Transcendental Materialism?

	Book review on The evolution of God by Robert Wright (2009) Reviewed by Chris Lyons, 2009 published in Network Review No 101
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This is the third book in which Robert Wright expounds his idea that, beginning from a purely materialist standpoint, meaning, teleology and even divinity, can be discerned in the world.

In his book The Moral Animal (1994), he showed how love and compassion can be plausibly explained by evolutionary theory alone. Beginning with a mother's loving feelings for her children, empathy extends to other family members through the mechanism of kin selection, and then, through the process of reciprocal altruism, to include friends and neighbours. In Nonzero (2000), he traces the development of human societies from hunter-gatherer groups to villages, chiefdoms, city-states and empires, to demonstrate how Game Theory, particularly the dynamics of non-zero-sumness, can explain that, as technological advances bring people into ever closer contact, and with it the opportunities for cooperation, their circle of consideration and compassion gradually, if fitfully, expands, till becoming global.

In the present book he turns his attention to God, and asks whether "religions in the modern world (can) reconcile themselves to one another and to science". He believes they can, and contends that if the ever expanding circle of human compassion is driven by natural selection and game theory, it suggests that the moral sense is transcendent of humans and built into the fabric of the universe itself. He sees in this an intimation of something that might be called 'God'. It's a different idea of God from the theistic one held by most believers, but it provides some compass for orientating our moral direction. It also avoids the problem of how an omnipotent, loving God can allow evil, and it's congruent with our scientific understanding of the world.

But if science can be reconciled to a world-view that can be legitimately described as religious, there remains the problem of how the different religions, particularly the three Abrahamic ones, can ever be reconciled with each other. To tackle this he embarks on a history of religion that fills most of the book's five hundred plus pages. He starts with the shamanic practices of hunter-gatherer communities, but thereafter focuses mainly on the development of Judaism, Christianity and Islam with only occasional references to Hinduism and the religions of East Asia. The author is erudite, and the book well researched. The style though is easy, and the text peppered with his wry wit, (in reference to a tribe in central Australia, he quips "one of the shaman's jobs was ensuring that solar eclipses would be temporary-nice work if you can get it.").

His thesis is that when people feel threatened - are in zero-sum relationships with their neighbours - their gods (and scriptures) are belligerent, but when they have something to gain from being cooperative - are in non-zero-sum relationship - their gods and scriptures take on a more tolerant tone. Thus in the age of Josiah, the Book of Deuteronomy has Yahweh saying of the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites and Perrizites "you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them". Whereas later, after the Exile, when Israel and its neighbours had all been pacified and become part of the Persian Empire, we have a kindlier Yahweh saying to Jonah, of their ancient foes, the Assyrians, "Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons..." He gives similar examples in the life of Muhammad, contrasting his gentler pronouncements during the Meccan period with the more intolerant ones when, in the Medinan period, he'd acquired political clout. He likewise explains the rapid spread of Christianity (which he regards as largely the invention of St Paul) to the well developed communications of the Roman Empire and the additional opportunities for non-zero-sum relationships that they facilitated.

His conclusion is that throughout history humans have invented gods in their own image, and that whether they were tolerant or belligerent depended not on eternal truths, but on what was going on 'on the ground'; principally, whether they were in zero-sum or non-zero-sum relationships with their neighbours. Furthermore, in our own day, and in like manner, the scriptures of these ancient faiths will be cherry-picked for their tolerant or belligerent passages for the very same reasons. The way to avoid religious strife, therefore, is to not worry too much about the theology, but to get the right political conditions operating on the ground.

His further conclusion, however, is that whilst the gods were human inventions and illusions, the idea has been so modified and refined throughout the ages that it has taken on transcendent validity.

"On the one hand, I think gods arose as illusions, and that the subsequent history of the idea of god is, in some sense, the evolution of an illusion. On the other hand: (1) the story of this evolution itself points to the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity; and (2) the 'illusion', in the course of evolving, has gotten streamlined in a way that moved it closer to plausibility. In both of these senses, the illusion has gotten less and less illusory."

The book is an ambitious attempt to reconcile religion with science, and religions with each other. Whether it succeeds will depend upon the extent to which the author's perspective is attractive to either the scientific or religious communities. Nevertheless, it's an engaging perspective, and one, I think, that thinking people should try on for size.

Dr. Chris Lyons is a GP and a member of the SMN Board.

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