Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

The Evolution
of God
Evolutionary Teleology

Robert Wright

Journalist, Philosopher

“The Story of this Evolution itself points to the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity”

   Post 108.  March 08, 2020 continued . . .

  The Evolution of God

   Teleological Evolution

 Wright is aware that an immanent reconciliation of Science & Religion sounds like a Pollyanna pipe-dream. But he spends the next 400 pages documenting the history of the human progression from ancient superstitions to a modern empirical understanding of the world3. That same moral & technical progress has also been observed by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, and in Michael Shermer’s The Moral Arc. Like Wright they view history from a scientific and secular perspective. So, I’ll skip the history lesson, and focus mainly on the emerging secular notion of some force behind Nature that functions like an “invisible hand”, guiding humanity toward a more inclusive “moral circle”. This god-like guide is not conceived in anthro-morphic mythical terms, but more like Plato’s philosophical divine principle, the Logos4.

As a matter of fact, Wright does use that same proto-scientific concept in Chapter Nine, Logos : The Divine Algorithm. Yet he goes on to apply a more modern idiom to describe the source of that algorithm — God as Programmer. I too, use such terminology to explain my concept of a deity who works his magic through physical evolution instead of direct intervention. As Wright says, “the most obvious obstacle to rapprochement between traditional religion and a scientific sensibility : the idea of a an anthropomorphic and frequently interventionist god.” But Philo, the Jewish philosopher of Jesus’ time, like Plato, used the Greek Logos to mean “the reasoning principle in the universe” and “Natural Law for all men and matter.” Moreover, Philo assumed that “prior to creating the universe, God form-ulated the Logos in the way an architect might conceive a blueprint or the way a computer programmer might design an algorithm.” That notion is in agreement with my own Enformationism thesis, where my G*D5 is portrayed as both the Logos and the Programmer, which is to say that G*D is the Enformer of our world.

Another term that Wright uses to describe the evolution of Moral Imagination and the widening of the Moral Circle was drawn from political & economic Game Theory. It’s also a reference to his 1999 book by the same name, Non-Zero : The Logic of Human Destiny. There, he argued that Win-Lose competitions are regressive, while Win-Win games are pro-gressive. “The principal argument of Nonzero is to demonstrate that natural selection results in increasing complexity within the world and greater rewards for cooperation” __Wiki. Therefore, he concluded that Evolution was in some sense Teleological, tending toward an unknown ultimate goal. The notion of Progressive Evolution was heretical in Science at the time. So, he explained that, “the realization of such prospects is dependent upon increased levels of globalization, communi-cation, cooperation, and trust, what is thought of as human intelligence is really just a long step in an evolutionary process of organisms (as well as their networks and individual parts) getting better at processing information”. But his thesis has been backed-up by several historical studies since then, such as Steven Pinker’s and Michael Shermer’s books noted above. They too, saw evidence of moral progress. Moreover, the Information Age, has exploded since the year 2000 into what Howard Bloom called, The Global Brain, otherwise known as the Global Mind.

                   Post 108 continued . . . click Next

G*D is both a figment of our imagination and the cause of our creativity

Non-Zero Game Theory

Can Science Explain Religion?  

The New York Review of Books __H. Allen Orr

   “So the argument is that an evolutionary psychological construct, the moral imagination, lets us see game-theoretic situations that are non-zero-sum.”

“. . . Wright argues that religious responses to reality are generally explained by game theory and evolutionary psychology, the subjects of his previous books.

Unlike zero-sum games, wherein one player’s gain is another player’s loss, in some games both players can win; hence “non-zero-sum.”

For example, religious doctrine grew more tolerant of other faiths when tolerance helped smooth economic or political interactions that were potentially win-win.”

 4. LOGOS :
   In Enformationism, it is the driving force of Evolution, the cause of all organization, and of all meaningful patterns in the world. It’s not a physical force though, but a meta-physical cause that can only be perceived by Reason, not senses or instruments.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html

5. G*D :
   An ambiguous spelling of the common name for a supernatural deity. The Enformationism thesis is based upon an unprovable axiom that our world is an idea in the mind of G*D. This eternal deity is not imagined in a physical human body, but in a meta-physical mathe-matical form, equivalent to Logos. Other names : ALL, BEING, Creator, Enformer, MIND, Nature, Reason, Source, Programmer. The eternal Whole of which all temporal things are a part is not to be feared or worshipped, but appreciated like Nature.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html

Historical Evidence of Moral Progress

The Better Angels of Our Nature : Why Violence Has Declined  by Steven Pinker

Enlightenment Now : The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker

The Moral Arc : How Science Makes Us Better People by Michael Shermer

Science, Reason, and Moral Progress :
by Michael Shermer

The Lucifer Effect : Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
by Howard Bloom