The origin of human nature : a Zen Buddhist looks at evolution / Albert Low.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Low, Albert.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Consciousness.

Consciousness--Religious aspects.

Physical Description:

xx, 245 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Brighton [England] ; Portland, Or. : Sussex Academic Press, 2008.

Summary:

The Origin of Human Nature offers an original and fertile way to integrate spiritual and scientific views of human evolution. It offers a new and refreshing alternative to the way we think about our origins: random mutation (mechanistic neo-Darwinism), Genesis (God did it all personally), and Intelligent Design (God personally does what we can't otherwise account for). The result is an invigorating perspective on how our best qualities - our capacity for love, our appreciation of beauty, our altruistic capability, our creativity and intelligence - have come into being and evolved. The author takes issue with Richard Dawkins' published texts, and provides a point by point rebuttal of the neo-Darwinist argument.

How we think about our origin matters: if we think we are machines living among other machines, we will act accordingly. By showing evolution as a creative and intelligent process with its own inherent logic, The Origin of Human Nature resolves the dilemma of how to have, at the same time, both truth and ethics. Instead of starting in an imagined remote and uncertain past and moving to the present, this book starts at the certain and immediate present and works back. That consciousness, creativity, and intelligence exist is certain. The question is: how can these have evolved?

Dr Albert Low has made a study of human nature throughout his life. To write this book he draws on his prolonged meditations on creativity and the human condition, his years of providing psychological and spiritual counselling, and a wide-ranging knowledge of Western psychology, philosophy, and science.

Contents:

1 On Darwin's Theory 11

2 On Subjectivity and Objectivity 20

3 'Knowing', the Basis of Experience 28

4 Knowing and Evolution 41

5 On a New Way of Thinking 47

6 On Intention 64

7 Intention as Dynamic Process 73

8 The 'Blind, Unconscious, Automatic' Process of Intention 82

9 On Causation and Programming 90

10 What is Creativity? 101

11 Creative or Mechanical Evolution? 110

12 The Evolution of Intelligence 126

13 On the Evolution of Consciousness 140

14 The Ambiguity of 'I-You' 156

15 The Birth of Ego 171

16 On Humans and Evolution 178.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [223]-228) and index.

ISBN:

9781845192600

1845192605

OCLC:

156845817