Religion: Catching an Angel in a Net

It is billed as the world’s most lucrative honor. Every year since 1973, the Templeton Foundation* has given its Prize for Progress in Religion. All of the recipients have distinguished themselves primarily in spiritual endeavors. But the 1985 winner of the $185,000 award, announced last week, is an exception: Sir Alister Hardy, 89, won international fame as a British marine biologist. His ideas, however, are as discomfiting for many of his fellow scientists as they are for conventional churchmen. Throughout his career he has had an avocational curiosity about humanity’s spiritual experiences and the possibility of using scientific methods to classify and study them.

In the 1920s, Hardy began collecting written accounts of extraordinary religious experiences (inexplicable feelings of awe, answered prayers, visions, healings and out-of-body projections). In 1969, with the aid of modest donations and proceeds from his own speeches, he became the founding director of the Religious Experience Research Unit at Manchester College, Oxford.

$ Through newspaper appeals, pamphlets and broadcasts, the research unit has to date accumulated 30,000 pages of written reports of the experiences of nearly 5,000 individuals. Some are concrete (seeing a third eye in a friend’s forehead); most, however, just convey vague feelings like, “I was aware of something that was giving me strength and keeping me going.” Hardy and his small team analyzed the reports and developed 92 categories of

experiences. Among them: love, “guiding” voices, sense of timelessness.

The research unit has also helped sponsor a survey of 1,865 Britons, asking what became known as “Hardy’s question”: Had they ever been “aware of, or influenced by, a presence of power” different from their everyday selves, whether or not this was referred to as God? Overall, 34.6% said they had; among the better educated, the figure was 56%.

The calculated wispiness of Hardy’s question reflects the unorthodox religiosity of the slender, unflappable scientist. Hardy says, “My heart is in the Church of England, but not my mind.” He insists: “I do not think there can be any future for orthodox Christian beliefs.” However, he thinks human spirituality has a great future. There is, of course, considerable skepticism about whether spiritual experiences can be studied at all with any degree of success. The late Philip Toynbee, a writer and critic and son of Historian Arnold Toynbee, wrote that Hardy’s quest was the equivalent of “trying to catch an angel in his butterfly net.”

Nonetheless, Hardy believes he is exploring a realm that may help define the human race. Even though he has passed the reins of the Oxford research unit to British Botanist Edward Robinson, Hardy plans to continue his own work with the aid of his new prize money. One day, he hopes, studies like his will be extended to Asian cultures, helping to resolve the skirmishing among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. “They must realize,” he says, “that their different religions are all part of the same God.”

FOOTNOTE: *Founded and funded by John M. Templeton, U.S. Presbyterian layman and president of the mutual funds that bear his name.