The evolution of God

Lisa Miller discusses Robert Wright’s forthcoming book, The Evolution of God, in Newsweek:

[Robert Wright]  argues that the scriptures of the three Abrahamic faiths were written in history by real people who aimed to improve things—economic, social, geographical—for their constituencies. (And then he exhaustively, minutely catalogs who those writers were and what those specific aims might have been. This is not a book to read on the beach this summer.) But he never argues that what he calls a materialist view of scripture disproves God. Instead, he takes another approach: as our societies have grown more complex and more global, our conceptions of God have grown more demanding and more moral. This is a good thing, for religion can “help us orient our daily lives, recognize good and bad, and make sense of joy and suffering alike.” Wright is optimistic even about Islam in today’s world: “The ratio of good to bad scriptures varies among the Abrahamic faiths, but in all religions it’s possible for benign interpretation of scripture to flourish.”

Though he never comes right out and declares that the human propensity for morality—and, by extension, truth and love—is given by God (or is God), he comes awfully close. In an imaginary debate with a scientist, he compares God to an electron. You know it’s there, but you don’t know anything real about what it looks like or what its properties are. Scientists believe in electrons because they see the effects of electrons on the world. “You might say,” he writes in his afterword, “that love and truth are the two primary manifestations of divinity in which we can partake, and that by partaking in them we become truer manifestations of the divine. Then again, you might not say that. The point is just that you wouldn’t have to be crazy to say it.” (I can already hear Steven Pinker typing like mad.)

Read the full review here, and see a previous here & there post about Andrew Sullivan’s review of this book, with a link to an excerpt.