About Robert Wright.
He was born in 1957, grew up in Lawton, Oklahoma, son in a Southern Baptist family. He also lived in San Francisco as a boy, and other places as a so-called "Army brat." He attended Texas Christian University and then transferred to Princeton, graduating in public and international affairs. He became a journalist and Editor at The Sciences and later at The New Republic. He has also written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Times. He was also an editor at the Wilson Quarterly. Since 2005 he has launched Bloggingheads.tv, a current events diavlog with discussions conducted via webcam online. Wright also has a video-on-Internet entitled MeaningofLife.tv during which he interviews a number of scholars, theologians, scientists and cosmic thinkers about their ideas on religion and spirituality.
He is a prolific writer about science, evolutionary psychology, history, religion, and game theory. His books include: Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information. HarperCollins, 1989
The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. Vintage, 1994.
NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny Vintage, 2001
The Evolution of God Little, Brown, 2009.
The last three books have websites.
Wright describes himself as an agnostic. He is currently a visiting scholar at University of Pennsylvania and is a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New American Foundation. He is married and lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and two daughters.
Please click read more to see a summary of some of the tenets of this book and the groups' discussion.
Our discussion of this book was rather freewheeling as sometimes occurs. I will make an attempt to summarize some of the basic tenets of this book, The Evolution of God and some remarks made by the group. It should be remembered that the majority of the group did not read this book. Dave K did and presented a summary.
Wright's first chapter discusses the primordial faith. This had its origin in hunter-gatherer groups existing greater than 10,000 years ago. These groups usually consisted of 40-50 individuals. They were nomadic, following food sources. As their curiosity and intelligence developed, their need to understand their natural surroundings slowly developed into a religion which is called animism. These early semi-religious ideas placed spirits or gods in animals and inanimate objects such as rocks, the moon, clouds, the sun. These spirits or gods were not all powerful and behaved much like the people themselves did. They became angry, were peeved, over-reacted, and sometimes acted irrationally. These ancient people had basic questions that have not been satisfactorily answered to this day: the main such question is: Why do bad things happen to good people? Human beings even 10,000 years ago needed to try to understand these natural events, and they needed an expert. They also wanted some way to lessen the suffering and control their world better. These two needs produced the shaman -- the local priest and healer for the hunter-gatherer group. Wright discusses these important individuals and how they became a shaman and how they developed their power within the group in detail in Chapter 2.
As people came together into larger groups, they became tribes and the leader of the tribe became a chief. These groups of people encompassed anywhere from 100s to several thousand people, sometimes scattered in smaller groups over larger territories, such as separate islands in the South Pacific area. These groups existed about 7000 years ago. Anthropologists call these groups chiefdoms. They were agricultural or subsistence in nature, also including fishing. These peoples did not have writing. Religion evolved somewhat further in these groups sometimes using the shaman but also investing religious authority in the chief. Religious practices dominated the daily life of these people such that every action of daily life was ruled by what the spirits or gods would want. Some of the practices were brutal up to and including human sacrifice. But one positive aspect of these groups was their social cohesion. It seemed that the religious ideas and the almost divine nature of the chief helped this social organization evolve. However, probably the gods and spirits were still much like people, unpredictable and without a true moral base.
Chapter 4 discusses the next evolutionary steps that humankind took. People gathered into ancient states and developed cities still surrounded by agricultural production. These ancient states also carried social organization one step further. Humanity developed writing during this time allowing recorded history to develop. There were rules and laws, punishment, and more social organization. However, the gods were still much like those of the chiefdoms. They were often not paragons of virtue and still behaved in unpredictable and often brutal means. The main change in the gods is that they had become more powerful and were capable of very destructive forces (which included all natural disastrous events). They still invested a lot of their authority in the main leader of the people i.e. the king like figure, or pharaoh. Yet among all these states and their religious evolution, by the third and second millennia BCE, there were occasional places where moral consideration to people of other lands and other races had started to appear. An ethical code was starting to appear. And also in some of these states, there were examples of a universal religion in the state. But these two characteristics of religion would not be combined thoroughly for several millennia.
In the next section and starting with Chapter 5, Wright begins to consider what is the main body of the whole book: i.e. the three religions that had their origin in the patriarch Abraham's story: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. First Wright considers the Israelites of which we read in the Hebrew Bible. The Bible story that most of us know from Sunday School has Yahweh, the Hebrew god appearing as a monotheistic god in a revolutionary manner. It includes the story of the Israelites breaking out of Egypt, wondering the desert and then appearing in Canaan, conquering the local people and establishing their monotheistic religion. But both an understanding of the Hebrew Bible and decoding it and archeological evidence in the region does not support this story. First of all the Bible was written at different times and not in chronological order. Some was written close to the time of the occurrences and some was written centuries later. All of these writings were greatly influenced and sometimes reedited by the political status on the ground. Sometimes some tolerance and ethical virtues were shown, depending on the level of tolerance shown at the time of the writings. But overall, the Hebrew Yahweh and his religion were characterized by intolerance and belligerence. Monotheistic tendencies took a long time to become established. For millennia, polytheism existed beneath the purported overall influence of monotheism. The local people maintained their own favorite gods and even the kings often reverted to a local favorite God. Baal was one of those that kept reappearing. The evidence for these statements is in the Bible. Not all of such evidence has been edited out of the writings. Also archeological evidence does not show signs of conquest by the Israelites. Instead both of these bodies of evidence suggest that the Israelites were really local Canaanites and their religion gradually infiltrated the region. It was therefore evolutionary, and not revolutionary. There was a stage called monolatry before monotheism, where other gods such as Baal existed but the leadership maintained that Yahweh was better and the other gods didn't deserve the respect of the chosen people, the Israelites. And at various times that worship of other gods was brutally discouraged.
Historically, perversely, monolatry moved to monotheism for the Israelites under what on the surface would seem to be strange circumstances. King Josiah of Judah had big dreams of uniting southern and northern Israel into a restoration of King David's old empire with Yahweh as the only God. But terrible things happened: Josiah was killed by Egyptians, and the Israelites had to submit to outside states that overran them and subjugated them -- first the Egyptians and then the Babylonians. When King Zedekiah of Judah rebelled against the Babylonians, they brutally killed him and his sons and burned Yahweh's temple to the ground, and transferred Israel's upper classes to Babylon, beginning the Babylonian exile. This was in full swing in 586 BCE. Strangely enough, in exile, the Yahweh theologians were able to transform that disaster into progression to monotheism for the exiled Israelites. They had to answer that old question of why bad things happen to good people and somehow they spun things such that Yahweh not only survived but grew stronger and became the only God for the Israelites in exile. Somehow the believers in Yahweh as the only God turned calamity into a symbol of God's universal power.
Now comes Christianity. Christianity teaches that Jesus himself founded a religion that provided a way to have individual salvation, to help individuals reach transcendence through love of their neighbor, tolerance, and love of God. But Wright maintains that when the actual teachings of Jesus Christ are decoded and closely read, Jesus was really putting forth teachings that he hoped would provide social salvation in his time. His words were supposed to provide leadership for a movement that would triumph over evil right there then in Palestine. He wanted these same ideas of love and tolerance to help the people of 30 AD Palestine survive and suffer less at the hands of the political and social subjugation that the Roman Empire was responsible for at the time. He was not supposed to die before that was accomplished, not according to what people of that time believed about the Messiah. But just as the Yahweh-alone leaders in Babylon turned catastrophe into a symbol of God's universal power, the followers of Christ turned his death into a symbol of God's universal love. It took future teachers of the Christian faith such as the apostle Paul and writings back and forth between different factions of the new Christian faith to establish the more lasting and far reaching basis of Christianity as we know it today. In some cases, the writers had to twist the teachings of Jesus to make it look like that's what he wanted from the beginning. Also Wright gives two chapters to consider the writings of Philo of Alexandria, a Jew and Greek citizen there, who Wright feels provided a very strong and the first bridge between Athens and Jerusalem -- between the rational and scientific nature of Greek thought and the theological beliefs as symbolized by Jerusalem for both Judaism and Christianity. He credits Philo with a basis for establishing thought patterns that allow science and religion to coexist harmoniously.
In spite of persecution, proselytizing outweighed its effects, and Christianity grew until, in 312 Emperor Constantine by winning a battle under the symbol of the cross, ushered in an era of tolerance for Christianity. By the end of that century, Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire and pagan religions were gunned.
In Chapters 14-18, Wright considers the third Abrahamic religion, Islam. First he considers the Koran. It is a scripture that is quite different than the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. First unlike those holy books that were written by multiple writers over centuries of time, the Koran reflects the oral proclamations of one man, Muhammad, provided over 2 decades of time. However, again these are not in chronological order. This possibly explains some of the vacillation between words of tolerance and words of belligerence, advising to kill all Infidels. If you can read the suras (chapters) in chronological orders you can understand a little better how Muhammad's career and the birth of Islam unfold. Then we see that even though the Koran was written over 2 decades of time, still like the Bible it encompasses wild fluctuations of moral and ethical tone. It is felt that the Koran reflects time from 609 AD when Muhammad was 40 and was in the habit of retreating to a mountain for contemplation to a later time when Muhammad has become a statesman over an infant Islamic empire. Some of the Koran is felt to be written by Muhammad himself, some by other writers reciting his words within 20 years of his death. However, even so, it is postulated that at least some of the more belligerent passages especially toward Jews, like the Bible may have been amended or interpreted differently after his death.
Another reason for the vacillations may be that Muhammad was rejected in his home city of Mecca. He was trying to get a religion going and sometimes was belligerent in his talk to try to accomplish that. Not until he moved to Medina was he more accepted. And eventually he became more statesman-like in his behavior. Still some passages from the Koran might have been intended to shake up the social status quo to advance the new religion. The same thing happened with Jesus; he sometimes tried to shake up the people in his teachings and in his behavior. Whatever, it worked. Within a decade of Mohammad's death, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine had passed from Byzantine to Islamic hands, and the conquest of Iran, the heart of the Persian Empire had begun. In the quarter century after Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina, possessing less power than the mayor of a small town, an Islamic state formed and became a multinational empire.
Wright considers the question whether Jihad as we tend to interpret the concept today is proposed or called for in the Koran. Some say Jihad which means "struggle" may mean more a struggle to bring God into your own life. However, like the Bible, you can find both tolerant statements and belligerent statements in the Koran reflecting the state of policies and circumstances on the ground at different times during the writing and later editing of the Koran scriptures. In the end, Wright does not feel we can find the answer to jihad in the Koran. It has been in times since the writing of the Koran that Jihad has been put forward by Islamists like Osama Bin Laden. It is a more modern concept. But if you specifically look for passages in the Koran to support this interpretation, they can be found.
The final section of the book is called: God goes global (or doesn't). In this section, Wright asks what we can learn from all this extensive history of the development of religion and "The Evolution of God." Wright says, "When people see their fortunes as inversely correlated with the fortunes of other people and see the dynamic as win-lose, they tend to find a scriptural basis for intolerance and belligerence. When they see the relationship as non zero sum, i.e. as positively correlated, see the potential for a win-win outcome, they are more likely to find the tolerant and understanding side of their scriptures. Some of this type of arrangement has already taken place between peoples of the three Abrahamic faiths. But it seems that just a win-win situation is not enough. We need to actually put ourselves in the place of the opposition and walk in their shoes. This is more than moral truth; it is moral imagination. All members of all Abrahamic faiths need to give up something that all have been guilty of -- a feeling that their own self, own group, own faith is special and better than the others. If we can achieve this, perhaps we can place larger and larger groups of people of diverse beliefs within our circle of moral consideration. "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. Time has drawn us toward the commonsensical-sounding yet elusive moral truth that people everywhere are people just like us."
Again, I would comment that this book is an exhaustive look at the history of God and of religion, which attempts to get us to understand where some of the conflicts of today come from and also makes some small steps toward figuring out a solution to those conflicts. Moral truth which equals some combination of moral imagination and social organization must be obtained or chaos will rule. Only time will tell if humanity today can move toward moral truth. There has been movement in that direction historically as evidenced in this book, but we are not there yet.
Interestingly, the current issue of EnlightenmentNext, a magazine of spiritual advancement edited by Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilbur, has a brief interview with Robert Wright asking him about this book, The Evolution of God. I cannot print this interview in this post due to copyright issues, but I will bring a hard copy for everyone to the next meeting. I will also try to email a copy to the list of emails on our attendance list.
Some comments during our meeting led to this quote from the book: "Wright says that love and truth are two manifestations of the divine. By participating in them we are participating in the divine."
One thing that this book produced: a strong sense of humility in me. It was a difficult undertaking to read major parts of this book and summarize them for this blog. Humility: At the last meeting Dick Y. turned to me and said, "Humility is only one of the many qualities that make me so great!"
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