A couple weeks ago, James McGrath offered copies of Robert Wright’s new book The Evolution of God to the first five readers of his blog who contacted him. I was lucky enough to be one of those five, and there was a copy waiting when I arrived home from my Florida trip.*
I picked it up tonight and started reading the introduction. He writes
On one hand, I think that God arose as an illusion, 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 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 has moved it closer to plausibility.
I’m impressed – and reassured – to realise that there just may be other people who approach the whole “god” thing in the same way I do. Can’t guarantee it will continue to make sense to me, but that’s a very good start.
Filed under: Religion and Science
Robert Wright was interviewed last night on PBS’ “Bill Moyers’ Journal” (17 July). The interview is probably available on the PBS Website. When Wright said the evolution of God was by kind of natural selection, I think the analogy was beginning to stretch. (He didn’t talk about random drift, but did mention something along the idea of horizontal gene transfer without using the term).