EP
Copyright
Submitted to publishers.
kevin.sharpe@tui.edu
www.ksharpe.com
1 September 2003
Re. Love and Happiness: Spiritual Thought in the Light of
Behavioral Genetics and Neurochemistry
Dear
Thank you very much
for your willingness to see my proposal for the above book. To jog your memory,
this is the introduction to it that I gave in my query letter:
For at least the last
Love and Happiness explores the most recent work emerging from genetics and neurochemistry, research showing such human feelings to have a genetic and biochemical base. What does this mean in light of the cultural theological tradition that insists on God being love?
God doesnt possess veins filled with love-inducing biochemicals. Neither do genes and neurotransmitters bring about happiness in the afterlife. What then are love and happiness, spiritually? To address this question means making sense of the opposing explanations that scientific and spiritual traditions offer to arrive at adequate explanations of love and happiness: ones that do justice to both the physical and the spiritual aspects of our nature.
Several religious thinkers have tried to confront advances in genetics, while most scientists choose to ignore traditional spiritual issues. Love and Happiness takes the next step by showing how science and theology can work in tandem for greater explanatory power. Taking over where recent books like Robert Wrights The Moral Animal and Dean Hamer and Peter Copelands Living With Our Genes leave off, Love and Happiness provides answers to some of the most tantalizing challenges leveled by Richard Dawkins. This work reaches the burgeoning science and religion market, as well as students, scholars in theology, and educated trade audiences interested in spiritual responses to modernity.
The enclosed
Proposal includes:
Overview
Table of Contents
Introduction
Style
Audience
Competition
Marketing
Length and Delivery Date
Biography
Included also is my current Curriculum Vitae and a sample chapter.
I have enclosed a SASE. However, as I travel frequently, it is best to contact me through email. A full manuscript will be available for you when completed should you request it. Thank you for your time and interest, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours sincerely,
Kevin Sharpe.
A Proposal for:
by
Kevin Sharpe
How does science explain happiness
and love?
What is happiness in an afterlife?
Can God be the source of love?
Can science explain human emotions such as happiness and love? Or are these emotions something more than the action of biochemicals and electrical impulses? We feel pulled in two opposing directions. Science is the most powerful explanatory tool we have, yet to submit everything even our most intimate feelings to its gaze feels wrong. Why?
Love and Happiness explores the most recent work emerging from
genetics and neurochemistry. We learn that human feelings do have a genetic and
biochemical base. More research emerges daily to
Does the Divine possess veins with love-inducing biochemicals running through them? Could genes and neurotransmitters bring about happiness in the afterlife? We must address these kinds of questions if we want to make sense of the opposing explanations that scientific and spiritual traditions offer. We need a new understanding of the Divine if we wish to reconcile these two opposites. Only then can science and religion join forces to provide adequate explanations of love and happiness ones that do justice to both the physical and the spiritual sides of our nature. Only then can we hope to understand more deeply the natures of love and happiness.
Several religious thinkers have tried to confront advances in genetics. Most scientists choose to ignore traditional spiritual issues. Only Love and Happiness takes the next step by showing how science and religion can work in tandem for greater explanatory power. It takes over where recent books like Robert Wrights The Moral Animal and Dean Hamers and Peter Copelands Living with Our Genes leave off, and provides answers to some of the most tantalizing questions that Richard Dawkins raises as challenges.
Love and Happiness combines science with spirituality, asking about the nature of human emotions. It will appeal to readers with an interest in what genetics and neurochemistry can tell us about human nature as well as to those who ponder how religion can adapt to the onslaught of modern science.
Happiness through the eyes of spiritual thought:
Happiness through the eyes of contemporary science:
Differing scientific and spiritual views of happiness lead to conflict:
Love through the eyes of spiritual thought:
Love through the eyes of contemporary science:
Differing spiritual and scientific views of love lead to conflict:
The love and happiness disputes are instances of a much older reductionist debate, as exemplified by debates over sociobiology during the last twenty years:
Spiritual thought responds inadequately to sociobiology:
The happiness and love conflagrations spring from our understanding of the Divine:
The implications flow not only from science to spiritual thought, but also from spiritual thought to science:
Love and happiness represent two emotions lying at the very heart of human existence. Ask anyone what they most desire from life, and they will likely reply with a simple "happiness." We go to great efforts to satisfy our desire, seeking out engaging and fulfilling occupations, choosing and decorating our homes for maximum comfort and contentment, filling our leisure time with enjoyable pursuits, making lifestyle choices that we hope will make us happy. And close loving relationships shared with our partners and, perhaps later, with our children represent one sure route to happiness for many of us. So much of our energy goes toward finding a suitable mate, someone with whom we can share our hopes, our fears, our desires, someone with whom we can attain utmost happiness. Once we have found our hearts desire, many of us decide to strengthen and fulfill that union further by creating and caring for children together.
The centrality or importance of a concept often becomes apparent from the effort we expend in trying to explain or account for that concept. And so it is with love and happiness. These two emotions have traditionally fallen within the remit of religious explanation but, increasingly, they have become the focus of scientific scrutiny. With the growth of behavioral genetics, neurochemistry, and sociobiology over recent years, a new window has opened onto our behavioral, emotional, and social traits. Love and happiness have captured the attention of the two most influential explanatory systems available to humanity science and religion.
My aims in this book are threefold. We first examine spiritual and scientific approaches to love and happiness. We show how, in many spiritual traditions, these emotions involve a moral or spiritual relationship between ourselves, our actions, and the Divine (or God). The Divine loves us infinitely, desiring above all else our happiness. The Divine urges us to love our fellow humans, to seek out happiness on earth. And, some traditions assure, ultimate happiness awaits the good and faithful in the life to come. The scientific perspective, by contrast, concentrates on the physical mechanisms underlying love and happiness, ignoring both the Divine and the afterlife. I show how, according to the scientific story, love and happiness are the products of our genetic inheritance working in conjunction with naturally occurring chemicals in our bodies and brains. I show how love and happiness represent biological adaptations that encourage us to reproduce, to nurture our young, to maximize our achievements, to push our potential.
A conflict emerges. And my second aim becomes one of highlighting the
apparent incompatibility between spiritual and scientific accounts of love and
happiness, of cataloguing the subsequent dispute between spiritual and
scientific thinkers. We show how theologians mount various (largely
unsuccessful) campaigns to armor their own discipline and to cast doubt on
scientific findings, while scientists remain unrattled,
assured of success and public
A handful of theologians attempt to move beyond this impasse. They eschew
the dualism employed by those who desire the separation of science and
religion, by those who talk of different worlds, different subject matters,
different languages, different levels of explanation.
We examine two such attempts those of
And finally, I offer my own solution to the problems that rise from the debate over love and happiness. My solution is radical. Important explanatory roles can and should exist for both science and religion, I believe, but in order to achieve full integration, we must demolish and reconstruct some of our most trusted conceptions. I offer a novel understanding of the Divine, a naturalistic understanding that equates the Divine with the universe-as-a-whole. This understanding divests the Divine of human characteristics, yet paints a picture in harmony with our modern, scientific interpretation of the universe, a picture that may legitimize theology in the eyes of science. I also propose that scientists and theologians adopt an overarching empirical framework, a framework that enables scientific evaluation of religious claims about human love and happiness. And, by examining the ways in which different wholes relate to their parts, I offer a radical reinterpretation of love and happiness in the divine context.
I aim to raise spiritual ideas to the lay level. Im interested in where research on a subject might lead to in the future.
My audience is general, including not only those who ascribe to a religion, but disaffected and thinking spiritual people and those interested in the broader aspects of scientific research. People will want to buy this book who seek greater happiness in tried-and-true ways, yet ways that are true to their deepest selves and to the heart of the universe.
Books on love and happiness abound. Books on spirituality, love, and happiness abound too. Several books on science, love, and happiness have also appeared. The following list offers a sample on books that focus on the happiness side of the issues:
Happiness
Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual, by Dennis Prager (New York: ReganBooks,
Happiness
Now! Timeless Wisdom for Feeling Good Fast, by Robert Holden (London: Hodder & Stoughton,
The God
Instinct: Heeding Your Hearts Unrest, by Tom Stella (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books,
The Art of
Happiness: A Handbook for Living, by The Dalai
Lama and Howard C. Cutler (New York: Riverhead Books,
Human
Happiness and Morality: A Brief Introduction to Ethics, by Robert Almeder (
The
Psychology of Happiness, by
Love and Happiness is unique because it offers a broad scientific yet spiritual avenue to love and happiness, one that compares and contrasts itself with common sense, and therefore speaks in a unified voice to both our secular and spiritual sides, to our full selves.
Marketing could be aimed at both trade and academic
audiences, within the latter especially theology/religion and social
psychology. Advertising and reviews in the usual places for these fields will
reach potential readers. Science and religion journals and magazines for
advertising could include Earthlight,
Mother Jones, Parabola, Research News in Science and Theology, Resurgence,
Science & Spirit, Shambhala, Tricycle, Utne Reader, and Zygon.
I can market through my well-developed web site, speaking engagements,
workshops and seminars, the program of the Oxford Institute for Science and
Spirit. I am very comfortable with radio, TV, web, newspaper, and magazine
interviews.
The book
will be about
For
I am a professor in the Graduate College of Union Institute
and University,
For details, please see my accompanying Curriculum Vitae.