors does not provide any religious enforcement of morality, because the beings in the unseen spirit world are not omnipotent and moral deities actively concerned with monitoring human life.  Only very recently in human evolutionary history, Darwin observed, have human beings come to believe in an all-seeing and moral God, and this has contributed to the advance of morality.  This cultural evolution was driven by group warfare in which groups that were cohesive because of their shared religious belief in moralistic Gods would tend to prevail over groups that lacked such religious beliefs.  And now this belief in morality as rooted in reverence or fear of God is "most important, although not necessary."  Now it is possible for people to live by their own moral judgment.  "Man prompted by his conscience, will through long habit acquire such perfect self-command, that his desires and passions will at last yield instantly and without a struggle to his social sympathies and instincts, including his feeling for the judgment of his fellows" (Darwin 2004, 138-40, 682; Darwin 1959, 94-95).

In this way, according to Darwin, the evolutionary history of morality and religion has passed through three stages.  First, in the earliest and longest stage, human hunter-gatherers organized their lives in small bands through social instincts such as kinship and reciprocity, without any need for a religiously grounded morality.  Then, as human beings formed large, civilized societies, they formulated through cultural evolution religious traditions of believing in an omnipotent and providential God who enforced a moral law for human beings.  Now, it is possible for many human beings to live by the inner monitor of their conscience (or what Smith identified as the "impartial spectator") without the necessity for believing in a God who rewards the good and punishes the bad.  Over the past 40 years, the growing research in the evolutionary psychology of morality and religion has largely confirmed Darwin's account (Norenzayan 2013, 2014; Norenzayan et al. 2016).

One can see these three stages in the history of morality and religion in the history of Bogota and Colombia.  When my wife and I toured the Gold Museum (Museo del Oro) in Bogota, we saw beautiful displays of pre-Columbian gold artifacts from all regions of Colombia.   Many of these artifacts were from the Muisca, the indigenous people of the Bogota savannah before the Spanish conquest.  The Muisca replaced the El Albra Culture sometime between 1,000 years BC and 500 AD.  The Muiscas moved moved from being hunter-gatherers to becoming sedentary farmers.  When the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, the Muisca were organized as a tribal confederation with each tribe ruled by a chief.  The tribes united in the face of a common enemy under the command of one ruler.  They fought against the Spanish, but they were completely defeated by 1540.

The moral and political order of Muisca civilization was grounded in their religion.  There is a good animated video about the religious creation story of the Muisca.

They worshipped a variety of deities at sacred sites and in temples, with priests performing sacrifices.  Their gods included a Supreme Being who had created light and Earth, and gods and goddesses of the Moon and the Sun..  Their rituals included consuming psychotropic plants such as coca.

All of this was swept away after the Spanish conquest when the Spanish established the Catholic Church as the state church for their Latin American colonies.  After the struggle for independence from Spanish colonial rule, Simon Bolivar captured New Granada in 1819; and he was elected the first president of the Republic of Gran Columbia.  The Catholic Church was still the state church, but there was a continuing debate over whether the Church should remain the established church.  

Colombian politics has been dominated by two political parties--the Conservatives and the Liberals--and while the Conservatives have been in alliance with the Roman Catholic Church, the Liberals have wanted a separation of church and state.  In 1848, Ezequiel Rojas, a leading liberal thinker, wrote an influential newspaper article supporting the candidacy of Jose Hilario Lopez as president, which is generally seen as the beginning of the Liberal Party in politics.  In his article, Rojas declared:

". . . the Liberal Party wants a government organized to benefit the governed.  It wants a republic, a truly representative system, an independent congress, an executive branch with powers limited by law and responsible for an independent judiciary, good laws, and an unmistakably national and American executive power with impartial justice for all, which by its actions takes into account nothing but the public benefit.  It wants all this so the obedient will not be slaves to those who govern; so there can be true liberty; so we can liberate ourselves from theocratic government; so those of Granada can truly ensure ownership of themselves and their properties" (Rodriquez and Ramirez 2022, 148).

This began a long liberal period dominated by the Liberal Party in government--from 1848 to 1880--during which the liberal effort to "liberate ourselves from theocratic government" led to assaults on the power of the Catholic Church and to constitutional guarantees for religious liberty in the Constitution of 1863.

But then when the Conservatives gained office in 1880 with the presidency of Rafael Nunez, they overturned many of the liberal reforms, including a restoration of the Catholic Church's supremacy.  In 1888, the Conservative Party government signed a concordat with the Vatican that began by declaring:

"The Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion is the religion of Colombia; the public powers recognize it as an essential element of social order, and they are obliged to protect it and make it respected."

A hundred years later, this was reversed by the Colombian Constitution of 1991, which disestablished the Roman Catholic Church and declared (in Article 19) that "freedom of religion is guaranteed."

In travelling around Bogota today, one can see evidence for a deep Christian, and particularly Catholic Christian, culture.  The Catholic Cathedral and the giant statue of Jesus standing on the peaks of Monserrate overlook the entire city.  In the Cathedral on Monserrate, there is statue of Jesus behind the altar that has been associated with many miracles.  People come from far away to make a pilgrimage to there, where masses are conducted every day.  On Sundays, the Cathedral is full.  Around the city, my wife and I went into some of the beautiful old churches, and there were always some people there praying or attending mass.

Surveys indicate that 90% of Colombians identify themselves as Christians, 70% identify as Catholic.  But less than 30% of the Catholics regularly attend mass.  It seems, therefore, that while Christian religious practice is greater in Colombia, and in most of Latin America, than is the case in North America and Europe, even there the tendency to secularization has been strong.

I am reminded of Smith's letter to Alexander Wedderburn (August 14, 1776), in which he reports on Hume's decline towards death.  Smith said that Hume told him that he was trying to come up with some excuse to give to Charon to delay his being carried into Hades on Charon's boat: "At last I thought I might say, Good Charon, I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of people; have a little patience only till I have the pleasure of seeing the churches shut up, and the Clergy sent about their business; but Charon would replay, O you loitering rogue; that wont happen these two hundred years; do you fancy I will give you a lease for so long a time?  Get into the boat this instant."

Was this Hume's joking way of suggesting that he foresaw the churches being shut up in maybe 200 years--towards the end of the 20th century?  Can't we see a lot of evidence that that decline in fervent religious belief and practice has been occurring in many parts of the world?

And if so, can we also see that the moral order of society has endured without much support from religion?  Can we see that Smith was right that for some people, perhaps even for many people, the impartial spectator of conscience, as part of our evolved human nature, can take the place of God as moral monitor?  

Can we be good without God?

Or should we take seriously the complaints of the Catholic Integralists and the Christian Nationalists that in fact secularizing liberal societies are showing moral decline and social disorder, and that the only way to restore moral order is to establish theocratic states that will enforce Christian morality?

REFERENCES

Bering, Jesse. 2006.  "The Folk Psychology of Souls."  Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (5): 453-498.

Darwin, Charles. 1958.  The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. Ed. Nora Barlow. New York: Norton.

Darwin, Charles.  2004. The Descent of Man. New York: Penguin.

Eliade, Mircea. 1964. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gomez Mejia, Juliana. 2012. "Analysis of Bone Markers of Stress in Populations of the Middle and Late Holocene of the Savannah of Bogota, Colombia." Colombian Journal of Anthropology 48: 143-68.

Marlow, Frank W. 2005. "Hunter-gatherers and Human Evolution." Evolutionary Anthropology 14: 54-67.

Norenzayan, Ara. 2013. Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Norenzayan, Ara. 2014. "Does Religion Make People Moral?" Behaviour 151: 365-84.

Norenzayan, Ara, A. F. Shaariff, W. M. Gervais, A. K. Willard, R. A. McNamara, E. Slingerland, and Joseph Henrich. 2016. "The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39: 1-65.

Peoples, Hervey, Pavel Duda, and Frank W. Marlowe. 2016. "Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion." Human Nature 27: 261-82.

Rodriguez, Sebastian, and Gilberto Ramirez. 2022. "Liberalism in Colombia." Econ Journal Watch 19 (1): 142-65.

Sanderson, Stephen K. 2018. Religious Evolution and the Axial Age: From Shamans to Priests to Prophets. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Singh, Manvir. 2018. "The Cultural Evolution of Shamanism." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41: 1-61.