Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit - Softcover

Hay, David

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9781599471143: Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1599471140 ISBN 13: 9781599471143

Publisher: Templeton Press, 2007

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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 inter-disciplinary 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 the context 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 a biological 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 hasdamaging 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.'

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About the Author:

David Hay was previously director of the Religious Experience Research Unit at Oxford University, now known as the Religious Experience Research Centre, and is currently honorary senior research fellow in the department of divinity and religious studies at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of many books and articles and the co-author with Rebecca Nye of The Spirit of the Child. He lives in Nottingham, England.

From Publishers Weekly:

Hay is an academic cousin to Richard Dawkins—they both studied with zoologist and sociological observer of religion Alister Hardy. But at a time when the quasi-scientific atheist screed is increasingly popular, Hay's work tends in the other direction. Statistics prove that religious observance is down, but surprisingly, Hay can marshal other figures to show that spiritual experience is on the upswing. And this is all to the good for Hay, who feels that although the religious skepticism birthed in the Enlightenment had undoubted benefits (like modern science), it has also caused great harm. This is an ambitious book, covering biology, zoology, history of religions, philosophy, theology, politics and social science. Not many books quote both scientific journals and original sociological field research between the same covers. Specialists in these areas may feel shortchanged, but even they will learn something: Hay's interviews with avowedly nonreligious persons in Nottingham often yield heartrendingly beautiful stories about how wretched the church can be, but how interesting the life of the spirit is. The only problem is that church folks already know this. Readers from Dawkins's branch of the Hardy academic tree will likely see this as more evidence of how much religious "delusion" remains to be overcome. (May)
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