Oh, God of Progress

The New York Times reviews Robert Wright's new book on religion:

In sharp contrast to many contemporary secularists, Wright is bullish about monotheism. In “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny” (2000), he argued that there is a moral direction to human history, that technological growth and expanding global interconnectedness have moved us toward ever more positive and mutually beneficial relationships with others. In “The Evolution of God,” Wright tells a similar story from a religious standpoint, proposing that the increasing goodness of God reflects the increasing goodness of our species. “As the scope of social organization grows, God tends to eventually catch up, drawing a larger expanse of humanity under his protection, or at least a larger expanse of humanity under his toleration.” Wright argues that each of the major Abrahamic faiths has been forced toward moral growth as it found itself interacting with other faiths on a multinational level, and that this expansion of the moral imagination reflects “a higher purpose, a transcendent moral order.”

Wright is always interesting and engaging, even when his bullish progressivism and his sympathy for religious abstraction seems to have no real basis in fact. But I'm sympathetic to his project and will be interested to see how he deals with the historical contingency of religious progress and whether or not he entertains the possibility that our sense of improving circumstances over time might be an accident or an illusion.