Coyne v. Wright on the Evolution of “God”

At the New Republic, Jerry Coyne has a withering review of Robert Wright’s popular new book, The Evolution of God. In response, Wright has made a list of Coyne’s misrepresentations, which convinced me that Coyne should indeed have been more careful. But Wright’s response focuses on the “trees” (Coyne’s individual distortions) and leaves Coyne’s criticism of Wright’s “forest” intact.

To wit, Wright points out that Coyne took a quote out of context in order to attribute to Wright “the claim” that “God” is behind humanity’s moral progress. But of course Wright doesn’t “claim” any such thing; he only suggests that it is plausible, as shown by a passage quoted by Coyne that was not, it appears, taken out of context: “Maybe natural selection is an algorithm that is in some sense designed to get life to a point where it can do something — fulfill its goal, its purpose.” Wright thinks that that purpose might have been the achievement of moral order.

As Coyne says, and as I confirmed by reading Wright’s afterword (entitled “By the Way, What Is God?”), this focus on possibilities, as opposed to what we might call provabilities, is “characteristic of Wright’s intellectual style.” But talking about what is possible is almost never enlightening or fruitful. Wright admits as much when he says that a personal God “presumably” does not exist; what he means is that the possibility is not disprovable, but we can and should nevertheless discount it. But the same sort of skeptical approach to “possibilities” vitiates Wright’s own argument. Read the rest of this entry »