Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

   Post 108.  March 08, 2020

  The Evolution of God

   The Progression of Human Understanding

 Robert Wright has written best-selling books on philo-sophical, psychological, and theological topics — Non-Zero : The Logic of Human Destiny; The Moral Animal : Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life; and Three Scientists and Their Gods : Looking for Meaning in the Age of Information. So this 2010 publication seems to be a continuation of his secular search for some rationale for the order within chaos that characterizes our world. Like Howard Bloom in The God Problem, he describes himself as a non-religious secularist, but not necessarily an Atheist. Although he says “’materialist’ is a not-very-misleading term for me”, and that he wrote this book “from a materialist standpoint”, he still concludes that the “religious worldview” may have some validity. “The story of this evolution itself points to the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity”. But quickly concedes “that the kind of god that remains plausible . . . is not the kind of god that most religious believers currently have in mind.” Instead, it seems to be the kind of First Cause Creator that Bloom called the “Inventor”, and that I call “G*D” or “Logos”.

At Princeton University, he studied Sociobiology, and later Evolutionary Psychology. So, Science and the evolutionary process seem to be essential to his worldview. Which is why he thinks that traditional belief systems should be open to change, just as Science is. Most scientists today though, and many philosophers, seem to believe that Religion is beyond hope for remediation. Yet, Wright notes that — despite the fact that the scientific method has dispelled the ancient concept of super-natural agents pulling the strings of natural events — world religions, and their “notion of the divine has survived the en-counter with science”. Many mainstream belief systems have reinterpreted their ancient doctrines to accommodate the idea that Nature seems to be on autopilot, and subject only to human, not divine, intervention. Since scientific cosmology has changed significantly since the Enlightenment, Wright concludes that “this ongoing adaptation is carrying science closer to the truth. Maybe the same thing is happening to religion”.

In this book, he seems to hope for a consilience1 between Science and Religion, with both making concessions to the other’s worldview. Somehow, the antithetical ancient philo-sophies of mundane Materialism and sublime Spiritualism must be reconciled to a progressive evolution of their fundamental beliefs about how and why the world works as it does. And in fact there are signs that such a Turning Point2 is near. Wright asserts that “the history of religion presented in this book . . . actually affirms the validity of a religious worldview. . . . The story of this evolution itself points to the existence of some-thing you can meaningfully call divinity.” He goes on to say about our ever-changing scientific paradigms that “ this ongoing adaptation is carrying science closer to the truth.” What that supposed “truth” is, he continues to elaborate in the chapter on “Moral Imagination”. Then he concludes that “Religion has gotten closer to moral and spiritual truth, and for that matter more compatible with scientific truth. Religion hasn’t just evolved, it has matured”.

                   Post 108 continued . . . click Next

How the concept of God has evolved

The Washington Post
Book Review

   Thank God for agnostics. Over the past decade, our public conversation about religion has all too often degenerated into a food fight between the religious right and the secular left. Now comes journalist Robert Wright with a gentler approach: a materialist account of religion that manages (sort of) to make room for God (of a sort). . . .

    The assumption underlying many answers to these questions -- an assumption shared by fundamentalists and "new atheists" alike -- is that religions are what their founders and scriptures say they are, rather than what contemporary practitioners make them out to be. Wright rejects this assumption. No religion is in essence evil or good, he writes. . . .

   The provocation comes when Wright claims that religious history seems to be going somewhere, as if guided by an invisible hand. . . .

1. Consilence :
   Literally, a convergence. The was term used by Sociobiology author E. O. Wilson to mean “agreement between the approaches to a topic of different academic subjects, especially science and the humanities”.

2, Turning Point :
   A 1982 book by physicist Fritjof Capra, who argued that materialist science was approaching a crisis, and that modern societies must accept and  develop the concepts of Holism and Systems Theory in order to deal with technological, eco-logical, sociological, and religious complexities. Ironically, most religions, especially in the East were already using such holistic approaches. His next book was entitled The Tao of Physics.

The Evolution
of God
Evolutionary Teleology

Robert Wright

Journalist, Philosopher

“The Story of this Evolution itself points to the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity”