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.

Now, as Coyne says, there are plenty of reasons to doubt whether humanity has evinced much moral order or progress. But Coyne is not an intellectual or religious historian, so it’s no surprise that Wright gets the pleasure of correcting him on such issues as “the evolution of monotheism,” “Christian inclusiveness,” “belligerence and tolerance in the Koran,” and “the Islamic doctrine of salvation.” But Coyne is a scientist, and the author of an excellent primer on evolution, so I was surprised that he didn’t take issue with Wright’s misrepresentation of natural selection, which turns out to be central to his justification for talking about “god” at all.

In his afterword, Wright imagines a dialectic between an “atheist scientist” (hello, Jerry Coyne) and a “believer.” He starts off by noting that his own “account of the moral direction of history has been a materialist account”: evolution produced the human brain, which produced technology, which allowed for the expansion of social organization, which likewise expanded our “moral imagination.” A totally plausible and godless account. “So why,” Wright asks rhetorically, “start talking about God?”

This is Wright’s believer’s response, and one can’t help but get the sense that it is also Wright’s: “[B]iologists agree that a strictly physical system or process—whose workings can be wholly explained in material terms—can have such extraordinary characteristics that it is fair to posit some special creative force as its source and ask about the nature of that force. Darwin inquired into the creative force behind plants and animals, and his answer was evolution. Surely the believer is entitled to ask the same question about evolution: Where did the amazing algorithm of natural selection come from?”

Well, natural selection is no more or less than the logical outcome of genetic variability and finite resources, neither of which seems particularly “extraordinary” or “amazing” to me. Perhaps this is not the “special explanation” for the “powerful mechanism” of natural selection that Wright has in mind. But of course Wright doesn’t use words like “special” and “extraordinary” innocently; they indicate that he has a bias towards unprovable, nonscientific explanations of where natural selection came from. The argument, if we can call it that, is fundamentally the same as William Paley’s infamous argument from design: some natural thing (for Paley it was the living organism, for Wright it is natural selection itself) is so darn complex and impressive that it just has to have a “special” (read: non-materialist) explanation.

For Wright, the discovery of natural selection merely forces believers to go a little further back into the infinite regress (i.e., but where did that come from?), but for less speculative souls, it did something far more powerful: it suggested that arguments of a particular form (this thing is complex, therefore God or “god” exists) were fundamentally misguided, and also that the more we know, the smaller “god” becomes, so that we might reasonably expect that he will eventually disappear entirely. Attempts to save some scrap of “god” from this onslaught of reason just end up begging the question: do we even recognize this “god” as “God” anymore, or should we maybe stop using that word entirely? For pointing out the tenuousness of Wright’s possibility-addled project, I’ll forgive Coyne’s misreadings and indiscretions.