A long tradition of thinking tells us that due to man’s animal nature we need to have order imposed from above, in the form of religion. Without religion, we could not live together, and that is why all human societies believe in the supernatural and have developed one religion or another.
This view, which the biologist and primatologist Frans de Waal calls Veneer Theory, is an essentially pessimistic view «that morality is a thin veneer over a nasty human nature.»
