The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(54)
I sensed that Jane was lost in the beauty of the experiences she was describing. When she looked back at me again, I asked her whether she thought chimpanzees ever had similar feelings.
“When food is plentiful and the chimps have fed well and are content, they certainly have time for thinking. When I watch them gazing up through the canopy, or lying in a comfortable nest ready for the night, I’m always wondering what they are thinking, freed for a moment of planning where they will go for their next meal. And I do think it’s possible that they have a similar sense of wonder, of awe. If so, it could be a very pure kind of spirituality—or at least a precursor of the kind of spirituality that we are talking about that is free from words.
“At Gombe there is a glorious waterfall, the Kakombe Falls, where the small stream plunges eighty-three feet, twenty-five meters, down a vertical groove worn by the falling water into the hard gray rocks of the cliff. There was the roaring sound of the falls on the rocky, gravely streambed, the constant breeze caused by the air displaced by the falling water. Sometimes as a group of chimpanzees approaches the falls, their hair bristles with excitement and they perform a wondrous display, standing upright and swaying from foot to foot, bending to pick up and throw rocks ahead of them into the stream, climbing the vines hanging down the rocks, and pushing out into the spray-laden breeze. After such a display, which may last at least ten minutes, they may sit gazing up at the water as it falls and watching it as it flows past them and away. Do they perhaps experience a similar emotion to the awe and wonder that I feel when I sit by that spectacular fall, listening to the thunder of the water as it crashes down onto the streambed?
“It always makes me realize the importance of our spoken language,” Jane went on. “If the chimpanzees really do have this sense of awe, and if they could share this feeling with each other with words—do you see what a difference it could make? They might ask each other, ‘What is this wonderful stuff that seems alive, that is always coming, always going, always here?’ Don’t you think that these questions could have led to the animistic religions, the worship of the waterfall, the rainbow, the moon, the stars?”
Kakombe Falls. (JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE/CHASE PICKERING)
“So you think that formal religions may have derived from those animistic religions,” I said.
“I can’t answer that, Doug. I’d need to be a scholar of religion, wouldn’t I?”
“But you do believe in a spiritual power, a Creator—God—and that you were born into this world for a reason?”
“Well, it seems so. There are really only two ways in which to think about our existence on Earth. You either agree with Macbeth that life is nothing more than a ‘tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing’—a sentiment echoed by some cynic who said that human existence is nothing more than an ‘evolutionary goof.’ Or you agree with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin when he said, ‘We are spiritual beings having a human experience.’”
Although I often see myself as secular and not necessarily a believer of any particular religion, I was moved and inspired by what Jane had said, and I was intrigued to explore the views of a scientist—watching my father die had raised questions that I wanted to try to answer. So I pressed Jane to tell me more about her beliefs.
“Well, I do not try to persuade anyone to believe, as I do, that there is Intelligence behind the creation of the universe, a spiritual force ‘in which we live and move and have our being,’ as the Bible puts it. I can’t tell you why I believe this—I just do. And this is what truly gives me the courage to carry on. But there are many people leading ethical lives, working to help others, who are neither religious or spiritual. I’m just talking about my own beliefs.”
Jane told me that many scientists, like Einstein, have come to the conclusion that there is “Intelligence” behind the universe. She said there have been more who proclaim themselves agnostic than atheist. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, who led the team that worked on unraveling the human genome, began this work as an agnostic but was compelled to believe in God because of the awesome complexity of the information sent to every cell in the human embryo. Information that instructed it to develop into part of a brain, or foot, or kidney.
We discussed this for a while, and Jane confided that she truly welcomes this convergence of science and religion and spirituality.
“Because, you know, Doug, for some people I think that their religion is their only hope. Imagine if you have lost your whole family in war or some other disaster. That you are destitute. You arrive in a foreign country that agrees to take you in. You know no one. You cannot speak the language. What helps such people, I think, is if they have their faith. It is a firm belief in God—or Allah or whatever name they use—that gives them the strength to keep going. My wise mother told me that, as I was born into a Christian family, we talked about God, but that if we were a Muslim family, we’d worship Allah.
“She said there could only be one supreme being, the Creator ‘maker of heaven and Earth’ and it didn’t really matter what name was used.”
“So you think there is a heaven?”
Jane laughed. “Well, it depends on how we define heaven, I suppose. I don’t believe in angels playing harps and all that sort of thing, but I’m sure there is something. Surely we shall see again those we have loved—definitely including animals! And also being able to understand the mysteries because we shall be part of them, part of the great pattern of things, but in an integrated way. I have experienced almost mystical moments of awareness when I have been alone in nature that might foreshadow the sort of heaven I like to imagine.”