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.”
This is not a terrible idea. Darwin himself had similar thoughts, but he later dropped the view that evolution had a higher moral purpose. New research on the biological roots of morality has drawn attention to another of Darwin’s ideas, that there is an innate disposition to moral behavior.
New York Times
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