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.

If you can't beat 'em join 'em! Atheists get into the summer camp business

Kids go to summer camps for all sorts of reasons. There are space camps, sports camps and all kinds of computer camps with specific objectives. What is odd about the new atheist camps is the air of supposed neutrality that is anything but neutral. They are not typical religious camps but camps created to make the point that belief in God is silly. This week's Economist, missing this hidden agenda, profiles one such camp. tothesource will have more to say about this article next week.

"In most ways, it is like other summer camps. Kids aged 8 to 17 share cabins in the woods. During the day, they paddle canoes, shoot arrows, go swimming and explore nature. At night, they chat beneath the stars. Like other summer camps, Camp Quest satisfies a demand that springs from America’s combination of very long holidays for children and very short ones for their parents. Unlike other camps, it is staffed entirely by humanists.

They are not pushy or preachy, but scepticism flavours nearly everything they do. Lunch comes with a five-minute talk about a famous freethinker. Campers are told that invisible unicorns inhabit the forest, and offered a prize if they can prove that the unicorns do not exist. The older kids learn something about the difficulty of proving a negative. The younger ones grow giggly at the prospect of stepping in invisible unicorn poop. There’s a prize for the tidiest cabin, too, because 'cleanliness is next to godlessness', jokes Amanda Metskas, the director.

Campers are not told that there is no God; only that they should weigh the evidence. They learn about the scientific method. An amateur biologist invites them to gather creepy-crawlies from a nearby pond. They are told how sensitive each species is to pollution, and asked to work out from this how polluted the pond is. They find several critters that can survive only in clean water, and conclude that the pond is in good shape. The kids are encouraged to explore ethical questions, too. The more argumentative ones sit in a clearing and debate the nature of justice.

The kind of people who send their kids to Bible camp are appalled. Answers in Genesis, a Christian fundamentalist group, berates Camp Quest for drumming a “hopeless” world view into young minds. But a humanist camp is less about indoctrination than reassurance that it is all right not to be religious; that it is possible to be moral without believing in the supernatural. Nearly all the kids at Camp Quest say they find it comforting to be surrounded by others who share their lack of belief. Many attend schools where Christianity is taken for granted. Many keep quiet about their atheism. Those who don’t are sometimes taunted or told they will burn in hell."

Economist

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=14031492

The Law of Religious Tolerance?

In his Evolution of God, Robert Wright asserts that there is something called the “law of religious tolerance.”

According to this law, “People are more likely to be open to foreign gods when they see themselves playing a non-zero-sum game with foreigners— see their fortunes as positively correlated with the foreigners’ fortunes, see themselves and the foreigners as, to some extent, in the same boat.” This “law” is strengthened by the negative effect of intolerance of others gods: “tolerance is more likely when you see yourself as losing from intolerance,” even more “when both sides see themselves losing” in any conflict, so that “mutual tolerance makes sense.” This law, for Wright, isn’t merely descriptive, but prescriptive: history will reveal people becoming more open to foreign gods as we move from national to a global economy, so much so, that they will eventually embrace the one great god, Tolerance.

The problem with the “law of religious tolerance” is that it is not in any sense a law. At best, it is a generalization about what some human beings happen to do; at worst, it is an attempt to make people believe that Wright’s overarching speculative scheme is somehow rooted in science. In either case, Wright’s “law” is merely window dressing for a particular political ideology, rooted in the secular Enlightenment of the 18th century, which sees human history moving inevitably toward a rosy secular future. For the philosophes of the 18th century Enlightenment, the particularities of “historical” religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had to be shed so that all of humanity could embrace the cosmopolitan religion of reason, Deism. For Wright, the particularities of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have to be shed so that all of humanity can be ruled by one world government underwritten by the vaguest of imaginable gods. Wright shows himself an heir to the philosophes in his invocation of law as a kind of semi-deity driving history toward its inevitable conclusion.

WWWD? What Would Wright Do?

As an heir to the Enlightenment, Robert Wright engages in the tactic of reconstructing the Bible to fit his argument. This is necessary precisely because Wright wants to show that his enlightened view “evolved” out of previous, more “primitive” forms of religion (rather than, directly contradicting them). Through crafty exegesis of Scripture, Wright thus attempts to prove that the historical unfolding of the Jews in the Old Testament and the Christians in the New reveals a move from strongly-held particular beliefs that exclude other religions, to enlightened, cosmopolitan religious tolerance. This tactic is a somewhat modified form of the kind of scriptural manipulation for secular purposes that one finds in Benedict Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), or John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696).

How does this play out in his treatment of the Gospels? Using the spirit and methods of modern scriptural scholarship, Wright layers the Gospels, and puts things in historical strata so as to fit his historical scheme. The real Jesus, the “historical” Jesus, the Jesus found in the earliest layers of the New Testament, is not the nice Jesus of universal love/tolerance; he is the naughty Jesus of Jewish exclusivism, condemning outsiders and sending them to hell. The nice Jesus “evolved” as the disciples spread out, and realized that it would be in their own self-interest not to rile the Romans. They ditched the exclusiveness, and unlike Jesus himself, preached a gospel of universal love/tolerance—a gospel, argues Wright, especially evident in St. Paul’s affirmation of love and universalism against the exclusiveness of Judaism.

But Paul didn’t preach universal love because he felt it; it was an act of self-interest, emerging “from the interplay between Paul’s driving ambitions and their social environment. In the end as much credit should go to the Roman Empire as to Paul.” Of course, we immediately recognize how nicely this fits into Wright’s thesis about self-interest as the driving force in historical evolution from religious exclusiveness to universal religious toleration. And Wright is not above painting St. Paul’s ambition in the crassest economic form. “He was a man who wanted to extend his brand, the Jesus brand; he wanted to set up franchises—congregations of Jesus followers—in cities across the Roman Empire.” Such universal entrepreneurial aspirations brought Paul (following the “the law of religious tolerance”) to preach anti-Jewish, pro-universalism that fit comfortably into the Roman notion of empire and religious tolerance.

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