Darwinians Looking for Forgiveness – in Apes

Forgiveness, a seemingly distinctive human trait, must have its roots in ape social behavior, believe some evolutionary biologists.  According to MSNBC News, the state of Iowa got a lot of money for researching this topic:

Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, lead scientist, said the four-month project studying bonobos [pygmy chimps] will be funded by a $125,000 grant from the Richmond, Va.-based Campaign for Forgiveness Research….
    Savage-Rumbaugh said many people believe forgiveness is a concept which only applies to humans.  The research center’s hypothesis is that it is not a process of species, and that like other social behaviors, “forgiveness is a set of patterned interactions that can be imparted to a group by how its newest members are treated,” according to a news release.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

She believes that forgiveness cannot be understood deeply only by studying humans, “because we are too close to these processes in ourselves to objectify them.”

To an evolutionist, “patterned interactions” among individuals of a species are an emergent property of patterned interactions of molecules.  Since Ms. Savage-Rumbaugh appears to be operating with a naturalistic paradigm, forgiveness, to her, has its roots ultimately in hydrogen.  She could save a lot of money by looking for forgiveness among bacteria in a petri dish; it’s only a pattern of interactions, anyway, with no moral connotations.  Since morals have no absolute existence in the Darwinian mind (see “Morality without religion?” by Dave Miller on Apologetics Press), forgiveness is only a game that populations of organisms play (see 02/10/2004 entry).  No moral laws have been violated when a fungus or an elk or a pigeon have played the part of defector and other individuals punish it, or reward it with a behavior called “forgiveness” when it changes its strategy and decides to cooperate.
    You cannot objectify forgiveness without destroying it any more than you can quantify love in equations, or put the soul in a test tube.  This is the bitter end of naturalistic reductionism.  It destroys everything it touches: design, altruism, romance, self-sacrifice, morals, and now forgiveness.  Nothing is real any more.  There are only shadows and dreams emerging like phantoms from chemical vapors.  This means there is nothing really worth fighting for, worth dying for, worth living for.  Like detached robots, evolutionary biologists observe what happens when the organism is poked and prodded.  They take notes and then write them up in journals.  But then those very publications and any interpretations drawn from them are also phantoms of matter in motion, so why even read them?  There is nothing left but to keep the pleasurable neurotransmitters flowing.  Then the world at least feels good, till the terrorist or dictator comes with a different game and his own rules.
    If this is not the kind of world you want to live in, you had better help these researchers find forgiveness, because they need it.  Tell them they are looking in the wrong place.  It’s not in the bonobo cage.  It’s freely available everywhere outside the naturalistic cage in which they have imprisoned themselves, and they’ll never find it without the key.  That key is jealously guarded by the demons of pride and selfishness.  Defeat them, and the key to forgiveness is as near as the heart.  The key is repentance.*