Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit - Softcover

David Hay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0232526370 ISBN 13: 9780232526370

Publisher: Darton Longman and Todd, 2007

Synopsis

Despite the decline of institutional religion, a remarkable new phenomenon is emerging. Survey figures show that interest in spirituality, often expressed as the awareness of 'something there', is rising right across the developed world. An astonishing upsurge of interest in spirituality is taking place across the Western world. David Hay, a zoologist who has directed much of the investigation on this subject in Britain, explains the biological roots of spiritual awareness and the importance this has for the future of both religion and society in the West. Research in the biological, psychological and social sciences strongly suggests that spiritual awareness is a genuine and deep-seated aspect of what it is to be human. David Hay's interviews with hundreds of 'ordinary' people, who claim no formal religious affiliation, backs up the view that spirituality is hard-wired into our biological make-up and evolves through natural selection because it has survival value. It is what enables people to relate ethically to other human beings and to their environment. By applying scientific method to religious enquiry, David Hay offers a new account of the importance of spirituality for human well-being.

About this title

Book Description:

In recent years, a considerable body of evidence has been accumulating in both the physical and social sciences suggesting that our spiritual nature is real and not illusory, or that “there is something there.” This book provides an accessible interdisciplinary study of recent scholarly work in human spirituality. Zoologist David Hay analyzes extensive research on contemporary attitudes drawn from surveys and polls; his investigative work with the late Oxford zoologist Alister Hardy, founder of the Religious Experience Research Unit; and more than thirty years of his own research experience. Evidence is presented in thecontext of Western cultural history, beginning with tracing a repression of spiritual awareness arising from the European Enlightenment view of God as the most remotely theoretical of all intellectual fantasies. 
Like Hardy, Hay believes spirituality is “prior to religion and is a built-in, biologically structured dimension of the lives of all members of the human species.” Spirituality has abiological context, Hay contends, through which religion can rise, but does not necessarily do so. To evaluate this hypothesis, he examines a lengthy research procedure in the 1990s and excerpts from a poll in which ordinary people talk about how they try to make sense of their spiritual lives.
The findings conclusively show that, regardless of cultural influences and variations in beliefs about traditional religion, the most common phenomenon is an all-pervasive sense of “something there.” He points to evidence that spiritual awareness is rooted in our physiological make-up. He argues that this awareness is the underpinning of ethics, thus ignoring or repressing spirituality has damaging effects on Western society. He notes the current upsurge of interest in spirituality which he sees as “both a symptom of the malaise and an opportunity to begin the reconstruction of a humane moral commonwealth.”
Hay uses the results of his research to consider ways of overcoming the negative image of the institution of religion. He sees recovery of contemplative prayer as one of the most important tasks of the church. He concludes that most people are already deeply interested in the search for ultimate meaning and long “to repudiate our alienation from our human essence and to rebuild a relationship with the Creator. . . . This amounts to the prying open of a cultural valve long choked up, but never quite closed, because at some level people have always known that there is ‘something there.’”

About the Author:

"David Hay trained as a zoologist and first began working on the biological basis of spiritual and religious experience in 1974, in cooperation with the Oxford zoologist Sir Alister Hardy. In 1985 he was appointed Director of the Religious Experience Research Unit that Hardy founded in Oxford. Currently he holds the post of honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Divinity and Religious Studies in King's College, Aberdeen University. He is the author of Exploring Inner Space: Scientists and Religious Experience, Religious Experience Today: Studying the Facts and, with Rebecca Nye, The Spirit of the Child."

About this edition

• Publisher: Darton Longman and Todd
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0232526370
• ISBN 13: 9780232526370
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288