The Evolution of God - by Robert Wright
About the Book
In The Evolution of God, Robert Wright takes us on a sweeping journey through history, unveiling a discovery of crucial importance to the present moment: there is a pattern in the evolution of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and a “hidden code” in their scriptures. Reading these scriptures in light of the circumstances surrounding their creation, Wright reveals the forces that have repeatedly moved the Abrahamic faiths away from belligerence and intolerance to a higher moral plane. And he shows how these forces could today let these faiths reassert their deep proclivity toward harmony and reconciliation. What’s more, his analysis raises the prospect of a second kind of reconciliation: the reconciliation of science and religion.
Using the prisms of archaeology, theology, history, and evolutionary psychology, Wright repeatedly overturns conventional wisdom:
Contrary to the belief that Moses brought monotheism to the Middle East, ancient Israel was in fact polytheistic until after the Babylonian exile.
Jesus didn’t really say, “Love your enemies,” or extol the good Samaritan. These misquotes were inserted in scripture decades after the crucifixion.
Muhammad was neither a militant religious zealot nor a benign spiritual leader but a cool political pragmatist, at one point flirting with polytheism in an attempt to build his coalition.
Wright shows that, however mistaken our traditional ideas about God or gods, their evolution points to a transcendent prospect: that the religious quest is valid, and that a modern, scientific worldview leaves room for something that can meaningfully be called divine.
Vast in ambition and brilliant in execution, The Evolution of God will forever alter our understanding of God and where He came from—and where He and we are going next.
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Reviews
Paul Bloom
“No Smiting,” The New York Times Book Review
In his brilliant new book, The Evolution of God, Robert Wright tells the story of how God grew up. He starts with the deities of hunter-gatherer tribes, moves to those of chiefdoms and nations, then on to the polytheism of the early Israelites and the monotheism that followed, and then to the New Testament and the Koran, before finishing off with the modern multinational Gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Wright’s tone is reasoned and careful, even hesitant, throughout, and it is nice to read about issues like the morality of Christ and the meaning of jihad without getting the feeling that you are being shouted at. His views, though, are provocative and controversial. There is something here to annoy almost everyone.
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Andrew Sullivan
“Light at the end of religion’s dark tunnel,” The Times of London
The possibility of a reasonable engagement between faith and reason, between doctrine and biblical scholarship, between a mature theology and a golden age of scientific research—all this seems very distant right now.
And that’s why a new book gives me hope. It reminds us that if you take a few thousand steps back from our current crisis, the long-term prognosis is much better than you might imagine.
The book is The Evolution of God (due out in the US next month) and it is by Robert Wright, a secular writer best known in America for thoughtful defences of evolutionary psychology and free trade. The tone of the book is dry scepticism with a dash of humour; the content is supple, dense and layered. What makes it fresh and necessary is that it’s a non-believer’s open-minded exploration of how religious doctrine and practice have changed through human history—usually for the better.…
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Gregg Easterbrook
“Belief Without Borders,” The Wall Street Journal
On any list of nonfiction authors that many people may not know but should, Robert Wright would rank high.… Taken together, The Moral Animal, Nonzero and The Evolution of God represent a powerful addition to modern thought.
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Stephen Prothero
“Preaching the Gospel of Maybe,” The Washington Post
Thank God or “God” or whatever matters most to you for this book … which offers the sort of hope even unbelievers can believe in: that we can somehow learn to talk about religion without throwing our food.…
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Dan Cryer
“Survival of the nicest,” The Boston Globe
As a lively writer, supple thinker, and imaginative synthesizer, Wright is bound to attract attention. His sprightly style deprives his subject of any solemnity. “Among the Aranda of central Australia,” he writes, “one of the shaman’s jobs was ensuring that solar eclipses would be temporary—nice work if you can get it.”
As a bold formulator he’s also a lightning rod for controversy. The Evolution of God, which explores permutations in our concepts of the deity, will please neither hard-core atheists nor fundamentalists of any faith. It’s too open to theism for the former, too rooted in scientific rationalism for the latter…
Wright’s description of Paul as an entrepreneur brilliant at expanding his Jesus “brand” throughout the polyglot Roman Empire may put off some Christians, but it provides a convincing account of why early Christianity was able to succeed among a Babel of competing deities.
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Peter Steinfels
“A Darwin for the Divine,” The American Prospect
The Evolution of God is a remarkable book, engaging, audacious, and provocative in an open-ended way … Wright is your favorite professor or high school teacher, teasing, debunking, taking the stuffiness out of learning.
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Steve Young
“The Evolution of God,” Library Journal
Making the best recent scholarship accessible to the general reader, Wright follows the historical trajectory from polytheism through monolatry (worship of one god among many) to monotheism, focusing primarily on the evolving vision of God in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an.… Wright’s approach will appeal to a broad range of readers turned off by the “either/or” choice between dogmatic atheism and religious traditionalism. Recommended for all readers engaged in consideration of our notions of God.
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John C. Snider
“The Evolution of God,” American Freethought
… offers a much more hopeful outlook for humanity’s future than, say, the kind of “religion spoils everything” absolutism of Christopher Hitchens.… Wright provides us with a book that will trigger passionate debate, although it does far more than that. The Evolution of God is a brilliant explanation of why the Abrahamic faiths are the way they are. The book is also peppered with Wright’s dry, deadpan wit.…
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David Klinghoffer
“Robert Wright’s Evolution of God,” Beliefnet
Luckily, Wright is not a professional academic but a scholarly journalist.… What I like about him, apart from the fact that he writes wonderfully readable yet learned prose, is his generosity to people of faith.…
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Margaret Quamme
“Philosopher sees hope in major faiths,” The Columbus Dispatch
The tone of Wright’s volume is lively, at times even snarky: Chapter titles such as “Well, aren’t we special,” “Yahweh’s sex life (and other myths),” and “God as Programmer” suggest its flavor. But the author isn’t simply out to slay sacred cows.… At its root, Wright’s argument places its faith in the development of moral imagination.… As the world grows smaller, and the connections among us more obvious, it’s harder and harder to see a difference between “us” and “them.”
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articles by Robert Wright
The Atlantic
“One World, Under God”
April 2009
Time
“Decoding God’s Changing Moods”
June 15, 2009
The New York Times
“A Grand Bargain Over Evolution”
August 22, 2009
Slate
“Do Shamans Have More Sex?”
July 29, 2009
The Huffington Post
“The Bible’s Vindication of Obama’s Middle East Strategy”
June 8, 2009
The Huffington Post
“Why the ‘New Atheists’ Are Right-Wing on Foreign Policy”
July 13, 2009
The Huffington Post
“The Trouble with the New Atheists: Part II”
July 20, 2009
television appearances
Bill Moyers Journal
July 17, 2009
The Colbert Report
August 18, 2009
The Charlie Rose Show
August 19, 2009
Morning Joe
September 3, 2009
text interviews
The New York Times Magazine
“Questions for Robert Wright: Evolutionary Theology”
by Deborah Solomon
May 29, 2009
Salon
“God, He’s moody”
by Steve Paulson
June 24, 2009
The Daily Beast
“How God Converted an Atheist”
by Jerry Adler
June 29, 2009
AlterNet
“What Makes Religion a Force for Good or Evil?”
by Terrence McNally
July 11, 2009
firedoglake
“FDL Book Salon Welcomes Robert Wright: The Evolution of God”
by John Horgan
June 28, 2009
Tikkun
“An Interview with Robert Wright”
by Paul Morton
July 6, 2009
Killing the Buddha
“The What of God?”
by Nathan Schneider
July 6, 2009
Washington Examiner
“Credo: Robert Wright”
by Leah Fabel
June 21, 2009
Religion Dispatches
“God Grows Up: Robert Wright’s Evolution of God”
July 29, 2009
podcasts
The New York Times Book Review
June 26, 2009
audio
Zócalo Public Square
June 10, 2009
audio & video
New America Foundation
June 15, 2009
video
“AirTalk,” Southern California Public Radio KPCC 89.3
June 11, 2009, hour 2 (starts at 21:00)
audio (click on “Airtalk” link)
American Freethought
July 1, 2009
audio (click on “podcast” link)
Homebrewed Christianity
June 29, 2009
audio
Be Spiritual (Unitarian-Universalist website)
July 31, 2009
audio
Mickey Kaus interviews Wright on KCRW 89.9 FM
July 14, 2009
audio
Bloggingheads.tv diavlogs
with John Horgan
“Cage Match of God”
July 5, 2009
with Mickey Kaus
“Mickey reviews Bob’s book” (topic)
July 3, 2009
with Ann Althouse
“Goddapalooza”
June 28, 2009
with Daniel Drezner
“Clueless But Godly”
June 20, 2009
with Tyler Cowen
“The Evolution of God”
June 17, 2009
with Karl Giberson
“The Elusive Hand of God”
June 7, 2009
with Mickey Kaus
“Bob’s new book incarnate” (topic)
May 27,2004
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