Summary of Robert Wright's The Evolution of God

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 The idea of comparing the religions of primitive peoples to the religion of civilized people is offensive to many Europeans. They believe that their religion is superior, and that it is impossible to understand the motives behind the actions of primitive peoples.

#2 The Bible, the oldest scripture in the Abrahamic tradition, contains traces of its ancestry. Monotheistic prayer didn’t grow out of Chukchee rituals or beliefs, but the logic of monotheistic prayer may have grown out of a kind of belief the Chukchee held, that forces of nature are animated by minds or spirits that you can influence through negotiation.

#3 The theory of animism, which was the dominant explanation of how religion began, was based on the idea that humans attribute life to the inanimate. It was promoted by Edward Tylor, a hugely influential thinker who believed that the primordial form of religion was animism.

#4 The animist view of the world is that it is inhabited by spirits that can be found everywhere. These spirits are what make up all of the things in the world, and they all have a soul. The animist view of the world began to evolve, and eventually became polytheism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822514072

IRB Media

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Insights on Robert Wright's The Evolution of God

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The idea of comparing the religions of primitive peoples to the religion of civilized people is offensive to many Europeans. They believe that their religion is superior, and that it is impossible to understand the motives behind the actions of primitive peoples.

#2

The Bible, the oldest scripture in the Abrahamic tradition, contains traces of its ancestry. Monotheistic prayer didn’t grow out of Chukchee rituals or beliefs, but the logic of monotheistic prayer may have grown out of a kind of belief the Chukchee held, that forces of nature are animated by minds or spirits that you can influence through negotiation.

#3

The theory of animism, which was the dominant explanation of how religion began, was based on the idea that humans attribute life to the inanimate. It was promoted by Edward Tylor, a hugely influential thinker who believed that the primordial form of religion was animism.

#4

The animist view of the world is that it is inhabited by spirits that can be found everywhere. These spirits are what make up all of the things in the world, and they all have a soul. The animist view of the world began to evolve, and eventually became polytheism.

#5

The modern understanding of how religion first emerged from the human mind is that it was developed by people who were trying to make sense of the world. As understanding of the world grew through science, religion evolved in reaction.

#6

The best evidence of prehistoric religion is the beliefs of hunter-gatherer societies. These are widespread and strange, and it is unlikely that they were imported.

#7

The Klamath, a hunter-gatherer people in what is now Oregon, talked. And, fortunately for us, they talked to someone who understood them more clearly than visitors often do: Albert Samuel Gatschet, a pioneering linguist who in the 1870s compiled a dictionary and grammar of the Klamath language.

#8

Hunter-gatherer societies typically feature spirits of the deceased, and these spirits do at least as much good as bad. They explain the otherwise mysterious workings of nature, and they are seamlessly interwoven into their everyday thought and action.

#9

The question of why bad things happen is a particular interest of hunter-gatherers. The answer is that the supernatural realm is populated by various beings that, as a rule, are strikingly like human beings. They’re not always in a good mood, and the things that put them in a bad mood don’t have to make much sense.

#10

Hunter-gatherer gods are not paragons of virtue, and they are often treated as such. They are kind on some days, less kind on others. The Ainu, Japan’s aborigines, would sometimes try to win divine favor with offerings of millet beer, but if the gods didn’t reciprocate with good fortune, the Ainu would threaten to withhold future beer unless things improved.

#11

The religions of savage societies are generally well-defined and praiseworthy, but they lack a clear moral dimension. The rules of these religions are not about behaviors that actually harm other people, but about breaches of ritual.

#12

Religion is mostly about morality today, but it did not start out that way. Hunter-gatherer societies do not use the ultimate moral incentive, a heaven for the good and a hell for the bad. They instead have an afterlife, but it is almost never a carrot or a stick.

#13

The moral compass of modern societies is not based on love and generosity, but on fear of punishment by a larger society. This is not the case in hunter-gatherer societies, where these values are not preached or reinforced by threat of religious reprisal.

#14

Religion, in all its forms, tries to explain why bad things happen and offer a way to make things better. The modern assumption is that the unseen order, the divine, is inherently good, and discrepancies between divine designs and our own aims reflect shortcomings on our part.

#15

Religion has always been about