The Evolution of God

by Robert Wright

Religion ...changes through time primarily because it responds to changing circumstances in the real world: economics, politics, and war. Wright thus offers what he emphasizes is a materialist account of religion. As he further emphasizes, the ways in which religion responds to the world make sense. Like organisms, religions respond adaptively to the world.

More formally, Wright argues that religious responses to reality are generally explained by game theory and evolutionary psychology, the subjects of his previous books. Subtle aspects of the human mind, he claims, were shaped by Darwinian natural selection to allow us to recognize and take advantage of certain social situations.

The criticism then is that while.

the overall trend characterizing the course of Western faith is clear enough: it has grown more tolerant and has encouraged the expansion of the moral circle. Hunter-gatherers huddled about a shaman may doubt the humanity of those not belonging to the tribe but contemporary worshipers gathered in a synagogue, church, or mosque do not. Religion may be imperfect, but it has, Wright emphasizes, taken us a considerable moral distance

......

We've been told that the "pragmatic truth about human interaction" generally accounts for the waxing and waning of religious ideas. And now we're told that something further is needed, a sight that is deeper than pragmatic.

As Wright tries to explain this deeper sight, matters get murky

The problem is, there is no direction to evolution - it's neutral.  If complexity works, it survives, but 'primitive' lifeforms like the microorganism of the black smokers may remain essential the same for billions of years.  Similarly, nothing in Wright's account of religion's history requires that religion become progressively more moral.  The important lesson of Wright's book is that religion may be just the artifact of natural evolutionary processes without being predictable or required.  It succeeds in providing a description of religion that does not require the assumption of anything supernatural and Occam's Razor applauds this simpler approach but it does complicate matters for those who insist there cannot be morality without a god.

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