The evolution of God

"When you exercise your moral imagination, you are doing God's work."

In game and economic theory, zero-sum describes a situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant. In contrast, non-zero-sum describes a situation in which the interacting parties' aggregate gains and losses is either less than or more than zero – situations where both participants may gain.

Most discussions about God and religion don’t venture into game theory, but Schwartz Senior Fellow, game theorist and best-selling author Robert Wright did in Launer Auditorium in early October.

Wright's lecture was part of the Schiffman lecture series on religion and he was introduced by Dr. Anthony Alioto, professor of history and Althea W. and John A. Schiffman Chair in Ethics, Religious Studies and Philosophy. The Schiffman family also was in attendance.

Wright began the lecture by joking that although this was his first time in Missouri, he was a Cardinals fan growing up. The audience, including a group of Columbia high school students bussed in for the lecture, cheered. Wright said he then became a San Francisco Giants fan. The audience didn't cheer.

"Allegiance is a fluid thing," he said, largely defined by and dependent on community. So it is with beliefs in God or gods, too, he said.

Wright then embarked on a sweeping journey through religion that began with polytheistic hunter-gatherers more than 12,000 years ago. The invention of agriculture, he said, changed conceptions of God and began the trend toward the monotheism of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They are so named because all spring from Abraham.

The religions of hunter-gatherer societies, he said, were not morality but attempts to figure out why bad things like famine, floods and sudden death occurred. The answer, he said was obvious to these peoples: some deity had been offended. In these small groups, moral and ethic codes simply weren't needed, he said; they were self-regulating or, as he said, "there was nothing to steal and nowhere to hide it." Morality and ethics only entered religion with the development of denser, more settled societies.

For example, he said the archeological evidence is darn near incontrovertible that ancient Judaism's Yahweh was one of a pantheon of Jewish gods. Archeologists have found references to Yahweh's consort, Ashira. The Jews only became monotheistic during the Babylonian exile when most Jews were evicted from Israel, taken into slavery in Babylon and their temple razed. This, he said, was a zero-sum equation for the Jews and Jewish religious scripture became correspondingly intolerant and zero-sum.

When the Persian Empire conquered the Babylonians and restored the Jews to Israel, Judaism became more tolerant and non-zero-sum, he said. Judaism was just one of many religions coexisting under the Persians, he said, and Israel and its neighbors had more to gain by coexistence than intolerance.

At the risk of sounding blasphemous, he said he'd concluded that peaceful, self-interested tolerance fosters "the moral growth of God."

But, he said, if the three Abrahamic religions can't adjust to each other and make moral progress, the consequences can be severe, as witnessed by 9/11, the wars in the Middle East and the modern-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Moral progress, he said, is being able to understand why your enemy sees you in zero-sum terms. He challenged the audience to be able to put themselves in the shoes of a suicide bomber.

"I think it’s a moral test," he said. "I think there's some larger purpose unfolding on the planet."

He concluded by urging the audience to exercise their moral imagination. "When you exercise your moral imagination, you are doing God's work," he said.