by Bill Moyers
I thought back to my conversation a year earlier with Robert Wright, who had just published his book The Evolution of God. He told me, “Religion will be the medium by which people express their values for a long time to come, so it’s important to understand what brings out the best and worst in it.”
Wright, the founder of Bloggingheads.tv, is known as a journalist of big ideas. In The Moral Animal, published in 1994, he argued that the biological process of natural selection that determines the fate of a species can create a more ethical human society. Six years later, in Nonzero, he used game theory to speculate that modern society doesn’t have to be a win-lose proposition.
For The Evolution of God he spent almost a decade charting the history of belief, from the Stone Age to the present, examining how societies mingled and interacted over the centuries. Call it a religious version of globalization: the gods that have been the most successful—that have attracted the most believers around the world—are those, according to Wright, that can shed their early vengeful incarnations and adapt into a more universal, more benevolent form. This was good news for a change, holding out the possibility that despite the competition between monotheistic fundamentalists, we may be able to evolve beyond the religious wars. His book arrived swiftly on the bestseller list despite a paucity of advance publicity—a tribute to the following that Wright has gained through his fearless search for the moral underpinnings of society. Of course, the evolution of God is no purely abstract exercise for him. As a kid in Texas he was buckled to the Bible Belt—“born again,” as the saying goes. It was the first step of his own journey into the understanding of religious experience, one that has kept on evolving ever since.
—Bill Moyers
So here’s the journalistic lede I would use if I were reviewing your book: Robert Wright has made a convincing case that as circumstances change, God has changed, because the story of God is intrinsic to the human story. But what Wright has not done is to make a convincing case that God exists.
I would say it’s hard for anyone to make a convincing case that God exists in the sense of pointing to evidence. And I don’t really try to do that. I mean, I do argue that there is evidence of some sort of larger purpose unfolding through the workings of nature. But that doesn’t tell you much about what might have infused the purpose.
As I read your book, I kept thinking that for a long time now, human beings have been yielding great power over their lives to a supreme being whose existence they can’t prove. What is there in human nature that does that?
I don’t think there’s a kind of God gene, or that religion was designed in by natural selection because it helps us survive and reproduce. Back at the beginning of religion, the main purpose seems to have been to explain to people why good things happen and why bad things happen and how you increase the number of good things.
It doesn’t initially serve a moral purpose, in our sense of the term. So it’s not about discouraging theft or discouraging lying or anything. It’s about people trying to figure out why disease afflicts them sometimes. Why they lose wars sometimes and win them. They come up with theories that involve gods. And then they try to manipulate the gods in ways that will make things better.
So did God begin as a figment of the human imagination?
I would say so. Now, I don’t think that precludes the possibility that as ideas about God have evolved, people have moved closer to something that may be the truth about ultimate purpose and ultimate meaning.
In my earlier writings about evolutionary psychology, one thing that became clear to me is that the human mind is not designed to perceive ultimate truth or even truth in a very broad sense. I mean, the human mind was designed by natural selection to get genes into the next generation, to do some things that help you do that, like eat and reproduce. The human mind is not designed to perceive truth that goes beyond this narrow part of the material world.
But there was something in even the primeval brain that was able to conceive of the supernatural, something beyond the perceived workings of nature.
Yes. Very early on, apparently, people started imagining sources of causality, things out there making things happen. And early on there were shamans who had mystical experiences that even today a Buddhist monk would say were valid forms of apprehension of the divine or something. But by and large I think people were making up stories that would help them control the world.
I chuckled when you compared the shamans of early times—the first religious experts, we might say—to stockbrokers today. Each claiming to have special insights into a great and mysterious force that shapes the fortunes of millions of people.
Right. Some serious economists have argued that you’re better off throwing darts at a list of stocks on the wall than listening to any broker in particular. And yet we continue to pay them tremendous credence.
I think what that shows is that whenever you don’t understand what it is that’s influencing very momentous events, you will pay attention to anyone who credibly says they have the answer. And I think that’s in the beginning of shamanism. That’s what’s going on. People say, “I understand the will of all these gods.”
What does that say about human nature that we will turn to an intermediary?
I guess it says that we get a little desperate when we’re faced with actual ignorance, and mistakes matter. But it’s certainly true that this just pervades society, not only in the religious realm but in financial markets, and things like that.
The gods of the market have failed, of course, again. We’re living through that period right now, when there is no God on Wall Street anymore. But the God of Abraham thrives. What does it say about us that this ancient religion still has a vitality and a vibrancy?
I think it’s a tribute to the evolutionary power of cultural change. And it shows us how God has adapted to varying cultural circumstances, because the God that is believed in now, first of all, assumes many different forms, even among believers.
I mean, the difference between the God I was brought up with in the Southern Baptist church and the way God would be conceived by an Anglican priest are very different. And similarly, there’s been change over time. The fact that God can adapt accounts for His longevity. And at crucial points during that evolution, He acquired features that have proved very attractive.
The Christian doctrine of individual salvation, of an eternal afterlife, if you qualify, certainly helped the church flourish. It was picked up by Islam, by Muhammad, who was in touch with these doctrines, and has proved very popular. Look at the number of Christians and Muslims around today. So the very appealing parts of God endure, and I think the adaptation accounts for some of the real moral growth.
So if we are propelled along by natural selection, is it okay to say that God is a product of natural selection?
The God that I show evolving is undergoing a process very analogous to natural selection. New traits arise, and if they succeed in enhancing the power of God by, for example, attracting new believers, then they remain. And if they don’t work for one reason or another, they fall by the wayside. So God has evolved very much the way the human organism evolved through natural selection, yes.
But you go to considerable lengths in here to make sure that we remember gods are products of cultural evolution, not biological evolution.
Cultural evolution is a much messier process than biological evolution. You and I can point to the source of our genes very easily: our parents and then their parents and so on. It’s very easy to see the channels of influence. I’m not going to transmit any genes to you in the course of this conversation. It doesn’t work like that.
But with cultural evolution, either of us could actually influence the ideas in our heads through conversation. Let’s go back to the Roman Empire, when the Christian God is kind of in flux and is taking shape. It’s not just a question of who, so to speak, his ancestor was. His ancestor was the God of the Israelites.
We know that. But meanwhile he c
an be picking up traits from all kinds of gods in the environment. And in fact, one thing I argue is that maybe the idea of individual salvation and being rewarded with a blissful afterlife if you live your life here right, may have come from one of the Egyptian cults that was competing with Christianity in the Roman Empire.
That’s why it’s hard to disentangle who’s influencing whom. I mean, you can go back there and read the texts written by adherents of the so-called mystery religions, the Greco-Roman mystery religions. They describe a born-again experience that sounds very much like one a Christian might describe today. And it’s really not clear who was copying whom back then.
Your own perception of God has evolved. As a child, God was real to you, right?
Very much.
Nine years old and you had a born-again experience of your own?
I went to the front of the church. I had been under the influence of a visiting evangelist at a Baptist church in El Paso, Texas, whose name was Homer Martinez. He was good. And I’ll tell you how he made his reputation: by getting people like me to go up to the front of the church.
Walk the aisle, as we said.
It was a spontaneous thing. My parents weren’t there. I went up to the front of the church and accepted Jesus and was baptized some weeks later. Then
I encountered the theory of evolution, and I had come from a creationist environment, so that was a kind of irreconcilable threat to my faith. The theory of natural selection seemed very compelling to me. And my parents even brought a Southern Baptist minister over to the house at one point when I was in high school to try to convince me that evolution had not happened. It didn’t work.
But I’ll tell you one thing I have not lost is that I’ve never lost the sense that I’m being judged by a being. If you’re brought up believing that a god is watching you, it’s a powerfully ingrained thing. And I think just in a vague kind of way I still feel that.
But does one need the God experience to have that?
I know plenty of conscientious people who don’t believe in God. On the other hand, it seems to me not necessarily bad for the conscience to assume belief in a personal God. I mean, if you believe that there is a moral axis to the universe, okay. If you believe in moral truth—
And do you?
Yes, I do. I believe that there’s a purpose unfolding that has a moral directionality. I have barely the vaguest notion of what might be behind that and whether it could be anything like a personal God or an intelligent being or not. That’s another question. I don’t know. But I will say, whatever is behind it, if something is, it’s probably something that’s beyond human conception.
One thing quantum physics has told us is A, that the way we’re thinking about electrons is wrong. And B, the human mind is probably not capable of thinking about them really accurately. Okay? And yet thinking about them in this crude way and drawing little things that you say are electrons, given the constraints on the mind, it’s all we can do, and it’s useful.
Well, you might say that in the moral realm, given the constraints on human cognition, believing in a personal God is a pretty defensible way to go about orienting yourself to the moral axis of the universe, which wouldn’t mean that a personal God exists.
An imagined personal God is accountable for our conscience, then?
I think, roughly speaking, evolutionary psychologists know how the conscience actually evolved. In other words, we can explain it plausibly in terms of natural selection. It gets back to these mutually beneficial relationships. Natural selection seems to have equipped us to enter into friendships. And part of that equipment seems to be because friendships are mutually beneficial. They’re good. I mean, friendless people don’t do well in society.
And one of the tools it seems to have given us is that we feel guilty if we neglect a friend or betray a friend. So these feelings of guilt and these feelings that there is some kind of moral truth out there that sometimes we fall short of are explicable in terms of natural selection. I don’t think you need a god to explain that.
On the other hand, if you separately conclude that there is such a thing as moral truth and you want to try to use your conscience, which certainly is imperfect as natural selection shaped it, it’s not by itself a reliable guide to moral conduct. And so if you want to shape the conscience in a way that makes it a better guide to moral truths, religious belief is certainly defensible and may be a valid way to do that.
But you’re not saying that one has to be religious to be moral?
Absolutely not. One of my own closer contacts with, I would say, a form of consciousness that’s closer to the truth than everyday consciousness came at a Buddhist meditation center. These were essentially secular Buddhists, and that was the context of the experience.
Through the meditative practice performed intensively for a week—no contact with the outside world, no speaking, five and a half hours of sitting meditation a day, five and a half hours of walking meditation a day—I reached a state of consciousness that I think is closer to the truth about things than the form of consciousness that is natural for human beings.
Was it a consciousness with an ethical and moral issue in it or was it a state of being? Of simple acceptance?
It absolutely had ethical implications because it involved much broader acceptance of other beings and it involved being less judgmental of other beings. I mean, it reached almost ridiculous extremes, looking down at weeds and thinking, “I can’t believe I’ve been killing those things. They’re actually as pretty as the grass. Prettier.” But in the realm of humanity, by the end I was being very much less judgmental about people I would see on the street.
And my focus moved away from myself. I think that is movement toward the truth. The basic illusion natural selection builds into all of us is that we are special. If you were natural selection, that’s obviously something you’d want to build into animals, right? Because that’s how you get them to take care of their own and get their genes into the next generation. But it really is an illusion, and it’s more fraught with ethical implications than we realize. It just suddenly blinds us to the truth about people, I think.
I do find more people like you who are seeking a spiritual practice without a governing deity presiding over it.
Yeah, it seems to work. These people, though—even these secular Buddhists, I would say—they do believe in a transcendent source of meaning. They believe that there’s something out there that is the moral truth, and they are aligning themselves with it.
I know that we can’t be precise, but in the larger sense was there a moment when God became a capital G?
There is this very curious word in the Bible, in the Hebrew version of the Bible, or what Christians would call the Old Testament: Elohim. It literally is the plural of the generic noun for “gods.” Elohim is at this point becoming a proper noun, and so I would say it’s not only God with a capital G, if this theory is right, but there’s also a notion called the Godhead. It comes out of Hinduism, among other places, where the idea is that all the gods are manifestations of a single, underlying divine unity. And it may be that that notion of the Godhead is being hinted at in this particular language of God, this particular language for talking about God that’s emphasized after the exile.
How do you relate that to the fact that, as you say again and again in here and as all of us know, the three great faiths all embraced the slaughter of infidels?
Right. They do. In the Koran, on one page Muhammad, or God speaking through Muhammad, is advising Muslims to greet unbelievers by saying, “You’ve got your religion, we’ve got ours.” On another page it says, “Kill the infidels wherever you find them.” Similarly, in the Bible, at one moment, God is advising the Israelites to completely wipe out nearby peoples who worship a foreign god. On another page, you’ve got the Israelites not only suggesting peaceful coexistence to a people who worship a foreign god but invoking that god to validate the relationships. So they say, “Your god gave you your land, our Go
d gave us our land, can’t we get along?”
The question is, why does God seem to be in these different moods? Why the mood fluctuations? I think the answer is actually good news, that when people feel that they can gain through peaceful collaboration or coexistence with another people, by and large they will find tolerance in their doctrines. Whereas when they feel threatened by a people in material terms, or there’s a threat to their values, they’re going to be more likely to find belligerence in their scriptures. And I think that’s what was going on in ancient times, when God seemed to be changing moods.
Although all of that is in the pasts of these religions and surfaces periodically even today, the good news is that when people find themselves in a kind of interdependent relationship, when they see that they can gain through collaboration or that they don’t need to be threatened, then doctrines of tolerance tend to emerge.
Are you suggesting that the character of God is ultimately defined by the conduct and interpretation of God’s followers?
That is what God is, a construct. He consists of the traits that are attributed to Him at any given time by people. Now, that doesn’t mean that theology can’t get us closer to the truth about something that may deserve the term divinity. But yes, I think in the first instance, God is an illusion, and I’m tracing the evolution of an illusion.
Where do you come out in the old conflict among those who say that religion is good for people and those who say religion serves power? You know, Marx’s argument that religion is a tool of social control.
I think religion is like other belief systems in that people will try to use it to their advantage. That’s human nature. We all try to game the system. And if there are huge discrepancies in power, the powerful will try to use religion to their advantage. I don’t think it has to be that way, and I think that often religion comes in a benign and good form. I think there’s a kind of danger in being too cynical about religion. I think there’s a danger in thinking that the so-called religious conflicts are fundamentally about religion and that without religion they wouldn’t be here. For example, Richard Dawkins has said if it weren’t for religion, there would be no Israel-Palestine conflict.
