The Evolution of God, C2009

Here is a book everyone should read. In The Evolution of God, Robert Wright tells the story of how God evolved. He starts with the deities of hunter-gatherer tribes which were the norm 12,000 years ago, moves to deities of chiefdoms and nations, then on to the polytheism of the early Israelites, which was finally followed by monotheism that is the foundation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This book is thoroughly researched and extensively annotated. It really should be in my library and read again but I probably will not do that at this time--maybe later. 

 After extensive coverage of the Old Testament, Wright moves on to cover the New Testament and the Koran, before finishing off with the modern multinational Gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. 

My Notes:

 Pg. 15: Evolutionary psychology has shown that, bizarre as some ‘primitive’ beliefs may sound—and bizarre as some ‘modern’ religious beliefs may sound to atheists and agnostics—they are natural out-growths of humanity, natural products of a brain built by natural selection to make sense of the world with hodgepodge of tools whose collective output is not wholly rational. 

 Pg. 87: Hammurabi is famous for producing one of the first legal codes of the ancient world. Today law is sometimes thought of as an alternative to religion--secular rules of the road, enforced by police, with no need for supernatural support. But in ancient states, domestic law, like international law, drew strength from the gods. 

 Pg. 100: See Kings 19:15-18; 20:29-30. If you read the Old Testament carefully, it tells the story of a god in evolution, a god whose character changes radically from beginning to end. However, keep in mind that the bible is not in chronological order; for example, the first chapter of Genesis was almost certainly written later than the second chapter of Genesis, by a different author. 

 Pg. 214: What might qualify as evidence of a larger purpose at work to the world? For one thing, a moral direction in history. If history naturally carries human consciousness toward a moral enlightenment, however slowly and fitfully, that would be evidence that there is some point to it all. At least, it would be more evidence than the alternative—if history showed no discernible direction, or if history showed a downward direction: humanity as a whole getting more morally obtuse, more vengeful and bigoted. To the extent that ‘god’ grows, that is evidence of higher purpose. 

 Pg. 233: This criterion of credibility—call it the rule of theological inconvenience—is one reason biblical historians attach so much credence to the Crucifixion of Jesus. There is no written reference to Jesus being crucified until two decades after his death, but we can be pretty sure the Crucifixion happened, in part because it made so little theological sense. 

 Pg. 249: Hard evidence about the ‘historical Jesus’ is scanty. The Bible’s gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and words—the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—were written sometime between 65 and 100 CE, thirty-five to seventy years after his death. By that time, their raw material, stories then circulating about Jesus in oral or written form, had no doubt been shaped by the psychological and rhetorical needs of his followers. (The letters of Paul—New Testament books such as Philippians and Romans—were written earlier, beginning around twenty years after Jesus’ death. Unfortunately, they say almost nothing about Jesus’ life and very little about his words.) 

 Pg. 351: What Muslims call the satanic verses are not in the Koran. At least they are not anymore. According to Muslim tradition, they were uttered by the Prophet and thus entered scripture, but were expunged when he realized they had been inspired by Satan. Matthew 10:34-38: ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace but a sword. (35) For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in war against her mother in law. (36) And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. (37) He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. (38) And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. 

 Pg. 392: If you ask which book is ‘worse’ (i.e. the bible or the Koran) in terms of belligerence, you might say that qualitatively the Hebrew Bible (and hence the Christian Bible) takes the trophy—thanks to that unrivaled embrace of genocide in Deuteronomy—but that quantitatively the winner is the Koran, at least in terms of the frequency of belligerent passages, if not in absolute numbers. And if, on top of the verses espousing violence in the terrestrial world, you had verses gleefully envisioning the suffering of infidels in the afterlife, the Koran wins the quantitative completion more decisively. (note that the Christian notion of hell, a notion Muhammad inherited, had not fully crystallized by the time the gospels were written). 

 Pg. 431: Hebrew scripture depicts the Israelites as theological revolutionaries: they marched into Canaan backed by the one true god and vanquished the ignorant polytheists. In truth, Israelite religion emerged from the Canaanite milieu and was itself polytheistic; monotheism did not prevail in Israel until after the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE. 

 Pg. 462: Biological evolution is not the only great ‘designer’ at work on this planet. There is also cultural evolution, the selective transmission of ‘memes’—beliefs, habits, rituals, songs, technologies, theories, and so forth—from person to person. And one criterion that shapes cultural evolution is social utility; memes that are conducive to smooth functioning at the group level often have an advantage over memes that aren’t. Cultural evolution is what gave us modern corporations, modern government, and modern religion.