that our altruistic behavior is a consequence of the fact that our ancestors lived
in small-scale societies for a very long time, where people did keep record of
mutual favors and others’reputation; under such circumstances, chances were
great that most interaction partners were relatives. Since our moral intuitions
evolved in the distant, pre-historical past, we are acting on the (false) assump-
tion that our social behavior has direct consequences for our future chances of
cooperation (Price, 2008). Finally, the archeological site of Göbekli Tepe does
not constitute a historical proof of the“big god”hypothesis, even if one
interprets it as evidence for transition toward large-scale social organization
prior to agriculture. As Jens Notroff, Oliver Dietrich, and Klaus Schmidt
(2014) recently suggested, the large-scale building project of Göbekli posed
logistic and organizational challenges that resulted in the formation of a
clustered and hierarchical social structure as well as experimentation with
new food sources. We can add that the motivation for the project remains
open to interpretation; whether the people participating in it believed in
punishing“big gods”is a matter of speculation.
The respective solutions suggested by Boyer (beliefs in moral gods resulting
from morally relevant cognitive mechanisms) and the adaptationist camp
(beliefs in moral gods generating moral behavior and large-scale cooperation)
do not be have to be seen as mutually exclusive. Beliefs in moral gods could in
fact rely on evolved moral intuitions and such beliefs could become adaptive at
some later point of human evolution. Moralizing gods could help cooperation
in some societies even if they did not underlie the formation of large states in
general. Part of the problem of contrasting the two accounts of the origins of
the beliefs in moral gods is that they answer different questions. On the one
hand, scholars who look for a solution to the problem of cooperation perhaps
too readily accept an attractive solution (supported by religious common
sense, especially in the Abrahamic tradition) without considering less obvious
alternatives. On the other hand, the by-product theory is based on psycho-
logical studies (accompanied by an evolutionary narrative that is largely
optional) and is less interested in long-term social and historical processes.
8.4 MORALITY AND EXPLOITATIONIn evolutionary theory, the term“exploitation”is used as a value-free coun-
terpart of “altruism,” meaning that one party benefits from interacting
with another individual while reducing the other’s reproductive success
(Jones, 2007). Exploitation is not simply a reverse view of altruism,
behavior,”but not reflecting on the conflict with his own arguments about the positive effects of
monitoring (Norenzayan, 2013, pp. 13–32).
180 Cognitive Science and the New Testament