Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit [Paperback]

`A courageous book by a serious scientist...I learnt much from his insights.'

‘A courageous book by a serious scientist...I learnt much from his insights.’

'In this remarkable and wide ranging book, David Hay avoids the
many weaknesses of the approach offered by "The God Delusion"'

`A courageous book by a serious scientist...I learnt much from his
insights.'

... at a time when the quasi-scientific atheist screed is
increasingly popular, Hay's work tends in the other direction.'

`...a compelling book, full of rich human insight and supported by
careful observation.'

'Tbe book is a challenge to both the religious and those who are
not religious.'

'Tbe book is a challenge to both the religious and those who are
not religious.'

David Hay, zoologist and former director of the Religious
Experience Research Unit in Oxford writes about the biological research Richard Dawkins didn't mention in The God Delusion. He reports on national and international data showing that despite the decline of
institutional religion in the Western world, a remarkable new phenomenon is emerging. Survey figures show that interest in spirituality, often expressed as the awareness of `something there', is rising right across the
developed world. Research in the biological, psychological and social sciences strongly suggests that spiritual awareness is a genuine and deep-seated aspect of
what it is to be human. David Hay's interviews with hundreds of `ordinary' people, who claim no formal religious affiliation, backs up the view that
spirituality is hard-wired into our biological make-up and evolves through natural selection because it has survival value. It is what enables people to relate ethically to other human beings and to their environment. By applying scientific method to religious enquiry, David Hay offers a new account of the importance of spirituality for human well-being.

An astonishing upsurge of interest in spirituality is taking
place across the Western world. David Hay, a zoologist who has directed
much of the investigation on this subject in Britain, explains the
biological roots of spiritual awareness and the importance this has for the

future of both religion and society in the West.

Modern biological research, particularly in the tradition
initiated in Oxford by Sir Alister Hardy, is much less hostile to religion
and the spiritual life than is suggested by the criticisms of Richard
Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others. Like Hardy (who incidentally was
Dawkins' old professor in Oxford) I am both a committed Darwinian and a
religious believer. I have tried to present the tensions there are in
maintaining this stance and the possibilities of resolution offered by the
new findings of empirical research.

David Hay was Director of the Religious Experience Research Unit
founded by Sir Alister Hardy FRS, formerly Professor of Zoology in Oxford
University. Currently David holds an Honorary Senior Research Fellowship in
the Department of Divinity and Religious Studies in King's College,
Aberdeen University and he is also a Visiting Professor in the Institute
for the Study of Religion in the University of Krakow in Poland. He is the
author of numerous research publications and his books include "Exploring
Inner Space: Scientists and Religious Experience", "Religious Experience
Today: Studying the Facts, and with Rebecca Nye, "The Spirit of the Child"

Excerpted from Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit by
David Hay. Copyright © 2006. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Certain people come to represent the spirit of their time. Maybe the
Beatles or Elvis did that for the pop world of the 1960s and 70s. On a cold
evening in London in the 1950s the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett had
already gone a step further. He put in a nutshell the emotional culmination
of four centuries of European culture. The setting of this tour de force
was the Arts Theatre Club in Great Newport Street on the Third of August
1955. After troubles with the Lord Chamberlain over censorship, Beckett's
new play was about to open privately with Peter Hall directing. The weather
had been drab all day, so it was not a bad time to get out of the cold and
into the warmth of a theatre. Anyone present on that basis and hoping for a
comfortable evening would be disappointed. As
the curtain rose, this is what confronted them:

On a bare stage stand two shabbily dressed men. Bowler-hatted clowns, they
might be mistaken for Laurel and Hardy. They are Vladimir and Estragon, the
central characters in Waiting for Godot. Although there is a path
running through their Wasteland they do not venture along it, but stay
rooted to the spot. It seems they are immobilised by hope, the hope that
someone called Godot will arrive and .... What? Give a meaning or an
explanation of their situation? Tell them what to do? Get them out of their
hopelessness? Who knows? At any rate here-and-now they are in a state of
absolute dependency on a mysterious figure who may or may not exist. Those
members of the audience who have the stamina to remain in their seats until
the final curtain find out that nothing changes and Godot still hasn't
come. They are left with the strong suspicion that he will never come.

On that opening night and for many succeeding nights most of the audience
were unimpressed. Many walked out while others stayed to jeer - they
couldn't make head or tail of it. I remember being puzzled myself, the
first time I saw the play. Yet Beckett repeatedly asserted that the theme
of Waiting for Godot is simple and straightforward. His claim to
transparency is somewhat disingenuous for his words confront us with human
depths where few would care to remain for long. The psychological world
occupied by the central characters is one that has regressed back to a
childlike directness of feeling, as hinted at by the use of their pet
names, Didi and Gogo. Their straightforwardness has a primordial quality as
if signalling the announcement of an embodied, biologically rooted
knowingness existing before all theology, all philosophy, all scientific
investigation, or any kind of extended thought whatsoever. The common
response of those first audiences was denial, in the psychiatric sense of
that word. People either avoided Beckett's version of the truth by refusing
to understand at the conscious level, or they ran away.

In spite of the temptation to shut out Beckett's message as unrecognisable,
his language is indeed perfectly familiar. Inevitably, but paradoxically,
the naked passions of the characters in Waiting for Godot are clothed in
the forms of European culture, particularly its Christian beliefs -
inevitably, because Beckett was a European; paradoxically, because how can
language ever do more than hint at the primordial?

Beckett was unusually well acquainted with Christian culture. His mother
who was a devout member of the Church of Ireland brought him up in a suburb
of Dublin. Their relationship was troubled and intense, and for the rest
of his life he continued to immerse himself in the classical literature of
Christianity, particularly the works of Dante. An interviewer once asked
him if a Christian interpretation of Godot was justified, to which he
replied, `Yes, Christianity is a myth with which I am perfectly familiar.
So naturally I use it.' Beckett's allusions to Christianity are not always
reverent, but they are always serious and self-referential. His
preoccupations are identical to those of the devout Christian believer -
meaning, hope and despair, suffering and the shortness of life. During one
knock-about exchange Estragon makes a reference to Jesus Christ. Vladimir
exclaims "Christ! What has Christ to do with it? You're not going to
compare yourself to Christ!" Estragon replies: "All my life I've compared
myself to him."
Many critics have dwelt upon this pervasive use of Christian imagery in
Beckett's writing, some of them claiming that his message is religious. It
has even been suggested that he was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize for
Literature on the mistaken assumption that his writing was a defence of
religion. But Beckett was absolutely without any form of religious belief.
The concluding words of his novel The Unnameable, express his views
succinctly: "Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you

don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."

One way of interpreting Godot is to see it as a snare to catch out unwary
people and summarily demolish their illusion that they do know where they
are. Although Beckett's stock of ideas came from the European tradition,
he insisted that there is no solid reason to suppose that this or any
inherited point of view corresponds with reality. His personal axioms
included the belief that we are forever alone, that language ultimately
fails to communicate, that broad generalisations (metanarratives) about the
nature of reality are unwarranted; that they are even a kind of violence
done to the unique world of the individual.