Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith
20 May 2008 | Kindle eBook
by George Vaillant
Kindle Edition
$17.99
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.
--------
Top customer reviews
Dave Shumway
5.0 out of 5 stars
I read slowly and reread which is not like me. I found much of myself and my ...July 10, 2015
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
As a "Buddhist/atheist/humanist I have strong suspicions and negative experiences with organized religions. This man looks the the ineffable, non- verbalizable experience of "connectedness" through the portholes of neuroscience, socialization and personal intuition. I read slowly and reread which is not like me. I found much of myself and my thinking concretized in there. A+
4 people found this helpful
Helpful Comment Report abuse
Dale Floody
5.0 out of 5 stars
A blend of science, spirituality, AA, and prosocial behaviorMay 29, 2009
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
If you want to read just one good book about spirituality, I highly recommend George Valliant's (2008) Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith. Vaillant is a research psychiatrist (which means the book is crammed with neurobiology) and directed Harvard's Study of Adult Development for 35 years. His conception of spirituality revolves around the eight positive emotions that involve human connection. He argues throughout that prosocial behavior is part and parcel of natural selection, that positive emotions both promote and follow prosocial behavior, and that this process occurs in the limbic and parasympathetic systems and the amygdala (rather than in conscious, cognitive thought processes), and that humanity is moving (from an evolutionary perspective) in the direction of greater spiritual (prosocial) interaction.
Vaillant would argue that spirituality defies rational, cognitive description. Vaillant's final chapter, entitled "The Difference Between Religion and Spirituality", is primarily a fascinating discussion of Alcoholics Anonymous ("AA"), which he concludes is mostly a spiritual rather than a religious program. AA certainly has its detractors, but it has also helped an awful lot of people to maintain sobriety, and Vaillant's discussion of the spiritual aspect of the program was most interesting. Given my emphasis on the importance of humor, I was also pleased to note his comment that AA meetings tend to be filled with laughter and humor (although, beneath it all there is a "deadly seriousness"). Excellent book.
9 people found this helpful
Helpful Comment Report abuse
Doug
5.0 out of 5 starsA great book from a legendAugust 13, 2015
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Wow - a great book from a legend in the field of psychological and well being research. Vaillant has really outdone himself with this book. Using data from the last 80+ years (much of it from the Harvard men's study), he talks about love, joy, passion, faith and other elements of our spiritual lives in easy-to-understand, yet impactful ways.
2 people found this helpful
Helpful Comment Report abuse
Don K in Alaska
4.0 out of 5 starsExcellent, but challenging textJanuary 14, 2016
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Difficult reading, befitting a psychiatrist who is writing a defense of Spirituality (as opposed to religion). It's good enough I am re-reading it, this time highlighting the noteworthy text. There's a lot of noteworthy text. Highly recommended for thinkers.
One person found this helpful
Helpful Comment Report abuse
jcrafts
4.0 out of 5 starsAn Inspirational ReadFebruary 4, 2013
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
It is difficult to bring clarity to the difference between religion and spirituality, but he has done it. Simple yet powerful concepts in this book fill each page and help us to understand ourselves better. A good example of one of these concepts is that normal human development is actually a spiritual progression. He shows with great success how religion harnesses our positive emotions and how cults abuse them. After reading his book I have renewed hope that we can all coexist, and that we can put the nonsense to rest.
One person found this helpful
Helpful Comment Report abuse
douglas a. dailey
5.0 out of 5 starsFive StarsAugust 3, 2017
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
excellent copy
Helpful Comment Report abuse
Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 starsFour StarsDecember 26, 2016
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Good, but complicated science.
Helpful Comment Report abuse
Scott Henderson
5.0 out of 5 starsSpiritual Evolution; how we are wired for faith, hope and loveFebruary 21, 2012
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I have never read anything by this author that I didn't like. This book arises out of his experience with a longitudinal study on the natural history of mental illness. Within this study was around 180 alcoholics that he followed through most of their life. His finding that Alcoholics Anonymous was superior to professinal treatment led him to consider how spirituality contributed to his process. I have been dealing in these issues for 30 years and find his book breathtakingly to the point. It is a must read for Ministry and Professional's involved in recovery.
One person found this helpful
Helpful Comment Report abuse
======
Aug 07, 2008Patrick Tracey rated it it was amazing
This is a book by George Valliant, a Harvard scientist following in the footsteps of thinkers like E.O. Wilson who started the whole movement to "biologize" spirituality.
The key point is the difference between the brain's mammalian limbic system and its reptilian amygdilla. Apparently the brains of reptiles have no limbic region, and this explains why they don't cry out for their parents. They remain silent, frozen in the fear that if they make but a peep, their daddies might eat them.
It turns out that the reptiles are missing the limbic region that contains the brain's hard wiring for the most important things that make life worth living -- empathy and compassion and a willingness to care for people who are not our blood relatives. It's also the part of the brain that embraces the unselfish maternal care for the young (love, we could call it) and play (joy, we could call it) and the separation cry of babies for their parents
So the good news is that we mammals have moved up the evolutionary spiritual chain with the limbic region, but we still have the reptile's old amygdilla region to drive us nuts with fear.
What I like as well is that Valliant takes on the arrogance of fashionable post-modern intellectuals who, as the blind followers of Freud, have rejected positive psychology and, with it, any serious consideration of how we are hard wired for positive emotions like love and joy.
Until very recently, in fact, positive emotions have been entirely absent from psychiatric textbooks. In the bargain, love has been overlooked
How unexpected that the biologists -- along with the quantum physicists -- are leading the psychologists back to God these days.
God, of course, is just a word--and words are but symbols of symbols. People get hung up on it, but why bother? I'd rather conceptualize God as The Force of Ever Giving Love and keeping pumping that nonreligious love through my own brain's limbic region.
What I take away from this book is that at every moment in our lives there are only ever three basic options before us: We can feel fear through our amygdalla. We can feel love through our limbic. Or we can argue about it all day through our prefontal cortex . . Peace . . . PT
(less)
flag5 likes · Like · 3 comments · see review
Jan 27, 2009John Schneider added it
Recommends it for: Open-minded people of faith
Recommended to John by: NPR
Dr. George E. Vaillant M.D., a psychoanalyst, research psychiatrist, and professor at Harvard University, breaks new ground in the age old controversy between science and faith. The book convincingly defends, through reference to historic data and recent research, the proposition that the positive emotions of faith, love, hope, joy, forgiveness, compassion, and awe and mystical illumination are a product of Darwinian evolution and natural selection. The premise is put forward that the mammalian capacity for love and commitment has grown out of the survival need to propagate and nurture children in a hostile environment. Dr. Valliant makes the case that these positive emotions are produced in the more primitive limbic system of the brain rather than the more highly developed neocortex, basically that we are hardwired for selflessness. The development of these positive emotions is largely responsible for the tendency toward more complex relationships and community building in our society.
Dr. Valliant is obviously committed to the theory of Darwinian evolution, yet seems to be open to the existence of God, though loosely defined in his book. As anyone who has read Darwin's abstract On the Origin of Species knows, Darwin himself concedes that the evidence put forth to prove the theory of evolution could just as well apply to the existence of an all powerful creator, and that much more observation would be required to prove his theory. Unfortunately, Darwin died before he could accumulate his further evidence. Dr. Vaillant seems just as content with this conclusion.
The book urges that not only can and must these two perspectives on the nature of our universe peacefully coexist, but that science and spirituality actually have much to contribute to one another. It is of course an answer to both the fundamentalist extremes of the religious right and the radical atheism or anti-theism of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.
Dr. Vaillant draws a distinction between genuine spirituality and dogmatic religious belief, which actually reside in different parts of our brain. According to Dr. Vaillant, "the former engages with a formal religious group's doctrines, values, traditions, and co-members, while the latter relates to an individuals connection with something transcendent. Like culture and language, religious faith traditions bind us to our own community and isolate us from the communities of others; while our spirituality is common to all of us. Religion asks us to learn from the experience of our tribe; spirituality urges us to savor our own experience. Religion causes us to mistrust the experience of other tribes; spirituality helps us to regard the experience of the foreigner as valuable too."
Dr. Vaillant predicts that spirituality will continue to evolve through the power of positive emotions and will increasingly contribute to making our world a more communal-minded place. Not only have we evolved spiritually as a species, but as we age as individuals we evolve from the exclusive positions of religious dogmatism to the more inclusive tendencies of openness and tolerance for the beliefs of others. Spirituality, then, the belief in something transcendent, is a net positive for the human race and anyone who suggests otherwise (Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens) would do well to read this book.
(less)
flag1 like · Like · comment · see review
Sep 08, 2014Pam rated it it was amazing
Beautifully written. There are eleven chapters as follows: Positive Emotions, The Prose and the Passion, Three Evolutions, Faith, Love, Hope, Joy, Forgiveness, Compassion, Awe and Mystical Illumination, and finally The Difference Between Religion and Spirituality. Each chapter/concept flows into the next as the author details why he believes that we are spiritual creatures. In chapter eleven he writes: "In this chapter, I reach for the conclusion that I hope has come to seem inevitable: that the human capacity for positive emotions is what makes us spiritual, and that to focus on the positive emotions is the best and safest route to spirituality that we are likely to find." Highly recommended reading. (less)
flag1 like · Like · comment · see review
Apr 19, 2011Sandra rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: recent-favorites
This book... very profoundly changed the way i think, or at least it has for now. I read it at exactly the right time that i needed to, just when i was wondering how exactly one harnesses the emotional part of your brain in truth-seeking, how exactly a characteristic like faith is valuable, and why in the hell does God seem like a big fat mean jerk 98% of the time?
It starts out very heavily, laying down the basic groundwork around which the rest of the book is written, so there's a lot of neuroscience and genetic/cultural evolution stuff which, while fascinating, my brain had difficulty synthesizing in the wee hours of the morning that i'd read. So i think that's why it took me so long to actually become absorbed in the book, but once i got past that and into the nitty-gritty of things, i could not put it down.
IMPORTANT THINGS I PICKED UP:
1. Post-formal operations. Um, holy crap, this completely changed the way i think about the entire "God is good" conundrum. The second i read this portion, i had to put the book down to write about how absolutely dickish i felt. He doesn't even explicitly state it as an explanation for that mental dilemma, but when i got to thinking about it, i understood.
In late adulthood, cognitive development may continue beyond Piaget’s formal operations into what Harvard psychologist Michael Commons has termed “post-formal operations”. Post-formal operations involve appreciation of irony and of paradox. By paradox, I mean learning to trust a universe in which the uncertainty principle is a basic axiom of quantum physics, in which good and evil exist side by side, in which innocent children die from bubonic plague, and in which to keep something you have to give it away. As in quantum mechanics, certainty is an impossibility. Only faith and trust remain. The frontal cortex, the seat of our social morality, can be both limbic and neocortical at the same time. It took the Catholic Church two millenia of cultural evolution and John Paul II eighty years of personal maturation for a Vatican pope to master paradox and finally refer to Jews and Muslims as “brothers.” If the bad news is that maturation takes a long time, the good news is that once you learn to ride a bicycle or fully understand that all women and all men are created equal, it is hard to forget.
I have no understanding of paradox. I'm not that mature. I think that just by knowing that that sort of thinking is possible - and also necessary - i am better equipped to deal with that particular mental stress.
2. Some emotions are inarticulate. Profound joy, love, faith... none of these things are available for cognitive explication. We can talk about those things til we're blue in the face but it's not going to make any sense until we immerse ourselves in it. He also did me the kindness of separating the cognitive functions from the emotional ones in the positive emotions he delves into, such as the difference of faith from delusion, faith from belief, happiness from joy, spiritual awe from drug states, forgiveness from tolerance, wishing from hoping, compassion from projection. THANK YOU FOR THAT, DR. VALLIANT.
3. Real faith/hope/love/positive emotions are empathic and focus on the other rather than ourselves. It also leads to action, not just to prayer. It's a Karen Armstrong thing i guess, where valid religiosity must lead to practical compassion. I'm with that. My only issue is then we ourselves are making that value judgment - can everyone really tell when they're just being selfish? I guess i trust myself to. I don't know if i trust everyone else.
4. I've stopped trusting people. This book has illuminated my profound mistrust of others and the lengths to which my independence has separated me from my community. Time to learn to get it back.
I can understand how some other reviewers might have found it distressing and disappointing, but i don't think it ever claimed to hold scientific defense of religion. And it's important, too, that he made that distinction between religion and spirituality. I think spirituality validates religion where science cannot, but only with a proper examination and understanding of exactly why faith and other inarticulate positive emotions are necessary in certain portions of our cognitive imaginings.
All in all, a very profound and thought-provoking read. I've gotten so much from reading it, and anyone who considers themselves to be on a spiritual journey will greatly benefit from a day or two of going through this book.(less)
flagLike · comment · see review
Jun 06, 2013Terry rated it really liked it
Dr. Vaillant directed Harvard's longitudinal study of adult development and followed hundreds of men over seven decades of their lives. From his pioneering research work, along with research from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and history Dr. Vaillant has developed interesting and important insights into human spirituality. He maintains that humans have evolved to experience spirituality and a concept of God at three levels: biological (genetic evolution), societal (cultural evolution) and individual (personal evolution through aging/adult development). He clearly delineates spirituality from religion. He sets out eight "positive" emotions that he believes comprise our experience of spirituality: faith, hope, love, joy, compassion, forgiveness, awe and gratitude. He outlines a biological basis for why these pro-social behaviors tend to improve as we age.
The book is a disquisition on how our brain is wired to experience both negative (fight/flight) emotions and positive emotions. The brain retains precise details of both traumatic experiences (PTSD) and strong mystical experience. Strong negative and positive emotional experiences have the capacity to significantly influence our future relationships and interactions with others. The good news is that we can affect our of positive emotions. The experience of positive emotions does not have to be associated with religion (Vaillant has worked with people in AA and discusses the spiritual basis of AA). I found the chapters that discussed each positive emotion to be the most interesting. Vaillant discusses the importance of spiritual practice and how spirituality and community building (strengthening our relationships with others) go hand-in-hand. One of my favorite quotes in the book (p. 165) is from Steven Post of Case Western University: "All true virtue and meaningful spirituality is shaped by love, and any spiritual transformation that is not a migration toward love is suspect."
This book provides a very hopeful view of humankind. Vaillant believes that human beings, as individuals and as cultures, are growing in compassion and generosity for each other. While newscasts may carry a different perspective, Vaillant provides evidence that mankind is becoming more spiritually oriented and that the positive emotions are one of the reasons for our success as a species.
(less)
flagLike · comment · see review
Aug 18, 2010Odile rated it liked it
Shelves: religion-mythology-spirituality, science, evolution
http://www.eveningoflight.nl/subspeci...
[...] Another recent book dealing with cultural, but particularly emotional, evolution is George E. Vaillant‘s Spiritual Evolution. It focuses mainly on the relationship between a range of positive emotions and different areas of the brain. For each of these emotions (among others love, joy, and compassion) Vaillant shows the ties to different stages in evolution ranging from basic impulses we share with reptilians to more recent developments in neo-cortex unique to humans and (some) other mammals. The style of the book is informal and anecdotal, ultimately not geared towards a scientific proof of all the author’s assertions, but more towards an emotional and spiritual resonance in the reader, which makes it a stimulating read anyhow, although a more rigorous scientific treatment might make the book more convincing to some people.
Vaillant’s main point is that a revaluation of the positive emotions will enable us to lead spiritual lives that benefit both ourselves and others around us. By examining the basis of emotions in biological evolution, we award them also the scientific appreciation they are due, something which has been sorely lacking in psychology and other sciences until now, as the author points out. The distinction Vaillant makes between spirituality (which he ties to the experiencing of specific positive emotions, e.g. love, hope, joy, awe, and mystical illumination) and religion (a more rationalistic social institution geared towards the propagation of ethical values, group identity, and indeed spirituality) is a very valuable one, and one which I have espoused myself for years. I, too, would argue that while religion, in particular the (pseudo-)rational and social aspects of it, may be responsible for great suffering in the world (as are certain non-religious social movements), it does not mean we must denounce spirituality along with it.(less)
flagLike · comment · see review
Sep 01, 2009Gavin rated it liked it · review of another edition
This is a very interesting book. I have learned a lot from it. It makes a good case for religion most religion as a force of good in the world from an evolutionary context.
Interesting small points in this book:
• Positive Emotions are essential to the survival of Homo sapiens as a species
• Increasing education and intolerance for patriarchal dogma has steadily eroded membership in most mainstream religions.
• If the world is going to function as one small planet, the development of some kind of consensus regarding human nature is essential.
• Religions have provided communities with a unifying view of the human condition and have often procided the portal through which positive emotions are brought to conscious attention.
• Positive emotions, especially joy make thought patterns more flexible, creative, integrative, and efficient. These emotions have been experimentally shown to help humans behave more communally and more creatively and to learn more quickly.
• We are learning to live peaceably with each other in greater in greater numbers.
• Positive emotions are more important than parental social class, religious, denomination, and IQ to human development.
• Rituals and cultural formats of the world's great religions form the surest way to pull our positive emotions into conscious reflection.
(less)
flagLike · comment · see review
Apr 05, 2009David rated it it was ok
In this book Vaillant chronicles the journey modern social sciences have taken from total denial of the instincts of compassion and love to a (grudging) acceptance. Along the way, Vaillant argues how fundamental these emotions are. He also emphasizes how the human instinct for love and compassion can be taken as a scientifically defensible basis for religion.
One of Vaillant's cases in point is the Alcoholics Anonymous organization. He notes how AA has somehow been able to avoid the fate of many ...more
flagLike · comment · see review
Mar 27, 2017Robert Bogue rated it really liked it · review of another edition
In Destructive Emotions, the Dalai Lama pondered with Daniel Goleman about whether we are generally selfish or generally compassionate creatures. He framed it from the perspective of a classic philosophy question and shared his own idea that we’re both compassionate and selfish and that we operate from a place of compassion until we experience a scarcity. It’s this passage of Destructive Emotions that resonated most with me as I was reading Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith. Spi ...more
flagLike · comment · see review
Jun 08, 2012Melinda rated it it was amazing
Recommends it for: Seth Kadish
Recommended to Melinda by: Melinda Krupa
This is probably in my top 5 books of all time. I have been searching for a book like this and have probably marked a dozen or more pages in in. It is straightforward and I love the way he writes and uses so many disciplines and all of his many years of study and vast knowledge to bring so much heart to a scientific case for the need for love, compassion, faith, joy and hope in the human realm and scientic pursuits. His thought process and writing style were wonderful and although he encompassed ...more
flagLike · comment · see review
Aug 11, 2012Michael rated it really liked it
Shelves: brain-body-science, thought-religion
Another beautiful contribution from Vaillant. He looks at positive experience connected with spirituality--faith, hope, love, joy, forgiveness, compassion, awe and mystical illumination--as essential to human thriving. That may seem obvious, but I was shocked to learn how blatantly academics (and, by extension, the law) have ignored or dismissed so many of the things that make life worth living. For example, Freud defined love as "object relations" and dismissed joy (his cocaine use may have had ...more
flagLike · 3 comments · see review
Jul 22, 2015James Beck rated it it was amazing
My client (who leads the oncology department at a major hospital in Los Angeles) gave me this book. I'll be honest... It looked boring. However, we always have lively philosophical conversations so I gave it a whirl.
Few books truly impact me. This one changed the way I approach life.
*** Warning ***if you aren't the type of person that chats until sunrise over philosophical conversation, then this book may not be for you. However, If you are looking for words that separate spirituality from religion, and breath new life into faith then this is a book you should sink your teeth into. (less)
flagLike · comment · see review
May 07, 2009Tim rated it really liked it
Very interesting book that debunks the ideas of modern athiests that spirituality is dangerous. Vaillant lays out a case that our brains have evolved over the last few thousand years to foster the capabilities of compassion, faith, hope and love as positive improvements to human kind. Not an evangelical title, but a very good read.
flagLike · comment · see review
Mar 05, 2013Jesse rated it did not like it
Ooof. There's a pretty good book to be written on this topic. Unfortunately, this isn't it. I so wanted this book to be better than it actually is. And the S*** about autistics is downright offensive at times.
flagLike · comment · see review
Sep 29, 2011Jenny Brennan rated it liked it
Shelves: mapp-program-recommendations
I greatly admire Valliant and his work. I love his tendency to incorporate poetry and literature into his arguments. However, while he raised some interesting points, I think that faith and particularly religions are probably more detrimental than helpful to our continued evolution.
flagLike · comment · see review
Oct 30, 2012Diane rated it it was ok · review of another edition
With my current search for what the basis is for us to be walking upon this earth, I enjoyed the reference to the human development.
I enjoyed the history & literature references made
flagLike · comment · see review
