Humanities & Social ScienceNicholas Wade is moderately skeptical of Robert Wright's new book, The Evolution of God:
Robert Wright's new book, "The Evolution of God," has a provocative title. But it's a disappointment from the Darwinian perspective. He doesn't mean real evolution, just the development of ideas about God.He argues that our morality has improved over the centuries and that maybe the hand of the deity can be discerned in that progression, if one looks hard enough. But he leaves fuzzy the matter of whether he thinks a deity is there for real. There's a moral order in history, he says, which "makes it reasonable to suspect that humankind in some sense has a 'higher purpose.'" And maybe the source of that higher purpose, he writes, "is something that qualifies for the label 'god' in at least some sense of the word."
Wade has his own book coming out in the fall, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures.
Comments
It's the same problem as any other form of conflating Evolution to Intelligent Design.
Genes (information patterns in DNA) evolve; memes (information patters in human social structures) evolve. Big Fat Hairy Deal. Statistical mechanics and the suffices to give the mechanism for such evolution, a result of and as inexorable as the second law of thermodynamics. If you want to claim "purpose", you need to show how such conjecture of purpose allows a hypothesis more concise than the current minimum description length induction theory's hypothesis.
Posted by: abb3w | July 2, 2009 2:43 PM
I don't know if you've listened to his podcasts on this over at Bloggingheads. (There have been three) It sounds intriguing. I think he's vague about God in the sense of any kind of "personhood." He is a moral realist though but appears to think this is a structure that evolved in the universe itself.
I've not read Wright's book (although I am interested - but have too big a stack in my unread pile). However it sounds like he's not really thought the philosophical issues. My impression is that he's influenced a lot by William James although his view of God sounds pretty Peircean. It sounds somewhat similar to say Martin Gardner's views on God and the universe.
Posted by: Clark | July 2, 2009 6:14 PM