The Religious Experience Research Unit in Oxford embodies a brave and ambitious project devised by Sir Alister Hardy, to turn theology into a science comparable with other modem sciences. As a biologist, Sir Alister is convinced that “religion” is a side of man’s experience which can no longer be neglected by empirical science. He believes that there are scientific, as well as philosophical, grounds for attacking materialistic monism (DF p. 23); and he considers such an attack necessary, for otherwise “civilization may yet cut its throat with Occam’s razor if it does not realize in time that materialism is ignoring a large part of the data of experience” (DF p. 228). In his Gifford Lectures of 1963-5, the second series of which make up The Divine Flame now happily made available to us again in the RERU re-issue, and in The Biology of God, he indicates what form this attack might take, and it is a powerful and many-fronted attack. Sir Alister’s own professional contribution, as a biologist, is essentially to be found in his evolutionary theory, in which he alleges that a purely mechanistic doctrine is untrue to the evidence. This means that the claim that religion and everything that might be meant by “spirituality” have been demolished by evolution is far from proven. The attack is furthered by evidence from a wide range of sciences, including psychology, neurology, social anthropology, and Sir Alister is particularly concerned to draw our attention to the claims of parapsychology. Obviously a lot of work remains to be done in all these fields, but a strong case can be made for saying that ideological scientism of the old school is not nearly as well grounded scientifically as some people would like to think.