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Our author, Robert Wright, has agreed to answer some of our questions via email!

Please post questions for Robert Wright here in this thread. Do your best to write questions that can be forwarded to him without the need for serious editing please. This is a great opportunity for everyone that is reading and participating in this book discussion to interact with our author.

Sure I will ask one. Mr Wright what influence has the research process had on your beliefs while you were writing the book?

Chris

I have a number of questions related to the omissions and speculation in TEoG. Do you intend to forward legitimate questions or am I wasting my time submitting them?

There is not much discussion of gender in The Evolution of God. Did you consider the argument that early humanity had greater equality of the sexes and that the rise of monotheism was related to a rise of patriarchal society with greater focus on war and social hierarchy?

Do you believe that Jesus Christ actually lived as a historic individual, or do you see the Bible story as a pastiche combining stories from a range of stories to produce a believable narrative?

Stahrwe, if you ask a good question it will be forwarded. We are only going to send him a max of 6 question as answering questions properly takes a few hours of his time. Post your questions after you have really thought them out and in a week or two we will grab the best questions and send them to Robert Wright.

1. Given that polytheism seems to have tolerance built into it, and monotheism arrives at tolerance with difficulty and only when advantageous to itself, how would you defend monotheism as a higher prompting of the Logos?

2. One reviewer called your book Hegelian in outlook. Was Hegel an influence on you, or is any resemblance coincidental?

3. Would you agree that, in terms of theology fully in accord with non-zero-sumness, evolution probably reached its highest point to date, over 2,000 years ago with Philo?

4. Do you think that the expansion of the moral circle can continue considering reasonable doubt that the resources of the planet are sufficient to supply the needs of the burgeoning population?

5. Do you think that the religions themselves will proactively seek to expand non-zero-sum relationships, or will they continue to change only when conditions have made it apparent that they must, or can do so with little risk?

Only 6??? I hope my question gets included. What particular part of EOG did you not feel comfortable about and why did you still include it in the book?

Isn’t the story of the call of Abram (apocryphal or not) a more parsimonious explanation for the emergence of monotheism from polytheism, and while you mention Abraham several times in TEoG, why did you not directly address the story of his call?

Russell Blackford on the Richard Dawkins website, claims you "repeatedly suggest (...)that the narrative of religion's cultural evolution may be evidence for something divine behind it all." Would you care to comment on this?