Earlier this year I spotted a review of this book and said I would probably do a review of my own later. I’ve been pipped to the post. I’m barely past the end of the first chapter still and, in any case, a review from me would be superfluous now. Jason had already produced a review in August which I have only just spotted. It’s well worth a look.
Jason quotes these passages as a key ones from the book:
Given the constraints of human nature, believers in God are interacting with the moral order as productively as possible by conceiving its source in a particular way, however imperfect that way is. Isn’t that kind of like physicists who interact with the physical order as productively as possible by conceiving of its subatomic sources in a particular way, however imperfect that way is . . .
Maybe the most defensible view – of electrons and of God – is to place them somewhere between illusion and imperfect conception. Yes, there is a source of the patterns we attribute to the electron, and the electron as conceived is a useful enough proxy for that source that we shouldn’t denigrate it by calling it an “illusion; still, our image of an electron is very, very different from what this source would look like were the human cognitive apparatus capable of apprehending it adroitly. So too with God; yes, there is a source of the moral order, and many people have a conception of God that is a useful proxy for that source; still that conception is very, very different from what the source of the moral order would look like were human cognition able to grasp it . . .
So you might say that the evolution of the human moral equipment by natural selection was the Logos at work during a particular phase of organic aggregation; it was what allowed our distant ancestors to work together in small groups, and it set the stage for them to work together in much larger groups, including, eventually, transcontinental ones.
If you accept this argument – if you buy into this particular theology of the Logos – then feeling the presence of a personal god has a kind of ironic validity. On the one hand, you’re imagining things; the divine being you sense “out there” is actually something inside you. On the other hand, this something inside you is an expression of forces “out there”; it’s an incarnation of a non-zero-sum logic that predates and transcends individual people, a kind of logic that – in this theology of the Logos, at least – can be called divine. The feeling of contact with a transcendent divinity is in that sense solid.
(Pages 452-455)
Physicists can produce the electron’s diffraction patterns that our notion of the properties of the electron can explain. What is the equivalent phenomenon that we can produce that needs God as an explanation? Wright seems to mean morality, but why does morality need a supernatural explanation or a supernatural prod? There is no need of a God to make our ancestors work together, is there? If there is then, do meercats have a god? Do ants and bees? There are many social species that work together in communities, and it is incredible that such behavior should require a God to make it happen. Many animals are even openly moral in ways that we would accept as showing moral behavior. they help others of their species, and sometimes others not of their species. Morality is precisely the codification of social habits that evolved to aid sociality in social species. We are moral because society depends upon it, and we cannot live without society. Historically, neglect of morals has often led to the breakdown of societies, but humans build them again because they need society to function for us to be human.
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