The Evolution of God
Robert Wright, Joanne J. Myers
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Introduction
JOANNE MYERS: Good morning. I'm Joanne Myers, Director of Public Affairs Programs, and on behalf of the Carnegie Council, I'd like to welcome our members and guests, and thank you all for joining us.
The evolution of God is the subject of our discussion today. If there is anyone that is capable of tackling this complex subject, and can also provide a revolutionary new perspective on religion, it is our speaker, the world-renowned author Robert Wright. This provocative book was a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year and ranked among The New York Times Top 100 Notable Books of 2009.The Evolution of God is a natural progression of thought which flows from two of Professor Wright's widely acclaimed earlier works, The Moral Animal and Nonzero. In The Moral Animal, Professor Wright introduces us to evolutionary psychology and examines the ways in which the morality of individuals might be hardwired by nature, rather than influenced by culture. And in Nonzero, he argues that ideas from the mathematical field of game theory reveal how much of history was driven by the mutual benefits that accrue from human cooperation.
In his latest opus, Professor Wright takes on an even grander subject—religion. Beginning with a survey of the role of religion in hunter-gatherer societies, Professor Wright guides us through several thousand years of religious history to describe how religions and religious practices have evolved over time. This narrative of how the three monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—developed and exhibited moral growth through the centuries, follows a historical trajectory from polytheism to monotheism. Our speaker focuses primarily on the evolving vision of God in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur'an, and ends with a discussion of religion's place in human evolution.
What Professor Wright finds is that religious traditions are not static, but made up of many layers to which believers associate, attributing different meanings to these practices over time. Indeed, in all three religions, if you read the scriptures, you become aware that God has belligerent and benevolent faces, which we humans create to speak to our circumstances at the time. Professor Wright argues that it is this fluctuation which the survival of religion depends upon. In other words, it is the power of ideas, images, emotions, arguments, and charismatic or saintly examples which galvanize spiritual energies. As human civilizations have changed and progressed, humanity's concept of God has also changed.
The 21st century has not been kind to religion. We have seen how religion is capable of dividing us. But in its more mature forms, it's also capable of reminding us of what we have in common.
Although you may not agree with everything our speaker says this morning, his scholarly writings will forever change your views. Moreover, his optimistic belief that religion can play a role in allowing us to transcend our sense of self as separate creatures and, instead, tap into our shared welfare, leading towards a more benign global religious environment, is hard to disagree with.
Please join me in giving a warm welcome to an original thinker, our very special guest Robert Wright. Thank you for coming.
Remarks
ROBERT WRIGHT: Thank you, Joanne. Thanks, everybody, for being here. I'm grateful for two reasons. One is that you invited me to be here, and the other is, I traveled in from Princeton, and whenever New Jersey Transit delivers you anywhere on time, you're grateful. It's almost enough to give you religious faith.I should say at the beginning that evolution is not meant here in the sense of biological evolution, of course, but it refers to what anthropologists call cultural evolution—that is to say, changes in ideas, technologies, rituals. That includes changes in our ideas about God.
One thing I do in the book is chart changes in humanity's ideas about God over time. I start at the very beginning, back when, so far as we can tell, the world was populated by hunter-gatherer societies, all of which believed in more than one God. Polytheism seems to have been the original condition of religion.
Actually, interestingly, it did not have what we would call today a moral dimension. Religion seems not to have initially been about discouraging people from cheating and lying and so on. It did not have an ethical component originally.
That seems to be because in a hunter-gatherer society you don't really need that, especially. You have a small group of people. They know each other, interacting regularly, and they can pretty much keep each other honest. Whereas when you start getting more complex societies, with the invention of agriculture, more and more people, then you do start seeing religion play a role in ethics, which it didn't do originally. And now that's one of the main things we associate with religion.I should emphasize that as the story moves forward, I focus on the Abrahamic religions, the evolution of monotheism and the subsequent development of the Abrahamic religions—Islam, Christianity, and Judaism—but I should say that the ethical component enters religion broadly, polytheistic religions, as well as monotheistic religions, when societies reach a certain complexity.
The book is largely about the past, but the point of writing it is really about the present. There are two contemporary questions I was trying to look at with the book and answer by reference to the ancient world. They are both kind of reconciliation questions, you could say.
One is, can religion be reconciled with science? I'm not going to talk about that much today, although I'm happy to answer questions about it. The other is, can the Abrahamic religions be reconciled with one another? Can they get along? It's kind of the 9/11 question.The way I address that question is to ask the kind of generic question of what it is that brings out the best in religions, what it is that brings out the tolerant side of religions, as opposed to the belligerent side of religions and the intolerant side of religions. The premise is that if you find out what factors were conducive to tolerance in the ancient world, maybe those same kinds of factors are conducive to tolerance now.
I look at that question largely by reference to the ancient world and ancient scriptures. One way you could frame the question, as I address it in the book, is, how do you account for the kind of mood fluctuations of God that you see in the Abrahamic scriptures, in both the Qur'an and the Bible?
In the Qur'an, at one minute you will find God, speaking through Muhammad, advising Muslims that they should say to members of other faiths, "Look, you've got your religion; we've got ours. Can't we get along?"
At other moments, you will have God advising Muslims to kill unbelievers—although the verses that you see on the Internet prescribing that are sometimes taken out of context and are framed misleadingly. I may talk about that a little. But still, there's no doubt that there is a belligerent and a tolerant side of God in the Qur'an.And so too in the Bible. In, say, Deuteronomy you have God advising the Israelites that the way to handle neighboring cities that worship the wrong gods is to kill every man, woman, and child in the city, as well as the livestock. As the Bible puts it, "leave nothing alive that breathes."
At other times, though, you see the Israelites not only suggesting peaceful coexistence with a neighboring people, but actually validating that suggestion by referring to the other people's gods. So they say, "You've got your god, Chemosh; we've got our god, Yahweh. Your god gave you your land; our god gave us our land. Can't we get along?"So in both the Bible and the Qur'an you do see these two sides of God. The question I asked was, what is it that brings out the best and the worst in a religion? Why is it that people are sometimes inclined to think that their god wants them to kill other people and at other times are inclined to think that that very same god wants them to be very tolerant toward members of other faiths? That's very much the question we face today.
Before I get into my answer, before I tell you what circumstances I think bring out the best in religion, I want to emphasize that I do believe that the circumstances are fundamental, that there's no such thing as an intrinsically belligerent religion or an intrinsically tolerant one, that all religions have shown the ability to be either, depending on the circumstances. That's my bias. That's my belief. Not everyone agrees.
One way to make that point is to think back to 9/11. After 9/11 happened, people tried to make sense of it, and a lot of them went out and bought books. Some of them bought books about recent world events, the history of Arabian societies, and so on, and the sociological context in which some of the terrorists had grown up. Other people bought copies of the Qur'an to figure out what had happened, because they wanted to investigate Islam.
My bias is that you are going to get more illumination by reading the first set of books; by understanding the circumstances, the context in which these people live—the historical context, the social and economic context they had grown up in—than you would by just reading the Qur'an.
It's certainly true that there are belligerent verses in the Qur'an, and people can fasten onto them. But the way I would look at it, the Qur'an or the Bible, is that it's a menu of options. And the question is, why do people choose to focus on one kind of verse rather than another at any given time?The answer I came up with is really, I think, pretty commonsensical—I hope. The people who agree with it think it's commonsensical; the people who don't think it's crazy. The idea is basically that if members of one religion see members of another religion as people that they can, in some sense, do business with, can profit through interaction with, and they don't find them a threat to their material interests, then you are much more likely to see the tolerant side of the religion, whereas—and I dress this up in game theoretical terminology; I won't bore you with much of that. It's not, in a sense, essential. But that's called a non-zero-sum game.
When two people can both win through interaction, that's a non-zero-sum game. A zero-sum game is when one of them has to win and one of them has to lose. When you play tennis with somebody, that's a zero-sum game. Every point is good for one of you, bad for the other; whereas if you are playing doubles, your relationship with your teammate is non-zero-sum. Every point is good for both of you or bad for the other. So the sum of your fortunes doesn't add up to zero. They are either positive or negative.In real life, non-zero-sum games are seldom that simple, but you see them all the time—people doing economic exchange because they think they can both benefit or getting together to form a club because they have a common interest. There are all kinds of ways for mutual benefit to occur.
My argument is that if one religious group thinks that a relationship is fundamentally zero-sum, then you are more likely to see the belligerent side, if they think, "The only way we can win is for them to lose." So fights over land are zero-sum. I think sometimes, when you look at what is described as a religious conflict, underlying it is a more fundamental kind of struggle over land or something.
I don't know if many of you know who the so-called New Atheists are. There is a group of people thought of as the New Atheists, for reasons I won't get into, Richard Dawkins and so on. But one of the things that characterizes them is that they think religion is pretty much the root of all evil, or a lot of it.
I have gotten into some kinds of arguments with them, because I believe that religious conflicts are really not fundamentally about religion, but they have these underlying causes. For example, one of the so-called New Atheists, Richard Dawkins, wrote in his bestselling book The God Delusion that if it weren't for religion, there would be no Israel-Palestine conflict. I just think that shows not a very thorough historical understanding of the conflict.
The original Zionists were not especially religious; they were secular. The original Palestinian reaction against the existence of Israel was not a religious thing; it was more ethnic and nationalistic. As time goes on, as it simmers, it can begin drawing on kind of religious resources, you might say, to fuel the conflict. But that doesn't mean that's its underlying problem.Anyway, the view in the book is that this is what brings out the best and the worst in religion, these often unconscious perceptions of whether somebody is like zero-sum—that is, an enemy or a rival—whether there is some irreconcilable conflict between the two of you over some resource or something, or whether you just sense that they don't respect you enough to do business with you.
So respect is an example of a cue that I think the human mind is designed to pick up on as evidence of whether a relationship can be potentially non-zero-sum. I think it depends very much on whether you see the relationship as one of potential mutual benefit or not.I hope that if you look into your own minds and your own everyday behavior, you may see the underlying source of the dynamic I'm talking about. My belief is that the mind is designed by natural selection to discriminate between potential win-win games with people, people you can do business with—they can become your allies, your collaborators, your business partners, your friends—and people who just don't seem, in that regard, auspicious, who seem like your enemies or your rivals.
I submit that if you are competing with someone for a job or a mate or whatever, that tends to put them into a cognitive category where you just start sizing them up in an unflattering way. Your mind generates reasons to dislike them and to say bad things about them.
I really do think, as simple a mechanism as that is, that's the way the human mind works. It's designed by natural selection to navigate this landscape of zero-sum and non-zero-sum opportunities, and a lot of conflicts are just that mechanism playing out on the field of human endeavor. You see this, I think, very much in the Qur'an and the Bible.In the Qur'an, when Muhammad thinks he can do business, so to speak, with Christians and Jews—there are Christians and Jews in his environment, and it's very clear that there are times when he hopes to bring them into a common coalition, even a common religion—when he's optimistic about that, you see him saying things like, "God, in his prescience, in his wisdom, chose the Hebrew people above all others." Muhammad says that. He has Muslims celebrating Yom Kippur, signing on to that Jewish ritual that was prevalent in his environment. Muslims originally prayed toward Jerusalem. Now they pray toward Mecca. But originally they prayed toward Jerusalem. This is in the Qur'an.
All of this is when Muhammad is optimistic about bringing them on board in a common coalition. When that project seems to fall apart, for whatever reason, that's when he says all the negative things that you can read on the website of your choice. Generally, websites of a kind of rightward leaning emphasize those. But the point is, the other verses are in there, and they do reflect, I think, the facts on the ground. I think the facts on the ground are what shape the part of a religion that is going to come out.
In the Bible you see the same dynamic, where religious doctrine is associated with whether it's kind of in your interests to be tolerant, I maintain. I guess the part of the book I'm probably proudest of is my account of early Israelite religion, which, I submit, begins with well-entrenched polytheism, and I argue that monotheism doesn't show up until later than most people say, not until the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE. But there are just lots of ways that this same dynamic plays out in the Bible.
The Bible says that Solomon had 700 wives. Here's the interesting thing: The Bible depicts the polytheism of various kings as a temporary departure from the norm. I don't think that's what's happening, really. I think for a long time polytheism was the fundamental rule in ancient Israel. Solomon plainly was having altars to foreign gods built. The Bible blames this on his wives. It's because he had these foreign wives. They convinced him to worship these foreign gods.
I think the dynamic is exactly the opposite, almost. In the ancient world, when a king married a lot of foreign women, it was an instrument of foreign policy. It was a way to consolidate relations with these countries. It's also the case that acknowledging the gods of other countries, respecting them, permitting their worship, was another way of consolidating ties with these nations.
So what you're seeing is that Solomon was somebody who had what we would call today an internationalist foreign policy. That is, he saw Israel's neighbors as people you could do business with. He wanted to be allies with them. What do you do? You marry their wives; you worship their gods. So that's a case where, I would argue, his respect for their gods, his tolerance of their religions, is an expression of his initial perception that he can do business with these people.Then, when you start seeing, a couple of centuries after Solomon, clear signs that there are prophets who are insisting on worshipping Yahweh alone—some scholars call this the "Yahweh-alone" movement. This is a movement toward monotheism, although it's not monotheism per se, because they are not necessarily saying that only the god of Israel exists, but they are saying you should only worship him. That's not monotheism. It's called monolatry. That's their position.
Interestingly, if you look at what the prophets who were advancing this view say, they have a very skeptical view on the value of relations with other nations. Hosea, for example, who is the first kind of clear-cut monolatrist in the Bible, to the extent that the dating of texts by scholars is reliable—this is in the eighth century—he's saying you should only worship the god of Israel. Here are some things he's saying about Israel's predicament.
He says, "Israel mixes himself with the peoples. Foreigners devour his strength, but he does not know it."
He's a populist-nationalist. He's a little bit of a Pat Buchanan—not in every respect. But in terms of the political constituency he's appealing to, you would call him a populist-nationalist.
He writes, "The standing grain has no heads"—that is, there's famine—"it shall yield no meal. If it were to yield, foreigners would devour it."
He says Israel's officials "bargain with the nations. They shall soon writhe under the burden of foreign kings and princes."
I argue that the initial rejection of foreign gods, that act of intolerance that is a prerequisite for the evolution of monotheism, is grounded in this idea that "these people are a threat to us, these surrounding nations, and we shouldn't worship their gods."
I'll stop in a minute. I won't go through my whole account of how monotheism does emerge during the exile. But I will say that I think initially monotheism actually is this kind of expression of intolerance of other gods that is grounded in a perception of enmity with these other nations. The Israelites aren't imagining it. They live in a bad neighborhood, and they have had some very bad interactions with a lot of nations, culminating in the disaster of the exile.
So I would say that monotheism was, in that sense, born as a fundamentally intolerant thing. But it can change, and I do chart how readily it can change and try to show the emergence of a monotheistic god of tolerance and broader compassion.
I'm not referring, as some Christians might think, to the New Testament. The New Testament has a lot of that, but I'm not saying that you have to wait until Christianity to get a tolerant monotheism. I argue that right after the exile—the Jews are returned from Babylon.
What happened is, the Babylonians have conquered and humiliated the Israelites. They have taken all the elites, the educated Israelites, and brought them to Babylon. Then the Babylonians are conquered by the Persians. Cyrus the Great seems to be a more enlightened imperialist, who realizes that maybe it's easier to handle your various subjects by giving them some autonomy, letting them worship their religion. He returns the Jews to Israel, let's them worship their religion.
I argue that, if the mainstream dating of biblical texts is to be trusted—although it's a very contentious field, how you date biblical texts—but if the mainstream views are to be trusted, I argue that you can see, in texts written right after the exile, a different kind of god, that is different from the god at the birth of monotheism.
There are a few examples. One is the Book of Ruth. I don't know how many of you know your Book of Ruth. The whole upshot of the Book of Ruth is, in a way, the revelation that there is Moabite blood running in the Israelite family, because a Moabite was an ancestor of King David. If you look at pre-exilic texts, the Moabites are the enemies. They are these horrible people you would never want in your family. That's an example.
The Book of Jonah is an example, which ends on a note with God trying to convince Jonah to show compassion and forgiveness to the Ninevehns. Jonah is resisting. What's interesting is that the Ninevehns are the Assyrians. This was the capital of the Assyrian Empire. God is now saying, "These are good people. Forgive them. They were confused." In fact, the closing verse of the Book of Jonah is God saying to Jonah, "Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left."
Knowing your right hand from your left, that was an idiom meaning they were morally confused. They were just confused. They didn't know their right hand from their left. Can't we forgive them?
If you look at pre-exilic texts, I assure you that confusion is not considered an adequate excuse for the behavior of the Assyrians, in the pre-exilic period, when the Assyrians are enemies.
So what has changed? Well, now Israel is firmly ensconced in an empire. They are surrounded by allies, fellow members of the Persian Empire. So these former enemies are now allies. The relationship has flipped from zero-sum to non-zero-sum. I think you see it in the texts. You see that kind of adaptation.
I'll just close by saying—unless there are no questions, in which case I'll either release you or continue to talk—that I'm certainly not predicting that things will work out well in the world. Looking around, I see a lot of grounds for pessimism, to be perfectly honest with you. But the good news is the following.
First of all, all these religions—and I get into Christianity, too, in the book—have shown their ability to adapt constructively to a non-zero-sum environment. In other words, if you can arrange things so that they see it as being in their interests, in their material interests and in their less tangible interests, to get along with people, the doctrines will change accordingly and the interpretation of doctrines will change accordingly.You can see that happening in recent times as well. It may not happen as fast as you would like. That's one problem we have to deal with. But the fact is that people show tremendous flexibility in the way they interpret their scriptures.
The other part of the good news, I would say—if the first part is that they can react constructively to non-zero-sum dynamics—is that the world is full non-zero-sum dynamics these days—that is to say, potential win-win relationships or, you could say, relationships of interdependence, where your well-being depends on the well-being of another person. That's what a non-zero-sum relationship is.
In a previous book, Nonzero, I argue that the basic driving force of history, technological evolution, or the basic thing that changes the structure of societies over time has all along been having this property, ever since the Stone Age, of expanding the range of non-zero-sum games.
Beginning with roads and writing and culminating with the Internet, the drift of technological evolution has been to bring more and more people into non-zero-sum relationships with more and more people at further and further remove.
Globalization is a kind of culmination of that process, so that now our relations are bound up with the relations of people all around the world. You see this when the economy goes down. It goes down globally. Contagious diseases can go global. Environmental problems can be global.
To get back to this context of a non-zero-sum game, I think if you look at what is sometimes called the Muslim world, it's very much in the interests of what is sometimes called the Western world for things to go well in that part of the world. In other words, if more and more Muslims, on the one hand, feel they are not getting a fair shake or they feel alienated or threatened or whatever, that's going to be bad for the West. That's not going to be a good thing in what is called the war on terror, if there are more and more unhappy Muslims.
Whereas if more and more of them feel happy with their lives, fulfilled, and feel that they are part of a global community, that's going to be good for the West. So that is a non-zero-sum relationship.
So in the most fundamental sense, there's a non-zero-sum relationship between the West and the Muslim world. If people perceive this accurately—there is a lot of work to be done. This isn't going to happen easily or, necessarily, automatically, because it depends so much on the way people perceive things, not just the underlying reality.
But there is reason to believe that this at least provides the foundation for potential reconciliation among those members of the different faiths who do not feel reconciled right now. And it provides a foundation for the development of doctrines in all the religions that will actually consolidate bonds among the religions rather than dissolve them.
I guess I'll stop there and see if there are any questions.
Friday, June 04, 2010
The Evolution of God - Robert Wright Lecture and Q&A
Cool talk - Robert Wright discusses his book, The Evolution of God - followed by a Q&A with audience. This is from the Carnegie Council: The Voice for Ethics in International Affairs.
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