Product 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 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 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."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #960179 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
David Hay was previously director of the Religious Experience Research Unit, 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.

Customer Reviews

Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit
This is a monumental work by David Hay, bringing together over 30 years of his research and scholarship in the reality of human spirituality.

Hay guides us along historical pathways to understand just why expressing their spirituality can be so difficult for westerners and suggests how this apparent sickness of the spirit might be addressed.

While a significant scholarly work, the book is a very easy read interspersed as it is throughout with conversations from the many, many interviews with ordinary people, most of whom do not attend church, about their hidden spirituality.

A scholar could well buy it simply for the references. All would enjoy it with interest, gaining an expanded self knowledge in the process.

Dr Paul McQuillan
Honorary Reseach Fellow
Australian Catholic University

A unique, inviting and authoritative approach.
The human spiritual side is real and not an illusion: this is often a contention of spirituality titles but here the idea comes from a trained zoologist who uses his research and background to blend modern attitudes drawn from surveys and polls with results from his investigative work with a late zoologist Alister Hardy - and over thirty years of personal research. The idea is that spirituality is a built-in, biologically structured dimension of all humans: any serious spirituality holding will appreciate the reasoned, logical arguments which support his contention, and many a college-level collection in social science and psychology will also find this a unique, inviting and authoritative approach.

Human spirituality and biology
The biology of spirituality--is such a subject possible? David Hay is uniquely qualified to speak on human spirituality from a biological perspective. Having served as the director of the Religious Experience Research Unit at Oxford, he is well acquainted with the classic studies of spirituality conducted by zooligist Alister Hardy, founder of the research unit. In this book Hay surveys several key classic studies in the study of religion and spirituality, providing depth of coverage rarely seen in books of this nature. Hay also summarizes his own research work, which can be characterized by both having breadth and variety. As a complement to both the classic studies and his own work, Hay summarizes some of the best research conducted in recent years related to the spiritual experiences of humanity--including a variety of religions and, perhaps just as important, the spiritual experiences of non-religious people. The latter are important because as the influence of religion has significantly declined in much of the world, the interest in spirituality simultaneously has mushroomed. His conclusions point to not only a biological basis for spiritual experience, but also that spirituality is an important part of what makes us human, as the many first-hand accounts clearly underscore (although the possibility is admitted that some higher animals may have similar experiences). This book is poetry and science, historical and contemporary, subjective and objective, thoroughly human yet pointing beyond to the Other. A major addition to the literature on spirituality, it draws widely upon many sources--and perhaps The Source--to make a distinctive contribution to that literature.