Great New Story
Robert Wright's Evollution of God
- - Posted on 2009-09-27 05:03:51.0
Written By: Wendell Krossa
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Robert Wright’s Evolution of God is a good read. Well researched look at the history of how people have constructed their views of the divine. It is similar in scale and detail to Armstrong’s History of God. Wright brings his unique insights on political/social influences that led to certain inputs to the creation of human views of God/gods.
I take a book like Evolution of God for what its worth. The author is a man with a limited perspective influenced by various things (just as we all are) and is trying to respond to the excesses and distortions of historical religion. He offers some useful facts on the historical process of forming views of the divine, much like Jesus Seminar research. And he responds in the end to what he sees as the prevailing materialist alternative by acknowledging their skepticism and tries to reason with this. He tries to offer balanced alternatives to both sides.
Interesting material on how Israelite religion grew out of earlier religions, paganism. Interesting argument that Yahweh grew out of a merger of El and Baal. Note the biblical references to God battling the god of the sea (Yamm) as Baal had. This is the storm god origins of Baal carried over into Yahweh.
Some interesting suggestion that the Israelites may have actually evolved from Caananites and not displaced the Caananites as in biblical tradition.
A quote from the Introduction, “On the one hand I think gods arose as illusions and that the subsequent history of the idea of god is in some sense the evolution of an illusion. On the other hand the story of this evolution itself points to the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity and the illusion in the course of evolving has gotten streamlined in a way that moved it closer to plausibility. In both of these cases the illusion has gotten less and less illusory”.
But all of us are dealing with profound mystery and reality beyond comprehending
Robert Wright affirms this retributive nature of the Biblical God in his book The Evolution of God. He notes the many anti-Babylonian exilic passages in the Old Testament and refers to them as “retribution theology”. It is very much an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth thinking. He says, “If the bibilical texts commonly considered exilic are indeed exilic, we can get a view of the forces that animated Israel’s first clear monotheistic impulse and a fleeting glimpse of the character of the one true god upon his birth. What kind of god was he? A candid appraisal of those texts makes it hard to conclude that he was what many contemporary Abrahamic believers would like to think he was: a morally modern god, a god of universal compassion. If you had to give a simple answer to the simple question that has hovered over this whole exposition- Was the Abrahamic god a god of peace and tolerance at the moment he became ruler of the universe?- it would be no….if you look at the earliest biblical texts that plainly declare the arrival of monotheism and you ask which of their various sentiments seems to most directly motivate that declaration, the answer would seem closer to hatred than to love, closer to retribution than to compassion. To the extent that we can tell, the one true God- the God of Jews, then of Christians, and then of Muslims- was originally a god of vengeance.” (p.177, 185). So also with the New Testament. Referring to the book of Revelation and the Christian attitude toward their enemies, Wright says, “When Christians faced oppression at the hands of Roman imperialists, they did what Jews had done when they faced oppression at the hands of Babylonian imperialists: dreamed of vengeance and enshrined the dream in theology” (p.187).
Robert Wright ends Evolution of God with some interesting discussion of, ’What is God’? He challenges the anthropomorphic concepts of gods created over history but then does an interesting comparison of believer’s intuitions about ultimate reality with scientist’s speculation about electrons. As with electrons, so with God, there are believers and skeptics.
He says, "Though the best we can do is conceive of this ’thing’ imperfectly, even misleadingly, conceiving of it that way makes more sense than not conceiving of it at all". This has to do with positing a source or cause of the patterns in life and in the moral world. God is the reason there is a moral dimension and a moral direction to life on earth. As he says, being human we will always conceive of this source in misleadingly crude ways. But it gives some moral axis around which to organize our lives.
And after appealing repeatedly throughout the book to the creating/designing power of natural selection, he finally gives some balancing comment at the end to put this materialist god in its more proper place as most likely itself created. It’s (natural selections) a crude and often misleading attempt by materialists to explain the myseteries of developing life and humanity.
He does admit the profound directionality of evolution.
Also, some comment on love leading to truth and this, "Though we can no more conceive of God than we can conceive of an electron, believers can ascribe properties to God, somewhat as physicists ascribe properties to electtrons. One of the more plausible such properties is love. And maybe, in this light, the argument of God is strengthened by love’s organic association with truth - by the fact that these two properties almost blend into one. You might say that love and truth are the two primary manifestations of divinity in which we can partake, and that by partaking in them we become truer manifestations of the divine".
Varghese said it much better - you do not get something from nothing and what exists comes from something with the same potentials and properties but only greater. This is a much more sane and reasonable explanation of love, truth, and all the rest that exists - personality, consciousness, complex life forms, and so on.
Wendell Krossa
1 comment
Yonker
2009-09-27 05:17:37.0