Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey

by Jane Goodall

I believed in the spiritual power that, as a Christian, I called God. But as I grew older and learned about different faiths I came to believe that there was, after all, but One God with different names: Allah, Tao, the Creator, and so on. God, for me, was the Great Spirit in Whom “we live and move and have our being.” There have been times during my life when this belief wavered, when I questioned—even denied—the existence of God. And there have been times when I have despaired that we humans can ever get out of the environmental and social mess which we have created for ourselves and other life-forms on the planet. Why is the human species so destructive? So selfish and greedy and, sometimes, truly evil? At such times I feel there can be no underlying meaning to the emergence of life on earth. And if there is no meaning, doesn’t this suggest, as a bitter New York skinhead once put it, that the human species is simply an “evolutionary goof”?