Press Release

Something There The Biology of the Human Spirit David Hay For Immediate Release Contact: Sharon Kelly Tel. (484) 531-8380 Email: publicity@templetonpress.org Monday, January 29, 2007

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. In Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit, David Hay, a zoologist by training, analyzes extensive research on contemporary attitudes drawn from surveys and polls. He integrates this with the results of 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.

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 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. Hay is interested in the feelings and experiences of individuals, not just their intellectual beliefs. The examples he cites show vividly contrasting ways in which people's life stories shape both the direction of their spiritual search and the distinctive ways in which they express their experiences. These range from:

• Closely following the Christian institution, believing in traditional symbolism
• Having a strained and uncomfortable dialogue with the church
• Not following church doctrines, but acknowledging phenomena that reveals the "strangeness" of the world
• Holding many beliefs that parallel those of Christianity, but not feeling the need to belong to a Christian institution

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."

Evidence points to spiritual awareness being rooted in our physiological make-up. Arguing that this awareness is the underpinning of ethics, Hay contends that 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 that respects our relational consciousness." Spirituality is about relationships, he believes, about being "profoundly in communion, body and soul, with the totality into which we find ourselves 'thrown.'"

Hay uses the results of his research to consider ways in which churches might respond to negative feelings, disappointment, and cynicism about the institution of religion and even about church buildings. Reflecting on the advice implicitly given by interviewees and insights from modern empirical research, he suggests that recovery of contemplative prayer is the primary task of the "currently enfeebled" church.

He concludes that most people are already deeply interested in the search for ultimate meaning and that we long to:

repudiate our alienation from our human essence and to rebuild a relationship with the Creator of this beautiful and fragile planet and all who share it. 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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