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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 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 ofWestern 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 onWestern 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.'"
Features
- Examines the theory of biologically based spirituality
- Offers an interdisciplinary approach to examining
scientific and religious thought
- Presents author's research indicating that spirituality
is a deep-seated aspect of what it means to
be human
- Refutes thesis of Richard Dawkins' recently released
The God Delusion
"David Hay, zoologist by training, argues with powerful and persuasive data, that even in supposedly secularist and irreligious Britain, the human species possesses an openness to and even a need for spirituality and this because of a development in the evolutionary process. The book is a challenge to both the religious and to those who are not religious."
—Andrew Greeley, National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago
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