To Fred Hussey: RIP. A warrior for both his God and for the science they shared.

Background
It’s been nearly a dozen years since I last saw Bob Wright. He’s a thinker, writer, and arranger of deep ideas...a “pattern-maker” of genius and a treasure for our age. He’s also the son of Texas Southern Baptists, and, like me, an Army brat. Unlike me, however, he swore fidelity to his faith at age nine. Thus, “God” and God have always been near Bob’s mind, even when he disagrees with whatever most of us think about god-the-idea vs. god-the-entity.

Bob has also made a second but substantial investment in a different sort of pattern, called “evolution,” and here in The Evolution of God, he annoys theists who endorse special creation and evolutionists who practice a science that is often conjectural but denies anything supernatural.
Wright’s first book, Three Scientists and Their Gods, marked his career with a subtitle: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information. He followed Three Scientists with a bestseller, “The Moral Animal” that braided together the life of Charles Darwin, Victorian times and its creative tensions, and the structure of a new academic discipline, “evolutionary psychology.” His third book, Non-Zero, described the growth of human cultures as they found the benefits of trade rather than war. To Wright’s mind, non-zero relationships are something of an inevitability…familiarity erodes hostility and favors imitation. The interchanges between two peoples lead to outcomes that benefit both. Thus, zero-sum contests where one player must lose if the other is to win, become “non-zero” wherein each player makes the other prosper. A Robert Heinlein character once commented that two Chinese dropped on Luna’s surface would both get rich selling rocks to each other! An example from Wright: perhaps 1000 people helped produce your car and the $20,000 that you paid compensated each of its creators and the bank.

In book four, The Evolution of God, Bob layers humor with insight while he extends evolution and non-zero dynamics to religions. Not only does he jar us when he juxtaposes two very special words but also applies them to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, concluding that the three are really one, another “trinity,” in how they started, changed over decades, and will probably change further.

Tolerance for different faiths had been established by the Caesars and exploited by many religions. And three collections of religious stories – the Old Testament, the New, and the Koran – are out of sequence in the arrangement of their verses and chapters. He analyzes the Old Testament much as an archeologist analyzes fossil layers that reflect polytheism, tribalism, war, animal and human sacrifices, and the perimeter of tolerance that grew with the perimeter of commerce. It’s not all smooth going for traditionalists. For example, Moses very likely never existed or, at the very least, a lot of stories were made up about him.

The Book of Mark is the oldest and a clearer sketch of the “historical” Jesus who, like Muhammad, could be rather demanding while Saints Matthew and John describe Him as powerful but kind, loving, self-sacrificing, and a performer of miracles – all traits that evolutionary psychologists tell us are most admired by women. St. Paul is captured beautifully as if he were the CEO for Holiday Inns –“Stay with us. You will be safe, our members will love you, and you will live forever!” Paul appears to be a marketer who took advantage of Roman roads and the multi-ethnic communities through which those roads passed.

I hope the hell Wright had a good time doing this to the rest of us!

Similarities Replace Differences
Non-zero is about how similarities and identities emerge from differences. Or, order appears from chaos. In this case, three modern faiths seeded in polytheism, moved from tribal warfare and tooth-and-claw standards to hugs and the salvation of individuals … all in response to changes in social opportunities. Such was true for Chinese and Indian faith, for Judaism, and for Christianity. It was also true for Islam.

Muhammad was a struggling seer when he lived in Mecca and, like Jesus, was considered to be something of a madman. He moved to Medina, gained acceptance of his monotheism, settled some skirmishes between the Medinans, and eventually ran an empire. (Wright advises that reading the Koran backwards is more historically accurate as you start with short lessons, written when Muhammad struggled in Mecca, and move to the longer ones in the front, written when he had to be not only a theologian but also a politician.) Muhammad also demoted Jesus from “God” to “Messiah,” – perhaps a closer alignment with Jesus to his original role – but promoted Ham, the progenitor of Arabs, and integrated much of the Jewish Law into the Koran.

Bottom line: Each leader, those in the Old Testament, the New, or the Koran, in synchrony with his people and their opportunities, found the God he needed for the times he faced, a choice that often pivoted on whether the people saw themselves in zero-sum conditions – winner-take-all – or in those of non-zero in which swaps and mutual influence generate profits.

Wright’s Logos
“On the one hand, I think gods arose as illusions, and that the subsequent history of the idea of god is, in some sense, the evolution of an illusion. On the other hand: (1) the story of this evolution itself points to the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity; and (2) the “illusion,” in the course of evolving, has gotten streamlined in a way that moved it closer to plausibility. In both of these senses, the illusion has gotten less and less illusory.” (p. 4)

Wright doesn’t care for the idea of an old male hominid staring at us from the sky. And he finds an orderly progression, an “evolution,” from spirits and shamans to chiefdoms, polytheism, and monotheism. From early religions that had neither a concept of religion nor moral rules, and didn’t need them because of the restricted size of tribal groups, to complex books of laws, to later simplifications such as that in the New Testament. On the other hand, he hungers too much for order not to believe in a “design” even if the “designer” hides. (Wright, thus, resembles the legends that we have about Pythagoras!)

Wright’s concept of “moral imagination” guides our appreciation of non-zero games: it is usually better to give than to receive because you eventually receive. As my fundamentalists friends say, “Give abundantly and you will eventually receive abundantly.” And for the immediate instant, you don’t get killed. The old-school Darwinians were thus confused: cooperation is not a mystery but a biological and moral outcome that physics makes into an inevitability. “Survival of the fittest” now implies “survival of the cooperators.”

Bob puckishly asks for the differences in our understanding of God and of an electron. Both are invisible, measured, and inferred by their properties and on the basis of an array of “facts.” Thus, there are, on fundamental levels, few differences between the folks who study and manage electrons and those who study and manage God. Wright argues that both the electron and God fall between illusions and imperfect conceptions. Thus, Weinberg’s notion, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless” may seem brilliant.

It is also flawed.