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The Evolution of God |  | Author: Robert Wright
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Category: Book
List Price: $25.99
Buy Used: $6.49
as of 7/29/2010 16:29 PDT details
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Seller: friends-library
Rating:  94 reviews
Sales Rank: 30500
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 576
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 5.9 x 1.9
ISBN: 0316734918
Dewey Decimal Number: 200.9
EAN: 9780316734912
ASIN: 0316734918
Publication Date: June 8, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In this sweeping narrative that 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 archaeology, 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 future harmony.
Nearly a decade in the making, The Evolution of God is a breathtaking re-examination of the past, and a visionary look forward.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 94
 The convolution of God July 7, 2010
Wendell (Pennsylvania USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Wright's book is informative and interesting from a historical point of view and a few other viewpoints. It does not put forward a coherent point of view that leaves the reader feeling he learned what God is or might be.
The "Afterword" highlights Wright's fuzzy conception of his subject. After glossing over the traditional view of God, he tries comparing a view of God to a view of an electron. He wants to say that the essence of both of them is inescapable fuzziness. Wright seems to like fuzziness. A problem with this view is, however, that Wright doesn't understand electrons. He notes the fact that we humans--living in a large-scale world with sensory organs adapted to seeing that world of tigers and rainstorms and trees and other similar scale objects--can't directly see an electron and the electron doesn't behave like human-sized things. But he confuses this otherness of electrons with our not understanding them.
We do understand electrons. We understand them well enough to build televisions, cell phones, microwave ovens and lasers. We can write down equations that describe their behavior with amazing accuracy. We can control them with nearly infinite precision.
Having completely misstated our understanding of electrons, Wright says our fuzzy understanding of God is just the same as our understanding of electrons. It's just plain nonsense.
Whether you believe in God or not, read the book for history or read the book to see the range of human ideas about God. Don't expect to understand much more than you did beforehand.
 Amazing production July 3, 2010
J. Spoor (Austin TX)
This book is master degree level. If you are a philosopher and can read heavy material this is for you. The book is absolutely amazing in the degree of insight and the variations in the culture of human beings and the religious institutions we create. It is a thorough study in the evolution of religion on Earth. I can't believe how much the author put into the production of this book.
 The Ending Truly Disappoints June 25, 2010
Harkius (Laramie, WY)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was very, very interested to read this book. I had previously read Robert Wright's "Non-zero", and found it to be one of the best nonfiction books that I ever read. I had similarly high hopes for this one. Needless to say, judging by the star rating, I was disappointed.
The premise of the book is that the mutual dependence of peoples can result in the evolution of their religious beliefs, toward the current state of affairs (i.e., a monotheistic belief featuring a creator god who is both omniscient and benevolent). This was an interesting premise, and he does a pretty good job of supporting it with archaeological facts along the way, even if he does often resort (necessarily so, in many cases) to spportable and logical speculation. This leads to an interesting concept. He gives the first true impression of an emergent morality that is non-relative, although perhaps not absolute.
Along the way, he manages to butcher the ideologies and histories of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. (He would likely do the same to Hindus, Buddhists, and everyone else, but he runs out of space.) He claims that their history of being special people is little more than the wishes of dispossessed groups of religious fanatics, having little or no basis in reality.
So, after spending some 400 or so pages in destroying the cherished history of around 3 billion of the world's people, what is left? Not much, it turns out. Robert Wright, having basically blown up the Abrahamic faiths, wants to reestablish SOMETHING to give it all greater meaning. What does he do? He cops out. He suggests that there is something greater, something more than mankind. What is that? The progress toward what he calls moral truth. This is where everything pretty much goes downhill.
First of all, its a mealy-mouthed, miserable, and stupid claim. If we needed to kowtow to some emergent property, intelligence and consciousness would do just fine. There is no need to cite a dubious progression toward some theoretical moral perfection that hardly seems to exist. Certainly it is hard to argue that there HASN'T been moral progression over the last six thousand or so years, but it is dubious to claim that it is towards am absolute moral truth.
Moreover, after spending the first 400 pages annihilating the history of the Abrahamic faiths, he then goes on to argue some mealy-mouthed "god" that is "ultimate reality". If you pretty much ignore the last hundred pages or so, you can learn some interesting things from this book.
So, if you can stop after the third section of the book, and ignore everything that follows, it may be worth reading. As long as you can open your mind enough to tolerate it. It might be challenging.
Harkius
Great book June 22, 2010
A. H. Nasri (Maryland, USA)
Well written and well researched. Very informative book on religious beliefs and how they have developed and changed over the years, cites a lot of recent research and archaeological findings. Anyone interested in archaeology and religion will enjoy this book.
must read, if you are interested in this topic; annoying repetition June 11, 2010
PatriciaH500 (Los Angeles, CA USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you are interested in the topic of the history of God and religion, this is a must-read. Certainly this is a welcome addition to my shelf of books on similar topics. I am skipping over a few parts that become a bit tedious, but overall the book is well written and entertaining to read. I appreciate how the author refers to and comments upon the writings of other authors and scholars on this topic. His arguments are convincing. My minor complaint is that the author gets stuck on a few idiosyncratic phrases that become annoying to the point of distraction when repeated constantly. Two that come to mind are "writ large," and -- his favorite -- analyzing social changes and phenomena expressed as "zero sum" and "non-zero sum," seemingly on every page in some chapters. He really is in love with that that annoying "zero sum." I'm three-quarters through the text, but I swear that I'm throwing the book in the trash if I have to read "zero sum" once more ;-) He also uses colons in a very unusual and annoying way, but that I can deal with if we could get rid of that "zero sum" business. It would be a million times easier to read if he mixed it up a bit, perhaps just saying that a certain group had an advantage at the expense of the other. Why not say it in simple, less repetitive language? Please, I beg you. I'm sure there are a dozen ways of saying basically the same thing without using the same game and economic theory jargon over and over and over again.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 94
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