Jeune Street

Over the past couple of weeks, I have come to the conclusion that Robert Wright is pretty much the smartest person on earth. I have been listening to diavlogs on bloggingheads.tv (the best of which is excerpted below), where he discusses his new book, The Evolution of God. It takes a look at how religion and society are engaged in a long dance of mutual creation throughout history. As social organization has grown increasingly complex, people have looked to religion to provide the moral framework for an evermore cosmopolitan society. Religion has also been used to justify violence, but Wright argues that both history and religion have a moral arc that is leading us towards a global society of mutual tolerance and exchange. People interpret their religious texts to justify relationships with outsiders when they see the benefit of doing so.

What’s interesting about Wright’s argument is that he simultaneously demolishes the false idols of religion while also upholding what is essentially good, true and universal about it. And he contends that the religions that thrive/survive in the long-run are those that enable us to expand our moral imagination to encompass those who are different from us — primarily because they help us to cooperate and trust each other enough to assure our mutual security. He does all of this within a secular framework, and ultimately comes out as an agnostic, cheering on the sidelines of humanity’s great religious drama.

It makes you wonder what kind of God Wright does believe in — especially when evangelical atheism has become newly-fashionable. He gets to this in his afterward:

Is there any hope for the believer who would like to be considered cool—or, more realistically, not too uncool? Maybe. After all, the version of God being ridiculed by the cool people is the traditional, anthropomorphic god: some superhuman being with a mind remarkably like our minds except way, way bigger (indeed, a god that, in the standard rendering, is omniscient, omnipotent, and, as a bonus, infinitely good!). And this isn’t the only kind of god that could exist….

Suppose, for example, that we accept as our abstract conception of God “the source of the moral order.” … Could it be that thinking of this source, and relating to this source, as if it were a personal god is actually an appropriate way for human beings to apprehend that source, even if more appropriate ways might be available to beings less limited in their apprehension?…

The bad news for the religiously inclined, then, is that maybe they should abandon hope of figuring out what God is. … The good news is that the hopelessness of figuring out exactly what something is doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Apparently some things are just inconceivable—and yet are things nonetheless.

Wright has been criticized for what some see as a sneaky intellectual maneuver, but the criticism arises from his lack of orthodoxy. He’s neither on the side of the atheists (whose natural selection arguments he appropriates) nor the traditional believers (whose dignity he upholds). Instead, he provides guideposts for stepping beyond the current impasse in the science versus religion debate. And he provokes more questions than he answers. But one thing is for certain: the fate of humanity is inextricably intertwined with our relationship to religion and the moral order it creates.