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."
