Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith Vaillant

From CatholicKnowledge
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Title: Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith

Author: George E. Vaillant, MD

Go back to Books list

Synopsis

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.

Content

1. Positive emotions

  • " Positive emotions - not only compassion, forgiveness, love, and hope but also joy, faith/trust, awe, and gratitude - arise from our inborn mammalian capacity for unselfish parental love. They emanate from our feeling, limbic mammalian brain and thus are grounded in our evolutionary heritage".
  • "All humans are a hardwired for positive emotions, and these positive emotions are a common denominator of all major faiths and of all human beings"
  • positive emotions are not just nice to have; they are essential to the survival of Homo sapiens as a species.
  • ""This book defines spirituality as the amalgam of the positive emotions that bind us to other human beings - and to our experience of "God" as we may understand Her/Him. Love, hope, joy, forgiveness, compassion, faith, awe, and gratitude are the spiritually important positive emotions"
  • "... all of the positive emotions that I have selected all involve human connections. None of the eight are "all about me".
  • "Positive emotion induces in out parasympathetic nervous system reduces basil metabolism, blood pressure,, heart rate, respiratory rate, and muscle tension.
  • "Spirituality is not about following your bliss. Spirituality has a deep psychobiological basis 0 a reality rooted in the positive human emotions..."
  • "Spiritual Evolution builds on the relatively new scientific disciplines of ethology (animal behavior) and neuroscience - both of which have enabled scientific study of positive emotions. Each of these emotions has a neurobiological basis and an evolutionary architecture..."
  • There are three forms of evolution relevant here: genetic, cultural, and individual. "For selfish reptiles to evolve into loving mammals took genetic evolution that led to the development of the limbic system, the brain region underlying our positive emotions. For loving, playful, passionate mammals to become creative scientists and intellectual theologians took genetic evolution that led to the development of our huge human neocortex, the brain region underlying both science and our religious dogma.
  • "For humans to have evolved into Samaritans who often place compassion, forgiveness, and unselfish love above a mentality of might-makes-right has required cultural evolution, for cultural evolution is more rapid and flexible than genetic evolution.
  • The third kind of evolution is the evolution of the individual over the human life span. Evolution toward spirituality takes place not only in the genetic and cultural arenas but also in the lives of every one of us as we mature our focus from the caterpillar "me" to the community butterfly.
  • "However, while [the negative emotions of] pain, rage, and grief provide short-term benefits, positive emotions provide benefits over the long term."
  • For the survival of humanity, genetic evolution and cultural evolution are both important.
  • "Just as the genetically derived limbic system with its positive emotions facilitated the survival of mammals over dinosaurs, so has evolving cultural focus on positive emotions contributed to use communal and success of Homo sapiens.
  • Regarding a successful but disproven treatment of schizophrenia called insulin coma "While no medical journal would call the treatment spiritual, such caring behavior, involving as it did the three "theological virtues" of faith, hope and love, would be regarded as spiritual by most religious denominations."
  • With maturity, religious belief does not increase, yet we develop a more nuanced emotional life and deepening spiritual appreciation.
  • In contrast to popular science, which places spirituality in our huge, reasoning Homo sapiens neocortex, I concede that religious dogma might live there, but I place spiritual impulse in our mammalian, emotional brain - the limbic system.
  • "Love is the shortest definition of spirituality that I know. Both spirituality and love result in conscious feelings of respect, appreciation, acceptance, sympathy, empathy, compassion, involvement, tenderness, and gratitude. "
  • Jesus Christ and Karl Marx are not usually paired, but both men were revolutionaries who mistrusted organized religion because religion talked about, without actually creating loving communities.
  • "Third, I hold that we do not have to be taught positive emotions, Our brain is hardwired to generate them. Humanities task is to pay attention to them, for they are a source of ur spiritual being and the key to our cultural evolutionary progress.

2. The prose and the passion

  • "The newer sciences - neuroscience, cultural anthropology that is not ethnocentric, and the scientific study of animal behavior, ethology ... has tempered our highly evolved neocortical human preference for culture, for language, and for creating dogmatic, intolerant "religious" memes. The new sciences have accomplished this by teaching us about our inarticulate, subcortical, limbic, mammalian capacity for positive emotion and for altruistic action.
  • "These new sciences offer hope that our brains are constructed for loving cultural evolution and not just dor heartless scientific progress ..."
  • "... the left brain hemisphere specializes in details and articulates and understands ideas, words, and component parts. The right brain specializes in inarticulate music, visual images, and wholes (gestalts). The limbic brain specializes in emotion".
  • "Cognitive ideas can be expressed in words and controlled voluntarily, and for ther expression ideas a powerfully dependent on the Homo sapiens' cerebral hemispheres - the neocortex. Emotional feelings are equally dependent on our more mammalian subcortical brain - the limbic system and the hypothalamus.
  • This chapter discusses "the differences between the right and left hemispheres, first, and then the "mammalian" subcortical limbic system and finally the "reptilian" hypothalamus.
  • The right brain ays attention to integration of space and time, to context, empathy, and the minds of others, and to the gestalt of facial recognition. The verbal left brain is all about detail and the certainty if cause and effect, exegesis, and verbal communications.
  • Neither the seemingly spiritual right brain or the seemingly religious left brain is a trustworthy arbiter of truth..."
  • The differences between out "human" cerebral hemispheres (our neocortex) and our mammalian limbic system is just as great as the differences between our two neocortical hemispheres.
  • " emotions are almost always good or bad and almost always elicit approach or avoidance"
  • " For centuries, the Catholic Church, ... resisted translation of the Bible from Latin into vernacular languages for fear that increased cognitive understanding would weaken the "spiritual" awe produced by incomprehensible, sonorous Latin scripture".
  • Three brains
    1. hypothalamus or reptilian brain. "coordinates most autonomic functions such as heart rate, breathing, muscle reflexes. When stimulated these structures , particularly the hypothalamus, result in primitive responses, sometimes called instincts, that are selfish and that unlike the social emotions, are relevant only to the self.
    2. paleomammalian (limbic system) - "Poetically referred to by most of us as the "heart", selects and provides coloration for the experiences that we treat as important."
    3. neomammalian neocortex - "generates our science, our culture, our ideas our beliefs, and our religions. Equally important, our neocortex creatively elaborates our limbic positive emotions into awareness."
  • ... the whole brain cannot work properly together if it is divided against itself - wether by Luther of Skinner. The brain will not be "aligned" unless science and passion walk hand in hand". "Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height."
  • Reason without affect would be impotent; affect without reason would be blind"
  • Within the Limbic system:
    • "The hypocampus serves visual as well as verbal memory
    • The amygdala gives passion and importance to emotional experiences.


3. Three evolutions

  • Faith
  • Love
  • Hope
  • Joy
  • Forgiveness
  • Compassion
  • Awe and mystical illumination
  • The difference between religion and spirituality.

Other facts

Bibliographic info

Retrieved from "https://wiki.canonicaleye.org/index.php?title=Spiritual_Evolution:_A_Scientific_Defense_of_Faith_Vaillant&oldid=3046"