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242 of 266 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well-Researched, Judicious, and Enlightening, June 10, 2009
This new book from acclaimed author Robert Wright is a well-researched one covering a great deal of territory. It should be read in its entirety to be properly understood. In it he discusses the history of religion with a focus on western Abrahamic faiths, although not entirely neglecting eastern religions. He tells us in the Introduction that he's giving us a human "materialistic" account of it, although he thinks doing so "actually affirms the validity of a religious worldview," though not a traditionalist one, but one nonetheless. Wright argues the gods arose as illusions and that "the subsequent history of the idea of god is...the evolution of an illusion." This evolution points to the existence of a "divinity," he argues, even though this god is not one that most believers currently accept. As it evolved it has "moved closer to plausibility." (p.4).
Wright begins with the five types of primitive hunter-gatherer supernatural beings: elemental spirits, puppeteers, organic spirits, ancestral spirits, and the high gods. These primitive gods were not always worshipped but treated as we would treat other human beings. In these societies the Shaman was the "first step toward an archbishop or ayatollah" who had contact with these otherwise hidden forces and could help focus their powers to heal, protect, and provide.
As small tribes grew into larger societies the chiefdom was the next evolutionary stage where there was a need for a "structural reliance on the supernatural." Chiefs in these agricultural societies were conduits through which divine power entered the social scale down to the lesser folk. If things went well for a society then the chief was doing a good job. Superstition reigned in these days.
With the arrival of the city-states, kings needed divine legitimization and used the gods to solidify their rule over the people. The king was now the conduit of divine power. The character of the gods could differ between city-states, but many of them demanded human sacrifices or else there was chaos. Along with this development came moral obligations, which if they were not met caused sickness and death. In these city-states there was competition between rival cities and along with them rival gods. This had a tendency for these polytheistic people to elevate their god above others, which was a step toward monotheism.
When Wright turns to a discussion of the emergence of Abrahamic monotheism it appears to me he is at his very best. In decoding the biblical texts from how we normally read them beginning with Genesis, he finds good evidence that behind what we see on the surface is a different story of Yahweh who was just one god in a pantheon of early gods. Yahweh starts out with a body, for instance, and was given the people of Israel to rule over by Elyon, the highest god in the pantheon. Originally Yahweh was probably one of the Canaanite deities, he argues. When it comes to the Israelites themselves, Wright argues from archeological evidence that they look more and more like Canaanites who originally worshipped Baal and Asherah, rather than some people who invaded Palestine after leaving Egypt.
In a fascinating discussion Wright argues that this Hebrew god evolved into a monolatry, which was a "way station on the road to full-fledge monotheism." Monolatry didn't deny the existence of other gods, it just affirmed that Yahweh was the highest of those gods in the pantheon. This was achieved mostly by King Josiah, who sought to solidify his reign and centralize worship in Jerusalem. Josiah even had his reforms written in much of the book of Deuteronomy.
When Judah was carried away into captivity by the Babylonians the exiled Jewish theologians made the most of their disaster. Based on good reasoning and scholarship Wright shows how they thought about such a complete and utter disaster and why they came to the conclusion that Yahweh was the one and only God. If it was Yahweh's will to bring the mightiest empire of their day to so utterly destroy them for their sins, as they did, then Yahweh was bigger than they had ever thought. "A god who governs the actions of the greatest known empire is a god who can govern history itself." (p. 171).
But this God of theirs was not yet thought of as a good God. That was the next evolutionary stage to take place, and Wright sees this coming from the writings of Philo of Alexandria, who urged a tolerance for other gods at about the same time Jesus was preaching.
But even Jesus did not think of his God as a loving God, Wright argues. In Mark's first gospel Jesus is portrayed as one who "believes you should love your neighbors, but that isn't to be confused with loving all humankind. He believes you should love God, but there's no mention of God loving you." (p. 258).
The Apostle Paul, however, is described by Wright as the "apostle of love," not only because he penned I Corinthians 13, known as the "Chapter of Love," but also from other things he wrote. It was Paul's version of Christianity that eventually won the day in Constantine's multiethnic empire because it favored ethnic harmony, Wright argues.
Wright sees the same evolutionary trend in Islam. First Allah "transcended tribal distinctions," as Yahweh did before him. Then he acquired the "multinational perspective of an empire," even to the point when in places the Koran grants the possibility of salvation to people "outside the fold." (p. 436)
Wright concludes that in our day "we've reached a stage in history where the movement toward moral truth has to become globally momentous." In short, God has some "some growing to do," (p. 436), and Wright seems confident this will happen, given what he wrote in his previous book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Whether he can be this optimistic depends on the case he made there.
In the end, traditionalists will not like this book, and he admits this. Wright's god seems to be an abstract god as "the source of the moral order" (p. 446), and in such a belief he finds his god, although he holds out hope this god is also a personal one.
Other thinkers have argued God will become unnecessary and will evolve out of existence in the human mind, but whether or not that will happen is yet to be seen. In any case this is a judicious treatment that will surely provoke controversy. It's also enlightening. Hopefully his book will contribute to the ongoing evolution of the idea of God. And maybe it'll contribute to his evolution out of existence, too.
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I'm the author of "Why I Became an Atheist," and the forthcoming edited book, "The Christian Delusion."
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65 of 72 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Can Wright be wrong?, July 13, 2009
The Evolution of God
In 2000 Robert Wright published Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny to some acclaim. In it he argued that there is a favorable direction to human history attributable to increasing opportunities for non-zero-sum interaction where both parties gain something, versus zero-sum situations where one party may gain, but only at the expense of the other. Social structures grow to take advantage of these situations, he contended, and build incrementally toward supranational governance. He concluded that "...it is hard, after pondering the full sweep of history, to resist the conclusion that -- in some important ways, at least -- the world now stands at its moral zenith to date."
Now comes The Evolution of God, where Wright further elaborates his contention that moral progress is ingrained in the course of history. In it Wright offers a materialist analysis of changing portrayals of gods and God, sure to aggravate conventional believers of many faiths. But he also asserts that history shows there might be something like a God force behind moral improvement, a position that many religious skeptics are likely to reject.
Wright's thesis entails three basic propositions. The first is that God evolves. By this Wright means not an actual God, whom he generally treats as illusory, but rather peoples' conceptions of gods and God. The "evolution" he writes about is mostly cultural evolution, although he includes an appendix on the possible biological roots of religion.
The bulk of the book is devoted to his tracing the history of gods from hunter-gatherer societies through chiefdoms, polytheistic kingdoms, the evolution of monolatry and monotheism, and then the scriptural presentation of God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Wright is interested mainly in how gods may have felt about cultural outsiders, about "others" not part of one's own group. He emphasizes how gods have alternated between coaxing their followers to destroy designated others and urging accommodation and acceptance of people with different beliefs.
Wright proposes that whether gods were seen as belligerent toward out-groups or not often depended on the political needs of societal leaders at the time. When leaders perceived zero-sum conflict situations in relations with other groups it was useful to have one's own gods offer some encouragement to rally the troops. But if there were non-zero-sum opportunities in possible alliances, say through trade or military coalitions, then it became useful to be more ecumenical, to accept to some degree others' gods as well as one's own. For instance, one way of accommodating polytheistic gods when political coalitions were built was to make them into a clan of gods, related to each other.
His historical analysis of the cultural evolution is not as strong as it could be, not least because he leaves out a big chunk of time. While he relies on relatively modern evidence from hunter-gatherer and chiefdom societies, draws on certain contemporary events, and offers limited comments on the intervening centuries, he focuses mostly on the developmental period preceding about 700 AD. After Constantine, for instance, we hear very little of how the evolution of God may have played out in Christianity through the administration of churches and states.
Wright's second basic proposition is that there is a moral trajectory in history, expanding opportunities to realize the good. "The march of history challenges people to expand their range of sympathy and understanding, to enlarge their moral imaginations, to share the perspective of people ever farther away," he claims. He concedes that it is not inevitable that we will get closer to moral truth, but he believes that growing non-zero-sumness is forcing us to face up to it or to otherwise descend into chaos.
He allows that there has not been simple linear progress, but contends that there has been an advance through fits and starts, some forward, some backward. Yet since again he barely skims the past 1300 years, his assertion that history demonstrates moral progress remains highly questionable, unproven at best.
Wright's third basic proposition relies on the first two. He says that if there is a moral order (Proposition #2) and if conceptions of God have evolved to support it (Proposition #1), it does not necessarily mean there is a God; but, he asserts, these conditions are evidence in favor of the God hypothesis (Proposition #3).
Even if gods arose from illusions, he suggests, the evolution of the illusions "points to the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity." He is not arguing the God hypothesis is true -- he is merely offering it up for consideration as plausible.
Wright's reasoning is dubious. From his questionable assertion that there has been moral progress it is a big leap to claim, as he does, that it reflects a purposeful historical goal. Patterns do not necessarily imply purposes. And only after he has smuggled in the idea of purposeful history is it possible for him to speak of a source of the purpose. A "purpose" by its very nature has an agent, some sentient entity capable of intent, at least in our common understanding. Where we see purposes we see agents, just as Wright does here. There are further flaws in his logic, including reliance on a false analogy between propositions about God as the source of moral order and physicists' postulation of electrons to help explain the behavior of matter.
So Wright's conclusion that the evolution of the concept of God and moral progress in history constitute evidence for the God hypothesis is unconvincing. Nevertheless, The Evolution of God is likely to sell well, and perhaps it should. Certainly the title and subject matter are fashionable, in both their evolution and God dimensions. Wright deserves credit for the ambition of this work, for its sweep and boldness. The Evolution of God will make readers think, if only to marshal their responses to the parts where they believe Wright is wrong.
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57 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Religion: explained purely naturally, or not?, June 23, 2009
Robert Wright is an intellectually curious journalist and a fine writer whose previous books (The Moral Animal & Nonzero) I enjoyed. Wright's new book explores the character of religion through history, and, marshalling scholarly research, shows how religious ideas developed in response to changing social and political circumstances. The explanations make no appeal to the supernatural. But Wright sees progress (however haphazard and intermittent) in the moral dimension of religion through time, which leads him to speculate that this phenomenon actually points to the existence of something worthy of being named divine.
The bulk of the book is an interesting run through research findings from anthropology, archaeology and textual analysis on the topic of historical religious ideas and practices. The tour begins with a look at hunter-gatherer style animism and the role of gods and religion in tribal cultures, continues with an examination of the development of the various pantheons of gods in ancient civilizations, and then tackles the Abrahamic traditions. In all cases there seems to be a plausible explanation of prevailing religious ideas and the character of God or gods changing in concert with the "facts on the ground". As nations make war, their gods intone contempt for non-believers. As empires digest conquests, they co-opt the gods of their new subjects. More positively, as societies enter into non-zero sum relationships with a wider circle of neighbors, their gods become more universal and more supportive of a broader moral vision.
Wright also presents his own thoughts on what it all means. First off (repeating the theme from Nonzero), Wright argues that with the passage of time, humans have expanded their circle of moral consideration, and that this constitutes an arrow of moral progress through history. However, it seems hard to point to the evolution of our ideas regarding gods or God (more loving, less vengeful), and say that this adds anything to the story of moral progress. His analysis doesn't provide evidence that religion drives moral progress - it seems to mainly reflect it.
Nevertheless, in the final section, Wright proposes that the existence of an historical arrow of moral progress might be evidence for an objective moral order which transcends nature. He argues that even if the traditional idea of a personal God seems highly implausible given naturalism, it might nonetheless point (however imperfectly) towards truth. His arguments for this position aren't strong, however, consisting as they do of analogies and a repeated appeal that something special must be going; I don't think many traditional materialist-atheists will be convinced.
This is unfortunate because I think his intuition is sound. I think that any naturalist worldview needs to be expansive enough to account for first person experience and the meaning and values which arise from our engagement with the world. In any case, I admire Wright's contribution in these books. And in particular I find his vision of moral progress to be inspiring. We can all hope that the forces of globalization in today's world might promote peace, as we expand our circle of moral concern to finally cover the planet.
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