New review at Harvard Divinity Bulletin:
Given the enmity that recent works on evolution and God have fostered, pitting science and rationalism against spirit and faith—with “new atheist” celebrities casting believers as Scopes-era fools, and creationist culture warriors declaring natural selection the foundation of the Holocaust—Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God stands on remarkably conciliatory ground. There’s not only room enough for both, Wright argues, but they’re inextricably bound together in the story of human progress toward broader morality (however improbable that might seem today).
Wright’s argument, based on an exhaustive overview of religion’s path from “primordial faith” to universalistic monotheisms, isn’t for die-hard partisans of either camp. Wright, who has written extensively about science and religion, takes natural selection and evolution as bedrock fact and wastes no ink worrying culture-war causes. But he also makes a methodical and compelling argument for continuing to see scripture, or rather scriptures, as revelation of a sort. The holy books of the world and their prewritten forerunners, Wright argues, may not contain, within their endlessly revised and reordered stories, the revealed word of a God who created human morality. Rather, taken together, they unveil the slow and halting progress of humanity toward greater goodness and the constantly evolving identity of gods who don’t cause, but reflect, this transformation.
If, for believers, the bad news in Wright’s book is that man created God, the good news is that God’s growth over the millennia mirrors our species’ overall trend toward self-improvement. Wright argues against what he calls the “romantic view of religion as fallen—having been born pure only to be corrupted later,” and says that, from the beginning, religion has been the conflict-cultivating force it remains today. But if religion, for Wright, hasn’t been a solely positive force, nudging society toward selflessness and compassion, neither does he see it exclusively as a tool of social control wielded by the powerful. Rather, religious evolution has been a wobbling tale of slow progress toward cooperation, wherein “interfaith harmony [emerges] from enlightened self-interest.”
