The Evolution of God

By: Robert Wright

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

Length: 18 hrs and 25 mins

Publisher's summary

In this sweeping narrative, which takes us from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Robert Wright unveils an astonishing discovery: there is a hidden pattern that the great monotheistic faiths have followed as they have evolved. Through the prisms of archeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright's findings overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy.

He explains why spirituality has a role today and why science, contrary to conventional wisdom, affirms the validity of the religious quest. And this previously unrecognized evolutionary logic points not toward continued religious extremism but to future harmony. Nearly a decade in the making, The Evolution of God is a breathtaking reexamination of the past and a visionary look forward.

©2009 Robert Wright (P)2009 Tantor

Critic reviews

"[An] in-depth approach yields original insights." ( Kirkus)

Started out excellent

This book started with an excellent anthropological view of the gradual change of gods over time. Then it became a book on Game theory, and a very round about justification with LOTS of hand waiving explanations on why it is okay to still maintain your current religion. It stopped being about evolution of the idea of gods and became why it is okay to keep the same traditional religion. After the countless time some game theory term was mentioned within a five minute segment, I simply stopped listening. Perhaps it gets back on track, in the third segment, and perhaps some day I will start with the third segment and check. Not likely though.

Enjoy the beginning.

Myth of God

Robert Wright's theories in "The Evolution of God" is interesting, but also a tough subject to tackle. As I become older, I'm becoming more of an atheist. It's not so much I'm not a believer, but I have my doubt there is a God. The book is broken up into three main religions.Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Wright writes how God evolved overtime through different religions. He does not dismiss a God, but he explains the non zero sum. This was just a hard book to tackle because I'm not so religious that I think that God was my designer, but I also think that God was a myth from our ancestors and their stories got embellished overtime through religions.

Could have been less about Islam

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

While the book does a fair job of trying to develop a coherent story of the evolution of god or God, it dwells way too much on Islam and how we (not of the Islamic faith) can better get along with them. The author wants us to understand not only the evolution of Islam but to buy into his theory of why they (some) are terrorists, why they do what they do and how we can appease them, and thus move society forward. And while I may buy into this notion it really deserves to be in another book with a different title (“Why Islam Will Always Be In A Non-Zero Sum Game With The World”).

Over all the book seemed very well researched and I especially liked where the author took the trouble to rebut some of his own arguments, toward the end of the book. I was just disappointed that the author tried to include is justification of Islam and Muslim’s in a book that purported to be about the evolution of God.

I also agree with one of the reviewers that the narrator sounded like he fell asleep a couple of times. AND I know he knows how to pronounce the word specific but in a couple of instances it came out Pacific.

Great book; boring reader

The book itself is wonderful {I have read it several times, bought the audio to share with my wife}. However, the reader reads it like a lecture, very drily, instead of as a fascinating narrative. Wright is a very skillful writer, who varies the pace, colour and idiom of his writing, often injecting sly humour. All of these are lost in the reading performance. The reader's voice doesn't even vary enough to make it clear where a quotation ends and the regular text begins again. There were 3 minutes where the text varied between snippets of quotation and the author's voice. I was lost.

It's too easy for your attention to wander in this reading, and you can't afford that with this kind of writing, you'll get lost quickly. It's possible to read this so that you're attention won't even think of wandering because it's so interesting. This wasn't that reading.

I seem to recall the same reader doing one of Michael Pollan's books, again in marked contrast to the colorful way in which the author himself reads his other books.

If you're at all a reader, buy the book, you'll get so much more out of it.

Very heavy reading

The book is the author's theories on how man develped the concept of god(s). It is a very ambitious undertaking and he begins with when 'man' first walked the earth. His approach is scholarly but due to the nature of his topic, he presents portions of his research , study and experiences to try and describe how the concept of god evolved. Unfortunately, although I take his findings at face value, their interpretation is his. He picks and chooses anecdotes from different 'primitive' tribes to makes his case on how god 'evolved'. As a scientist, this is a frustrating approach as he appears to select 'random' facts he has found into a theory. He provides no rationale on how he chose which findings to include and which he did not include. Data is not the plural of anecdote. The presentation is also extremely detailed in parts and it easy to lost in the narrative. He also uses primitive words and names, which I could not even venture a guess on how they are spelled. On one level, the use of primitive vocabularies is interesting but it also makes it hard to follow. The depth of his discussions required my full, undivided attention. This made it very difficult to listen to while driving, and required that I regularly rewind sections. I am not a theolgian or particularly well versed in the history of religions and found this a very difficult book to get through. I confess that I only listened to the first of 3, 4 hour segments and gave up.

If God is just god, where does that leave me?

This book is not for the casual reader of religious propaganda. Nor, in my opinion, is it for someone who staunchly believes the Torah, Bible, or Koran to be literally true. On the other hand, if one is prepared to listen with an open mind the author has much to intellectually stimulate you. Or to put it differently, if you are willing to concede that your Sunday school teacher didn't exactly tell you the whole story, and even if the theory of evolution appeals to your intellect a lot more than Intelligent Design, you may still not prepared to believe that we are just a fortunate accident of electro-chemical actions in a primordial soup. If so, Robert Wright wrote this book for you.

He begins as other have by systematically destroying the credibility of all 3 Abrahamic religions as the inspired word of a creator God. He details, as others have, the human editing of the message to fit the political and economic needs of the era in which the text was written. Then when other authors end their book with the demotion of God to god --as if no more needed to be said -- he begins a cautious, although compellingly plausible, case for seeing the finger prints of a designer in the development of mankind. Personally, I don't need a teddy bear god to help me sleep at night, but if you are like some of my very intelligent and scientifically literate friends who are just not emotionally prepared to believe that there is no purpose whatsoever in our existence or in the creation of the universe then I highly recommend that you listen to Robert Wright's The Evolution of God. The narration was professional and moved along without delay.

Food for the mind!

I listened to this book twice and found new details with each listening that deepen my appreciation for this important work. Give it a try!

Non-zero Sum: Deus (and while I’m at it, Non-Zero)

I’m probably more of a splitter than a lumper at heart, but even a died-in-the-wool splitter would probably find it difficult to read Robert Wright’s new book, The Evolution of God, without thinking often of his prior book, Non-Zero. In fact, it would be fair, I think, to call EoG a sequel... something like, Non-Zero Sum: Deus.

Okay, if that little play on words doesn’t get you rolling on the floor, it’s perhaps because you hadn’t taken on board that the sequel is about god -- you know, deus. Ok, that done...

This will be a short review, because there are plenty of longer ones, including those by illustrious scientists like Paul Bloom. Also, this book’s a couple years old, so probably no one really cares anymore.

But I never wrote a review of Non-Zero, and if I could persuade you to do that, I would consider it a job well-done. Then I would say, So, take the primary ideas in non-zero, imagine that religions tend to follow the growth of non-zero relationships through into greater civility, and there you have EoG.

So, there you have EoG.

He adds a bit of stuff I don’t so much like, more about which in a few paragraphs.

Non-zero is the more academic version of win-win. An exchange is a non-zero sum exchange both parties benefit. I have something you want, you have something I want. We exchange and there is a non-zero sum outcomes. Humans, being more or less rational creatures, tend to like non-zero sum outcomes and the parties who participate in them with us. So, we don’t war with or kill those folks. Wright’s famous quip is that the reason he doesn’t want to kill the Japanese is that they make his mini-van.

The upshot of non-zero summing is that the more people one does business with on a global level, the fewer people there are whom one wants or is willing to kill or even badly exploit. It’s an argument that global commerce results in fewer wars and less bad feeling among people of different nations. That’s not an idea that many in the developed intellectual West find intuitively easy to digest, but there seems to be a good deal of evidence to support the claim, and that evidence is summed up very nicely in Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.

So, when we do business with another nation (in a non-zero sum way), we are not likely to go to war with them.

How transactions get to be non-zero sum transactions can vary. Often in the course of history, transactions began as zero (I win, you lose) or negative (lose-lose) sum. Think of slaverly (zero or negative), empire (zero), etc. But, over time, as oppressed people fight back, as resources dwindle, relationships may change such that the zero’s are no longer possible (oppressors can’t get away with it, it becomes to expensive to maintain empires) and non-zero relationships evolve.

So, non-zero sum transactions were a rather late development in human history, coming into grand fashion only in the last several thousand years. When they did arise, they spread rather quickly.

That’s non-zero sum. The Evolution of God is basically this: as non-zero sum relationships grew more common throughout the middle east, the homeland of the Abrahamic religions, the religions mellowed and grew more tolerant. As Jew traded with Gentile, with Christian, etc, the religions themselves become less marshall.

What I like and agree with: cultures and circumstances cause religions to adapt. Externalities alter religious morés, not vice versa.

What I don’t like: Wright spends a good deal of time mumbling about a direction of history toward more enlightened moral/ ethical relationships (more non-zero sum), which he claims supports the idea that there is some underlying moral order to the world, and that this moral order could be some fuzzy version of god.

Whatever, didn’t need that bit and it does no good. It seems a pretty heavy-handed tactic to get the religious to buy into non-zero sum and the idea of an evolving morality. But, I don’t think EoG will be read by too many people who would entertain that idea. It weakens (and lengthens by a good deal) the important argument of the book.

Also, I think you can read a two-pager on Fiske’s relational models theory (RMT) and come away with a somewhat more complete understanding of how economic models of relationships inform morality. But, together, RMT and NZS explain a lot about the directionality of morality social relationships.

Overall well researched and well argued book

This is another one of anti-religious manifesto. However for what it worth, it is overall well researched and well argued book, my only problem with the book has been that the book tries to cover too much, I'd prefer a narrower subject matter and deeper research.

Challenge your faith

For anyone who wants to truly wrestle with their beliefs.

Robert Wright does a great job of deconstructing today's Abrahamic religions in a way that dismisses closely held religious beliefs with solid historical context.