75th Annual Solomon Freehof Book Review
The Evolution of God
By Robert Wright
The story is told of an apikorus – a heretic, if you will – certainly for the purposes of this story – an atheist who once boasted that he could confront the local rebbe with incontrovertible evidence that God does not exist. The villagers warned the rebbe of the impending confrontation. The apikorus then entered the rebbe’s chambers, expecting to silence the rebbe with his strong arguments.
But the rebbe’s opening word silences the apikorus. What does the rebbe say?
“Efshar – Perhaps.”
The apikorus is thunderstruck. All his arguments against God, all of his certainty melts away. The humility of the rebbe – his admission that he lacks all of the answers, that he doesn’t claim certainty, even in faith, teaches the apikorus the foolishness, not of his ideology, which the rebbe doesn’t debate, but of his close-mindedness, his refusal to recognize the absence of monopolies insofar as truth is concerned.
I love this story because its lesson of humility bespeaks a deep holiness.
For when those of us – and I suspect there are a good number here today who are in this camp – who honor our doubts – or perhaps, better, when those of us who are at peace with our uncertainty – when those of us who are comfortable with our lack of certitude – are met with the overconfidence of the true believer, we are often dismissed as atheists, or perhaps, even worse, as liberals. As people who in failing to adhere to a given belief, will succumb to any belief.
But rather than cow to the overconfidence of some, I prefer to cast my lot with the sages of Jewish Tradition who taught that it is precisely our recognition that not a one of us possesses complete knowledge that allows those of us who are open to it, to learn from all people.
“Who is wise?” ask the Rabbis.
Their answers? The one who learns from all people.
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As we learn in the early collection of Midrash known as Pesilela de Rav Kahana – “God is an icon which never changes, yet everyone who looks at it sees a different face.”
Or as the Kotzke Rebbe in the 18th Century put it: “If one’s concept of God today is exactly as it was yesterday, it is tantamount to our worshipping idols.”
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The lesson is twofold: Humility is a high value and Judaism’s understanding – or more accurately, Judaism’s understanding’s (plural) of God have never been static or fixed. Therefore, we need to grow comfortable with all we do not know.
Ours is a dynamic faith and as we change, as we evolve, so, too, does our thinking about God. And, as this is true for us as individuals, so is it true for our community and for Judaism as a whole.
And this – the fact that religion changes as people and society changes – is the central message of the book I should like to discuss with you this morning.
The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright is a magnum work. Among all the books published in the last few years, either castigating religion or defending it, tearing down belief in God or seeking to build God up, The Evolution of God, is to my mind, the most sophisticated of the lot.
And what is it that makes this book so significant? What is it about this book that so meaningfully contributes to our understanding of our world and religion’s place within it?
Robert Wright’s thesis in The Evolution of God is that theologies have changed over time to accommodate the increased interactions among cultures that come with a more complex world, and that this process of theological evolution has made the world a more moral place. But atop this claim, Wright makes a really remarkable metaphysical assertion, namely that this whole evolutionary process is driven by God, who is pulling society toward moral perfection.
Permit me to explain. But first a caveat. Whenever we speak of God, we must first agree that, as theologian Neil Gillman teaches, all human characterizations of God are metaphors borrowed from familiar human experience. Precisely because God transcends all human conceptualization, we can only think of God through metaphors. Our ancestors discovered God in their experience of nature and history. Those experiences as understood, interpreted, and then recorded in the Torah and the rest of Jewish classical literature serve as the lens through which we recapture the experience of God for ourselves.
And what’s more, among all the varied conceptions and descriptions we have of God, we need also to agree that no human being can have a totally objective and literally accurate fix on God. We have no photographs of God. That is what makes God “God.” To claim that human beings can comprehend God’s essential nature is to slip into idolatry, the cardinal Jewish sin. What kind of God could possibly be comprehended by the human mind and human language? Only an idol.
And thus, while our tradition provides us with a rich kaleidoscope of images and names for God, all descriptions of God are necessarily metaphoric.
And some of these idols we will like and accept as our own – and others we will not like and we will reject. And further, you and I will choose differently among them, and yet, let us agree that in all cases, whatsoever we say about God is at best only and exclusively – though they be our best effort – they are all metaphors.
Now, to Robert Wright’s thesis which forms the basis of The Evolution of God. Wright is a cultural evolutionist, who studies how ideas and how culture gets transmitted and evolves over time. And so in discussing the history of religious development, Wright provides a clear –eyed description of how animism developed into organized religion, and how the conception of God morphed from pantheism on to monotheism. The trick is to see that gods are “products of cultural evolution,” he argues, and that “the tone of scripture is set by the circumstance of its creator.
Religion begins as an illusion, Wright posits. God is in that tree, said the Ancients. Or God is that tree, or that storm cloud or the sun or that person, and then over time God evolves. In The Evolution of God, Wright has done extensive homework and recounts the history of the Abrahamic faiths in detail, beginning with the animism of early hunger-gatherers and moving through polytheism and monolatry (the worship of several gods with one dominating) to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, ancient and modern...all the way to present day monotheism as you and I conceive of it.
In broad strokes, originally polytheism was the natural form of religion, then monolatry and then monotheism – not necessarily in a linear path. Rather, and this is Wright’s most significant contribution to the religion debate, or more aptly, this is his most original contribution to the God debate, Robert Wright suggests that as culture has changed as a result of advances in technology and trade, commerce and conflict, whether it went up or down... Wright argues that, as cultures change, so, too, did religion change. And in particular, as societies become more sophisticated and interdependent, moving away from narrower more isolationist concerns, so, too, did religion and the ideas of God within various religious traditions become more tolerant and nuanced and open to the mutual exchange of ideas.
Wright calls these types of interactives – “Non-Zero Sum Games.” According to this theory, a “zero-sum” game is one in which a victory requires a loss for the opponent. All sports are zero-sum games. A “non-Zero-Sum” game, by contrast, can lead to win- win, or lose-lose, situations. Bargaining for a car is one example. According to Wright, non-zero-sum dynamics promote the increasing complexity of human societies. As the human species spread over the world, its creativity led to inventions such as writing, printing presses, railways and computers. These technologies allowed societies to share each other’s advances, and so the world became more complex and interdependent.
And when this happens, as societies and the world they inhabit become more interconnected, the religious traditions these societies have long held become more open to the ideas held by others. In other words, when groups of human engage in “win-win” behavior, God is tolerant and loving; when one group loses (like the Hebrews often did), God starts talking about enemy-smiting.
The conception of God as expressed in the Hebrew Bible, The New Testament and the Koran are driven by what Wright says are the political and economic situations of the writers of those texts, not by any divine revelation handed down from on high. When the Scripture writers perceived their fortunes to be intertwined with the fortunes of others – a win-win relationship – the God in the texts became more tolerant and benign. But if the writers perceived win-lose scenarios – that their people’s fortunes were inversely related to the fortunes of others – their God appeared more belligerent.
The God of all three Western Abrahamic monotheists is faiths, Wright opines, over time grew progressively more tolerant of other faiths and nations, and therefore, came increasingly to be understood as less vengeful, albeit with some back sliding here and there.
Why? Because as people’s social interaction expanded, people increasingly saw their fortune as interrelated. In short as people and societies grew up, their ideas of God grew with them.
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Wright’s thesis is that there is indeed a progressive direction in the evolution as societies interact and become more complex, their religions interact too. These interactions are either zero-sum (when people of different faiths are in social conflict) or non-zero-sum (when different faiths feel they have something t gain by cooperating.) “And so,” says Wright, “cooperation breeds tolerance.”
Over time, Wright sees non-zero-sum relationships predominating, and so theology becomes more tolerant. This is what he means by “the evolution of God.” God does not evolve but doctrine does. In other words societies, at least those societies embracing the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – keep getting better, more ethical.
Now two questions (at least two questions necessary), flow from this:
I. Has religion become more ethical over time? Has morality increased
within societies dominated by the Abrahamic faiths? And,
II. If the first question about morality or ethical behavior increasing is
answered with the affirmative, is this evidence for God?
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In answer to the first question about whether religion has become more ethical over time, which is to ask if culture, if we – if humans – have become more ethical over time? Wright says – Yes.
Certainly there has been a kind of net moral progress in human history – and certainly religion has played a role in that progress.
I, myself, am not so sure. A little reflection shows that the career of religion in the history of morality is mixed, or worse. There are certainly fine ethical teachings in all the faiths. But since the fourth century B.C.E., philosophers have shown convincingly that our considerations of what is moral or immoral cannot be derived from religion. In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates argues that the statement “God is good” has meaning only if we have a standard of good that is independent of God. If it were otherwise, anything that God sanctioned would be good by definition. And clearly the God of the Bible mandates slavery and capital punishment for disobeying parents ... and surely we can agree that today we no longer consider such notions ethical simply because they occur in __________ ______________.
Thus, we need to look elsewhere to determine what is right – and religion must be viewed not as the origin of morality, but rather as a vehicle for conveying moral values or feelings that arise elsewhere.
And this, I think, is where Wright offers his most meaningful contribution to current thinking about the significance of God to religion.
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At the end of the day, while it is a comforting thought to believe there is a God who created the world for a purpose – replete with a divinely-ordained, moral order and that somehow amidst all that plagues and bedevils our world, there is yet a being who is guiding us to right action. I concede this is a comforting belief – and yet Wright provides no more evidence for this idea than we had before his book went to press.
And yet, Wright tells us in spite of the fact that – and here I quote, “the God I have been describing is a God in “quotation marks” – remember God began as an illusion and there’s no reason to believe that this isn’t the case even to this day.
After all, at best what we can say about God is based in metaphor – and thus, “Maybe, just maybe,” Wright offers...”Maybe the growth of ‘God’ signifies the existence of God. That is: If history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral truth and their God as they conceive their God, matures accordingly, becoming morally richer; than maybe this growth is itself evidence of some higher purpose... and maybe – conceivably – the source of that purpose if (is?) worthy of the name divinity.”
Thank you.
Questions?
