“S” for Scientific. “S” for Spiritual.

Any attempt to explain the clash between spiritualism and science and how the two differ in explaining the world around us in a short blog entry, is of course doomed. In this admittedly shallow format, and with my own severely limited knowledge and time to truly do justice to this fraught topic, I will resort to generalities. I can do no more than touch on a couple of questions raised in a recent conversation with a person one could label ’spritual’. In a dialogue between the two world views, there are some puzzling, possibly anecdotal similarities worth considering – if only for the purpose of sharpening our respective mental tools (so here: I admit nothing!).

In doing some reading about the term and concept of spirituality, I see an attempt to identify and codify an intuitive sense of connection we have to everything around us. This in contrast to a pervasive sense of alienation afflicting many societies. Spiritualism seems to be preoccupied with the existence of a metaphysical realm, one that does not necessarily adhere to our preconceptions of reality. Its governing rules, according to some, do not necessarily adhere to known scientific models. In Wikipedia’s entry on spiritualism (challenged as incomplete by a bright iconic disclaimer), it is said that “..as such spiritual disciplines (which are often part of an established religious tradition) enjoin practitioners (trainees or disciples) to cultivate those higher potentialities of the human being that are more noble and refined (wisdom and virtue)…”.

What makes some of us suspicious of sprituality is that many who follow and believe in its sprawling theories, are explicitly seeking the path to self improvement, self realization and what they term ‘enlightenment’. What some derisively call New Age concepts. Those of us who believe in science, logic, and rationality, want to distance and contrast our way of doing the same (path to knowledge and self realization), from that which we perceive as being prone to self delusion. The concept of spiritualism makes scientists and those adhering to ‘rationale’ methods of investigation and proof, very uncomfortable. Spiritualism is this earnest, truth seeking distant relative we occasionally meet in family events, which has the capacity to be infuriating and smug. The ’I know something you don’t’ kind of person.

But going back to my conversation with said ’spritualist’ (who was not smug, nor the least infuriating). What stopped me dead on my track, was her curiosity and open minded approach to our topic of conversation. This made our discussion less argumentative and more exploratory. There were two topics that intertwined into one: the illusive concepts of good and evil was the first, and we both of agreed, coming from our respective starting points, that on certain scales this moral construct is relative and therefore flawed. The other related idea that certain human acts could be absolutely defined as either ‘natural’ or ‘un-natural’ is at least problematic. As is my habit to get a rise out of my interlocutors in such arguments, I went as far as say that there is no such thing as ‘un-natural’ human act, no matter how deplorable on certain relative scales of human morality. To my surprise, this did not get as much of a rise as I hoped for. So I may have to think twice about my credo: that godlessness is the only way to let the mind journey and explore un-interrupted.

Rationale thinking, the basis for scientific methods of proof, can contain “uncertain but sensible arguments based on probability, expectation, personal experience and the like”. In fact, some of the greatest scientific discoveries which were ultimately proved using scientific methods of proof, started in the minds of their authors as ideas. It took years to prove that their “intuition’ was right. Einstein’s theory of relativity is a good example. Intuition is therefore at the basis of both methods of thinking about the world around us, and both should not be discounted as a result. Where the two approaches diverge, is the methods, logical and otherwise, that the two world views take (or not, as the case may be) – to support and prove their theories.

I can’t say that this conversation changed my mind in any significant way. I will not ditch Ray Kurzweil for Deepk Chopra, but the dialogue raised questions worth considering.