Robert Wright's new book, The Evolution of God, is big, both in size and vision. It isn't until a little less than half-way through that he reveals the real aim of his argument.
"Today globalization has made the planet too small to peacefully accommodate large religions that are at odds. If the Abrahamic God—the God of Jews and the God of Christians and the God of Muslims—doesn't foster tolerance, then we're all in trouble. We need a god whose sympathies correspond to the scale of social organization, the global scale" (p. 205).
Wright has the very same worries as Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and Harris. Foolish Jews, Christians, and Muslims threaten world peace precisely because their religions give them specific non-negotiable beliefs. But as peoples of the world increasingly interact, such unwillingness to negotiate brings increasing political friction. Rather than eliminate these intractable religions, Wright engages in a grand strategy of co-opting all three by vacuuming them up into a larger, comprehensive evolutionary-historical argument, wherein their particularities are magically being transformed into a deity he can countenance—more or less, Wright himself writ large, a god of universal niceness whose one command is "Thou shalt be tolerant of all gods before me, or no gods, or anything in between. Or whatever. Just don't fight."
This isn't a real god, as Wright himself admits: "The god I've been describing is a god in quotation marks, a god that exists in people's heads." The notion that god "evolves" merely means that idea of god, over time, "shows moral progress," meaning that "people's conception of God moves in a morally progressive direction." "Shows moral progress" actually means—indeed, only means—that the god in some people's heads is becoming more tolerant of the god in other people's heads.
And how does this all happen? The core of Wright's argument comes from an earlier work, Nonzero: the Logic of Human Destiny (a favorite book of Bill Clinton's by the way). The best way to engineer world-wide peace is to bring about the situation where your nation's self-preservation and especially its economic self-interest are hopelessly entangled with every other nation's. Then, you are in a "nonzero sum" situation: you cooperate, and its win-win (a positive outcome, more than zero); you fight, and it's lose-lose (a negative outcome, less than zero). Therefore, everyone who is not a self-destructive fool will realize that we should all subordinate our religious zeal to our self-preservation and economic self-interest. That is, we should be completely tolerant of all notions of god for the sake of mutual economic prosperity (a decidedly different "prosperity gospel"). How to bring about this rosy scenario? We must move from national to international rule; that is, world peace demands centralized universal world government.
Wright's new book takes the next step. One world government demands a new monotheism. One government, one god, and his name is Tolerance.
The problem with Wright's argument in The Evolution of God is that it is so patently obvious that he is god-making to give theological flesh to the patently secular arguments of Nonzero: the Logic of Human Destiny. The reader has to endure a seemingly endless stream of contrived arguments that disingenuously sort historical, biblical, and biological evidence to make it seem as if history is moving inevitably toward the very same goal that Wright is so passionately urging the reader to accept, international economic entanglement and universal religious tolerance. Wright attempts to give it the aura of both science and inevitability by calling it "evolution," but it is neither scientific nor inevitable. It is wishful thinking of the worst kind: "I wish God would go away, but since he won't, let's at least make him useful." Wright expends endless energy in his book to make it appear as if God is becoming more useful all the time as he evolves into the kind of moral idea-being that Wright himself can countenance.
The obvious question to pose to Wright is this: "If history/evolution is moving us inevitably toward this goal of yours, why are you pushing so hard?" On the cynical side, one suspects that he is pushing his argument so hard because he hopes that, while it isn't true, it would be a very useful fiction if enough people would only believe it. A new universal religion of tolerance could grease the wheels in the transformation from national to world government.
To be less cynical, it is possible that, in some sense, Wright really believes his own argument that the world is inevitably evolving from particular tribes and nations with their particular deities, to a single universal government blessed with a universal tolerance-god. If that is true, then Wright is a very dangerous man indeed, for such good-intentioned quasi-religious universalism has, with Marxism, already proven itself a hugely destructive paving company in the construction of roads to political hell.
As rooted in Darwinian theory, Wright's vision invites those less nice than he, to eliminate all who stand in the way of the historical evolution of political utopian universalism as heretical misfits to be weeded out just as biological evolution weeds out the unfit.
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