Sir Alister Hardy believed that religious experience was a biological reality, as much a part of human nature as hunger or fear. In 1969 he founded the Religious Experience Research Unit to find out.
Sir Alister Hardy (1896–1985) was a Fellow of the Royal Society and Linacre Professor of Zoology at Oxford, one of the most respected marine biologists of the twentieth century. He spent decades studying plankton distribution in the North Atlantic and was the inventor of the Continuous Plankton Recorder, a device still used in oceanographic surveys today.
Throughout his scientific career Hardy maintained a parallel private inquiry into religious experience. He was convinced that the sense of presence, the direct, felt awareness of something beyond the ordinary self, was not a cultural artefact or a neurological accident but a genuine feature of human nature with evolutionary significance. He believed it had been systematically neglected by academic psychology because it was embarrassing, not because it was unreal.
"I believe that the feelings of love, of wonder, of devotion which man has, and their expression in religious experience, are just as much part of his biological nature as is his sexuality."
— Sir Alister Hardy, The Spiritual Nature of Man (1979)
In 1969, following his retirement from Oxford, Hardy used his Gifford Lecture series to announce his project to the world. He placed advertisements in British newspapers asking whether readers had "ever been aware of or influenced by a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self." Responses came in the thousands.
Hardy's key methodological insight was to ask for first-person written accounts rather than answers to a structured questionnaire. The resulting archive is a collection of narratives, each one a person attempting, in their own words, to describe something that had happened to them and had mattered. This format preserves the texture and specificity of individual experience in a way that tick-box data cannot.
Hardy died in 1985, but the project continued. His unit, the Religious Experience Research Unit, later renamed the Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC), continued collecting accounts and conducting research. The archive is now held at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David in Lampeter, where it remains the largest systematic collection of first-hand religious experience accounts in existence.
The archive contains over 6,700 accounts in total. The 2,080 accounts analyzed here are those that meet our criteria for individual first-hand experience accounts (as opposed to letters commenting on the project, secondhand accounts, or institutional submissions) and that have been processed through our tagging and quality review pipeline.
Hardy's work was part of a broader mid-twentieth century effort to study religious experience empirically rather than theologically, following in the tradition of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and building on subsequent work by Abraham Maslow, Walter Stace, and others. What distinguished his approach was scale: instead of studying a small number of cases in depth, he sought to build a large enough sample to identify patterns.
The archive has been used as the primary data source for several landmark studies of religious experience in Britain, including David Hay and Ann Morisy's surveys in the 1970s and 1980s, which found that around a third of British adults reported having had an experience of "a presence or power beyond themselves." Hardy regarded this finding, that religious experience was far more common than either religious institutions or secular academia had assumed, as the archive's most important contribution.
The full archive is held by the RERC at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Researchers wishing to access the original accounts should contact the RERC directly. A portion of the archive is available in digitised form; the remainder exists in the original handwritten and typewritten letters sent to Hardy and his successors.
For further reading, Hardy's own account of the project is The Spiritual Nature of Man (Oxford, 1979), available in many university libraries. The archive's website is maintained by the RERC at uwtsd.ac.uk/rerc.