Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God"

This book walks a fine line between books that advocate religion and those that denigrate religion. Wright takes a neutral, evolutionary viewpoint and looks at the history of relgion. He starts with paleolithic tribes who made up stories about gods and spirits to explain the mysterious forces around them. He looks at the emerging city states where governance and religion are intermingled. He takes a close look at Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to see how they came into being and evolved.

His analysis is purely naturalistic but he keeps commenting that he is sympathetic to a religious impulse and see the broad evolution of religion as a symptom of the shaping of evolutionary forces. As our social groups get larger and our relationships are non-zero-sum, there is a pressure to cast religion in a tolerant mode. When things get bad and relationships are zero-sum, then religions become intolerant.

He does a good job of looking at the historical facts about the three major Abrahamic religions. I learned a few new things. I'm sympathetic to his line of argument.

My only complaint is that his style is a bit repetitive and turgid. I would have preferred a deft hand that moved more quickly while taking time to highlight the key points. I guess I'm getting lazy in my old age, but I don't see the point of making the reader wade through pages of text to try to discover the key themes of the writing. I prefer an expository style of (a) tell 'em what you are going to tell 'em (b) tell 'em and (c) tell 'em what you told 'em. Graphs and charts would be helpful. Any tools to help the reader wade through a lot of fairly monotonous text.

For me, the key point can be found in this extract from late in the book:

To say that other people are people, too, may sound like an unremarkable insight. But it is one that is often ignored, and one that is in some sense unnatural. After all, any organism created by natural selection is, by defult, under the illusion that it is special. We all base our daily lives on this premise -- that our welfare is more important than the welfare of pretty much anyone else, with the possible exception of close kin. Indeed, the premise is that our welfare is much more important than the welfare of others. We work hard so we can afford dessert while other people don't have dinner. We see our own resentments as bona fide grievances and we see the grievances of others as mere resentments. And we are all like this -- all of us walking around under the impression that we're special. Obviously, we can't all be right in any objecive sense. The truth must be otherwise. The extension of moral imagination brings us closer to that truth.

So, in the end, the salvation of the global social system entails moral progress not just in the sense of human welfare; there has to be, as a prerequisite for that growth, a closer encounter by individual human beings with moral truth. And this is an inevitable outcome of human history. It isn't inevitable that we'll prevail -- that our species will get close enough to moral truth to attain salvation. But is was an inevitable outcome of history's stubborn drive toward growing non-zero-sumness that we would at least face this predicament: either move closer to moral truth or descend into chaos.

And this:

... as natural selection ground along, creating more and more intelligent forms of life, it eventually created a form of life so intelligent as to give birth to a second creative process, cultural evolution; and as cultural (especially technological) evolution proceeeded, the human species exhibited larger and larger expanses of social organization, and eventually this expanse approached global proportions; and in the process there appeared a moral order, linkage between the growth of social organization and progress torward moral truth. This mortal order, to the believer, is among the grounds for suspecting that the system of evolution by natural selection itself demands a special creative explanation.

This suspicion may be wrong, but the argument behind it is intelligible and legitimate -- parallel in structure to the argument that, before Darwin, provided motivation to search for the theory of natural selection. And if the believer, having concluded that the moral order suggests the existence of some as-yet-unknown source of creativity that set natural selection in motion, decides to call that source "God," well, that's the believer's business. After all, physicists got to choose the word "electron."