In our current era of holy terror, passionate faith has come to
seem like a present danger. Writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam
Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have been happy to throw the baby
out with the bathwater and declare that the danger is in religion
itself. God, Hitchens writes, is not great.
But man, according to George E. Vaillant, M.D., "is" great. In
"Spiritual Evolution," Dr. Vaillant lays out a brilliant defense
not of organized religion but of man's inherent spirituality. Our
spirituality, he shows, resides in our uniquely human brain design
and in our innate capacity for emotions like love, hope, joy,
forgiveness, and compassion, which are selected for by evolution
and located in a different part of the brain than dogmatic
religious belief. Evolution has made us spiritual creatures over
time, he argues, and we are destined to become even more so.
"Spiritual Evolution" makes the scientific case for spirituality as
a positive force in human evolution, and he predicts for our
species an even more loving future.
Vaillant traces this positive force in three different kinds of
"evolution": the natural selection of genes over millennia, of
course, but also the cultural evolution within recorded history of
ideas about the value of human life, and the development of
spirituality within the lifetime of each individual. For
thirty-five years, Dr. Vaillant directed Harvard's famous
longitudinal study of adult development, which has followed
hundreds of men over seven decades of life. The study has yielded
important insights into human spirituality, and Dr. Vaillant has
drawn on these and on a range of psychological research, behavioral
studies, and neuroscience, and on history, anecdote, and quotation
to produce a book that is at once a work of scientific argument and
a lyrical meditation on what it means to be human.
"
Spiritual Evolution" is a life's work, and it will restore our
belief in faith as an essential human striving.
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