Robert Wright - The Evolution of God

Award-winning author and journalist Robert Wright promises that his new book, The Evolution of God, “will antagonize just about everyone—Jews, Christians, Muslims, new agers, and atheists alike.” In it, this recognized authority on human moral development and evolutionary psychology presents the controversial notion that God has evolved alongside culture since prehistoric times.

In a series on his new book, EnlightenNext senior editor Elizabeth Debold interviewed Wright (also the author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny and The Moral Animal). The first part of the interview is an exploration of how our understanding of God has changed in response to technological, political, and social development, from early hunter-gatherer clans and chiefdoms to modern monotheistic religions. Defining religion as a stabilizing force throughout history, Wright argues that the spiritual traditions have always pulled humanity to a higher moral truth and kept society from falling into chaos.

In the second part, Wright continues his exploration into humanity's changing views of God from ancient Egyptian myths to present day religions with EnlightenNext senior editor Elizabeth Debold. Driven by his interest in redefining and "re-enchanting" our ideas about the divine for modern times, he takes into account all that we know about evolution, biology, and human history. Arguing that, even though we can no longer rely on old belief systems to understand divinity, within the desire to know God is an indispensible spark of truth that is in line with "the moral code of the universe."

BIO

Robert Wright is an award-winning author, a prolific journalist, and a scholar with wide-ranging interests. He is a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, where he is writing on foreign policy, particularly in relationship to the war on terrorism. During the 2004-05 academic year, he was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values, and he has been a visiting scholar in the psychology department of the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught a course entitled "Human Nature and Social Change.”

Wright's most recent book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, approaches the issue of morality by examining ways in which it is interwoven into the very pattern of evolutionary history. It has been published in nine languages and was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book for 2000. His previous book, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, was published in twelve languages and named by the New York Times Book Review as one of the twelve best books of 1994. His first book, Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Wright is a contributing editor at The New Republic. His 1994 cover story, "Be Very Afraid," warned about the dangers of weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of terrorists. He writes the column "The Earthling" for Slate magazine and has written for Time, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, as well as various op-ed pages in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, and other newspapers. He previously worked at The Sciences magazine, where his column "The Information Age" won the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism.

Wright is completing a book on the history of religion that touches on a number of contemporary issues, including how to foster interfaith tolerance amid globalization.