The title is to be taken tongue in cheek, of course. This is not really the evolution of God, but rather the development of people’s ideas about God, focusing on monotheism in the Near East but including in its scope preliterate religion.

Primitive societies can be observed developing explanations for things they really don’t understand. We can see this process in action with the cargo cults of the Pacific islands. Gods and spirits — with no clear dividing line between the two — are said to be responsible for phenomena whose causes are otherwise unknown, and these stories are not the property of an individual but of the community as a whole.

These small groups of hunter-gatherers don’t need a moral code, though, because they don’t have any crime. They typically consists of groupings of a few dozen people, all vaguely related to each other, and many of whom will spend their entire lives together. It’s only when societies become bigger and more sophisticated that they need lists of thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots.

What results is a sort of ethical polytheism, typified by the religion of the Hebrews in the early parts of the Old Testament.

The next stage was monolatry — and note the distinction between monolatry and the later monotheism.

It’s not certain why the Israelites moved toward monolatry, but perhaps it was because the cult of Yahweh served as a focal point for domestic power struggles and foreign wars. It was not until the Babylonian exile and the time of Deutero-Isaiah that Yahweh evolved from tribal champion into global God. And after the encounter with the Greeks, this monotheism developed philosophical and theological expressions, as found in Philo of Alexandria or indeed the “logos” philosophy that begins St. John’s gospel.

And so to Jesus. Wright belongs to the school of thought that sees the historical Jesus as having had a much smaller role than that depicted in the New Testament. Christianity as we know it today, he says, is largely the invention of St. Paul. And the reason it grew to become a universal religion is that conditions in the Roman Empire favored such a development. On the one hand, living under brutal, large-scale power structures promoted anxiety and engendered the need for a loving God; on the other, a religion that might encompass many ethnic groups had clear value as a unifying force.

Wright’s over-arching thesis is that religion responds to social needs. Hence, he says, now that we live in a global society, religion will have to evolve still further. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam will have to develop philosophies that allow their adherents to coexist peacefully, and they will have to acknowledge that non-Near Eastern religions have value, too.

I don’t think Robert Wright’s book is the last word on the social and anthropological history of religions, but it’s a much more convincing attempt than that one by Karen Armstrong I read recently.

Robert Wright. The Evolution of God. New York: Back Bay Books (Hachette), 2010. Paperback. 592 pages. ISBN 9780316067447. $16.99.

From my blog at http://true-small-caps.blogspot.com