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The Evolution of God
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The Evolution of God (edit title/settings)

by Robert Wright (Author) (edit contributors)

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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... read more

Summary edit see section history

The author addresses how the concept of "god" ocurred, evolved and exists today. He also discusses why "god" was needed and how various religions and cultures see the deity.

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “A god who governs the actions of the greatest known empire is a god who can govern history itself”
  • “He believes you should love God, but there's no mention of God loving you”
  • “we've reached a stage in history where the movement toward moral truth has to become globally momentous”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • At the risk of oversimplifying: politics and economics gave us the one true god of the Abrahamic faiths.
    Highlighted by 173 Kindle customers
  • Still, hunter-gatherer religions have at least two features that are found, in one sense or another, in all the world’s great religions: they try to explain why bad things happen, and they thus offer a way to make things better.
    Highlighted by 158 Kindle customers
  • Religion is a feature of cultural evolution that, among other things, addresses anxieties created by cultural evolution; it helps keep social change safe from itself.
    Highlighted by 157 Kindle customers
  • To the extent that we can tell, the one true God—the God of Jews, then of Christians, and then of Muslims —was originally a god of vengeance.
    Highlighted by 151 Kindle customers
  • Maybe the growth of “God” signifies the existence of God. That is: if history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral truth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, then maybe this growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe—conceivably—the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity.
    Highlighted by 133 Kindle customers
  • The shaman represents a crucial step in the emergence of organized religion. He (or she, sometimes) is the link between earliest religion—a fluid amalgam of beliefs about a fluid amalgam of spirits—and what religion came to be: a distinct body of belief and practice, kept in shape by an authoritative institution. The shaman is the first step toward an archbishop or an ayatollah.
    Highlighted by 115 Kindle customers
  • Religion has gotten closer to moral and spiritual truth, and for that matter more compatible with scientific truth. Religion hasn’t just evolved; it has matured. One premise of this book is that the story of religion, beginning back in the Stone Age, is to some extent a movement from Mencken to James.
    Highlighted by 111 Kindle customers
  • In this phase of cultural evolution—with personal policing having lost its charm but with government not yet taking up the slack—a supplementary force of social control was called for. Religion seems to have responded to the call. Whereas religion in hunter-gatherer societies didn’t have much of a moral dimension, religion in the Polynesian chiefdoms did: it systematically discouraged antisocial behavior.
    Highlighted by 103 Kindle customers
  • The shaman’s role in cultivating antipathy and violence, both within the society and beyond it, is more evidence against the romantic view of religion as fallen—having been born pure only to be corrupted later. Apparently one of religion’s most infamous modern roles, fomenter of conflict between societies, was part of the story from very near the beginning.
    Highlighted by 102 Kindle customers
  • Clement lived in the late second century of the common era. By his time, the now familiar profile of western religion had appeared: belief in only one god, a fundamentally good god who focuses on the moral improvement of human beings, not the gratification of his own desires, and who cares about all people everywhere. That is: a monotheism that has an ethical core and is universalist.
    Highlighted by 100 Kindle customers
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First Sentence edit see section history

The Chuckchee, a people indigenous to Siberia, had their own special way of dealing with unruly winds.

Table of Contents edit see section history

I- The Birth and Growth of Gods

1. The Primordial Faith
2, The Shaman
3. Religion in the Age of Chiefdoms
4. Gods of the Ancient States

II- The Emergence of Abrahamic Monotheism

5. Polytheism, the Religion of Ancient Israel
6. From Polytheism to Monolatry
7. From Monolatry
8. Philo Story
9. Logos: The Divine Algorithm

III- The Invention of Chrisianity

10. What Did Jesus Do
11. The Apostle of Love
12. Survival of the Fittest Christianity
13. How Jesus Became Savior

IV- The Triumph of Islam

14. The Koran
15. Mecca
16. Medina
17. Jihad
18. Muhammad


V- God Goes Global (Or Doesn't)

19. The Moral Imagination
20. Well, Aren't We Special

Afterward: By The Way, What is God?
Appendix: How Human Nature Gave Birth to Religion

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Robert Wright (Author)

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Page Count: 592

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