About the Project

Religious experience is among the most widely reported phenomena in human life. Surveys consistently find that 30-40% of adults in Western countries report having had an experience of a presence or power beyond themselves, something that mattered to them, often profoundly, and that does not fit neatly into either religious or secular categories.

Despite this, systematic study remains thin. Academic psychology largely set the topic aside in the twentieth century, and the major archives of accounts, of which the Alister Hardy Archive is the largest, had never been comprehensively analyzed at scale. The accounts were there. The tools to read them all weren't.

AI-assisted analysis changes that. I can now do in months what would previously have required a large team and many years: reading every account in the archive, applying a consistent analytical framework, and asking what patterns emerge across thousands of people who tried to put these experiences into words.

The goal is not to prove or disprove religious claims. It is to describe what people actually reported, across a large enough sample to say something meaningful about distributions: what kinds of experiences are most common, what triggers them, what effects they leave, how they vary across religious traditions.

I have no stake in any particular conclusion. I'm not trying to show that religious experience is real in some ultimate sense, nor to debunk it. I'm trying to find out what it looks like when you study it carefully and at scale. The data will say what it says.