Andrew Sullivan offers a sneak peak at Robert Wright’s new book on religion, which was recently excerpted in the pages of Sullivan’s employer, The Atlantic:

The book is The Evolution of God (due out in the US next month) and it is by Robert Wright, a secular writer best known in America for thoughtful defences of evolutionary psychology and free trade. The tone of the book is dry scepticism with a dash of humour; the content is supple, dense and layered. What makes it fresh and necessary is that it’s a non-believer’s open-minded exploration of how religious doctrine and practice have changed through human history — usually for the better.

It isn’t clear whether the book takes a hold of the recent evolutionary psychology work done one religion, which is surprising since Wright is perhaps best known for his book on EP. Here, he seems more interested in broad strokes about the upward progress of religious ideas. It reminds me of Karl Jaspers’s Axial Age idea, which has enjoyed a resurgence lately among sociologists of religion like Robert Bellah and José Casanova.

Interesting to see, though, how believer Sullivan aims his review to make Wright’s book safe for believers:

What’s subtle about the book is that while it makes a materialist case for how God evolved — as a function of trade and travel, globalisation and science — it does not reduce faith to these facts on the ground. Hovering over the book is a small sense that, far from disproving the existence of God, this evolving doctrine might point merely to humankind’s slow education into the real nature of the divine.

via Light at the end of religion’s dark tunnel | – Times Online.

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