Kathryn Varuzza read and liked Patrick Tracey's review of Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith:

"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 mamma...more 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


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