2
The Science of Spirituality
As a social scientist who holds spirituality as the crux of my interest, I often am challenged by fellow scientist who argue with me that the study of spirituality and its aspects cannot be scientific because it can’t be proven by science. What is being inferred when this is said is that science is concerned with the empirical and when it comes to spirituality and religiosity, we are not dealing with the realm of the empirical.
In this video, Ken Wilbur presents some challenges to social and any other type of scientist who offers this criticism. He first argues that if science is truly about verifying phenomenon, then it must do so by means of injunction, illumination, and confirmation, which he terms the 3 strands of knowledge. I liken injunction to the process of invoking a catalyst or a condition that is necessary or required in order to know something. In other words, you can’t know if a cat is in the room unless you evoke the action of looking for it or calling out something to which the cat normally replies. Illumination is the experience that occurs as a result of the injunction. So this means that If I search for the cat and call out its name, my illumination will entail either experiencing the cat coming to me or not. Confirmation is the knowledge I gain from having performed an injunction and experienced an illumination relative to the phenomenon in question. That is to say, I gain confirmatory knowledge as to whether the cat is in the room because of the illuminating experience of having the cat come toward me from under the couch that resulted from my injunction of calling out her name.
Wilbur also evokes the notion of falsifiability (or refutability) made famous by the Philosopher of Science, Karl Popper, as an important factor in science’s attempt to verify phenomenon. Falsifiability is the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment. The quality of or having falsifiability does not dictate that its possessor is false. It only means that if something is false, then this falseness can be shown by observation or experiment.
Wilbur essentially states in this video that if what is verifiable cannot be falsified by experiential grounds or empirical data, then it can not be scientific. I certainly agree with both Wilbur and Popper on this point since I believe that true science is not just about providing evidence for the existence of phenomenon but about providing evidence for variance within a phenomena or differences in qualitative levels across experiences.
Put together, these four components give a clear picture of what science would have to do in order to prove spirituality. However, for the record, most scientist would probably agree that not just the meaning of science needs to be clarified in such ways but what science means by “prove” has to be as well. I submit that no absolute prove for any phenomenon can exist unless all (100%) of the evidence that confirms possibility is accounted for along with all (100%) of the evidence that refutes impossibility. And it is pretty clear, as most scientists would tell you, that scientific methods and results are a long way from providing the latter as well as the former in the overwhelming amount of research performed.
Somewhere along the way social science took a critical turn for the worse in terms of validating possibility. At one point the observation of experience by another party became more valid and reliable than the report of the party experiencing the phenomenon. In other words, someone else being able to observe my spiritual or religious experiences became more truth and believable than me reporting my own. This fallacy is no doubt the product of the search for empirical objectivity.
What Wilbur unintentionally points out here in relation to this fallacy is that the injunction that social science has been using in an attempt to reach knowledge of spirituality is incorrect. He explains an injunction as simply, “In order to know this, one must do that” to “get into the data domain.” If spirituality is individually experienced phenomenon of connectedness, transcendence and states of well-being, as it has come to be known in the greater circle of social science, or an experience of conscience awareness of relative existence, as I classify it, then the data domain is the subjective experience of the individual and not the experience of others observing individuals or attempting to verify whether the experience of the is or is not happening. In order to know spirituality, science must first look at the reported individual experience as the valid and reliable data domain and from there illumination will surface.
Then what about confirmation and falsification? It is here that many narrow scientists take issue with the study of spirituality and often the study of religious experience because they distrust the sensory perceptions of individual experiences. For example, this distrust might come from the fact that scientist can record individual perceptions of God, but the God that is perceived can’t be confirmed through the objective observations of the scientist recording these individual experiences. This is distrust that arises from the implication that because something is perceived doesn’t mean it is true. By this implication, people suggest that if what one individual perceives can’t be confirmed by another experiencing it, then that individual’s experience cannot be falsified and hence it cannot be validated by science.
But it seems to me that this issue of confirming perceptions of phenomenon is evoked in relation to some scientific inquiry like the study of spirituality and observations of religious experience but not for others. Take for example Astronomy, which is considered a hard science or one that is perceived as being more scientific, rigorous, or accurate. The data domain for this scientific study is the experience of light or its absence in many cases emanating from stars or bouncing off of celestial bodies. This light is the basis for much of the explanation of existence and relationships in astronomical phenomenon. With this data domain it is never possible to confirm or falsify the existence of the stars themselves but only the perception of light emanations that can be confirmed or falsified. In other words, astronomers can never truly verify the existence of a star, they can only verify that its existence is perceived equally by astronomers based on the light emanations that they agree occurred thousands of years ago.
Clearly in this example of scientific study, it is not the existence of the star that is conformable or falsifiable but it is the presence or the absence of the perception of light relative to the star that is. This is the same for spirituality and religious experiences. The confirmation and falsification is not in the phenomenon themselves but in the comparison or correlation of perceived experiences of them, which serves as the data domain which science can utilize in methodically addressing inquiry related to them.
So thanks Ken for helping to shed some light on the convergence of science and spirituality and religiosity that is so often argued impossible.
2 to “The Science of Spirituality”
Web Map:
Visit more of BrianHewlett.com and the social world of Dr. Brian Hewlett by selecting desired pages below.
I want to quote your post in my blog. can I?
Sure! You can quote me all you want but it might be better to go to the sources I am talking about and qoute them.