The world of science is full of unanswered questions; so is the world of religion. One of the most interesting questions divides those who believe that scientific method leaves room for religious belief and those who regard religious experiences as so many illusions.
This debate has continued since the foundation of the Royal Society in the 17th century, with its original motto, Nullius in verba, rejecting authority in favour of observation. Isaac Newton, the greatest of British scientists, was on the side of religion, as well as being an early and leading Fellow of the Royal Society. Another early scientist who believed in the reality of religious experience, also a Fellow of the Royal Society, was Robert Boyle, the great chemist. His Seraphic Love of 1659 can be regarded as an account of spiritual experiences.
In the late 20th century, the debate came to centre on biology, although historically it has been more involved in physics. The chief protagonist of the anti-theological argument has been a devout Darwinist, Richard Dawkins, who argues that evolution made God an irrelevant and unnecessary hypothesis. At the same time, a distinguished marine biologist, the late Sir Alister Hardy, became an outstanding advocate of spiritual belief. He founded the Religious Experience Research Unit (RERU) to record the evidence for the existence of spiritual experience.
Science has its own families of teaching; Hardy was taught by Julian Huxley and became Professor of Zoology at Oxford from 1946 to 1961. In that role he was the teacher of Dawkins. Hardy’s biographer, in a recently published book, God’s Biologist: A Life of Alister Hardy (Darton, Longman and Todd), is David Hay, who succeeded him as director of the RERU. Hardy had admired Huxley, whose grandfather, T. H. Huxley, had been called “Darwin’s bulldog”. Both the Huxleys, Darwin, Hardy, Dawkins and Hay are all orthodox Darwinists, but Hardy and Hay both believe that the influence of the spirit can be demonstrated by empirical facts.
Hay’s book is essential reading for anyone interested in this argument. He has pinned down the difference between the Dawkins and the Hardy views of evolution. Dawkins, Hay writes, “accepts that religious beliefs had survival value in the past and, therefore, were selected during the process of evolution. Dawkins interprets this as a fortunate accident. That is to say, cognitive adaptations that have evolved for other purposes just happen to be available for the construction of what were once morally useful, but mistaken, religious ideas . . .” Hay comments that this is where Hardy and secular critics such as Dawkins would certainly part company, and where, in his view, Hardy’s hypothesis is the more plausible.
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I first met Alister Hardy in the late 1970s, when The Times published two articles on the RERU. He had the manners of the old school. He invited people to send him their spiritual experiences in response to articles in various newspapers, of which The Times was one. I met David Hay later, after Hardy died in 1985, when Hay had become his successor. I found both men impressive for their fair-minded and open approach.
One letter written to the RERU provides a particularly good representation of these experiences, of which thousands are recorded: “A certain event had hurt and humiliated me. I rushed to my room in a state of despair, feeling as worthless as an empty shell. From this point of utter emptiness it was as though I were caught up in another dimension. My separate self ceased to exist and for a fraction of time I seemed part of a timeless immensity of power and joy and light. Something beyond this domain of life and death ... Years later I read of Pascal’s moment of illumination and was amazed at the similarity of mine.”
Hardy wanted to demonstrate that religious experience, the feeling of having met a benign but other power, was a common experience. But it is notable that these experiences, which are widespread, have been recorded by people some of whom one would regard as of exceptional achievement. Blaise Pascal himself was an outstanding French scientist of the later 17th century. His experience of illumination is recounted in many books on mysticism, but he himself wrote of his experience: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and savants.” Spirituality is not confined to an elite.
The letters that are still being written to the RERU cannot prove the proposition that religious experience is universal, but the evidence is clear. Spiritual or religious experiences are common in all groups, and are recorded in all regions.
If one accepts the logic of Darwinism, there must be a strong probability that this is an evolutionary attribute, like other widely distributed personal qualities. Human beings have these religious experiences because they have inherited, by an evolutionary process, a potential for such experience. Are Darwin and religion compatible? Yes, because Darwinism accepts that this religious capacity has evolved .
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The question is not one of the existence of these experiences, but of their meaning. People who have had them tend to believe in their truth, but for those who have had no such experience, belief is much more difficult. Nevertheless, Hardy’s work has provided a substantial volume of evidence, which needs to be considered with an open mind.
Religious experience must, therefore, in some way have tended to survival. Dawkins thinks that the religious capacity is, in essence, a happy accident that may no longer have any beneficial effect. If he is correct, religion was never anything other than a benign mistake, and those who imagine that they have had real spiritual experiences are being fooled by their own genes. This is not impossible; there are evolutionary characteristics that have ceased to provide a survival benefit. But so long as human beings are programmed to have religious experiences, many will believe in their own experience and will side with Professor Hardy rather than Professor Dawkins.