Spirituality vs. the Scientific Method: Lent 2024, Day 11

[A response to Marek]

I wrote yesterday “Science instinctively has a problem with the metaphysical” – my brother replied: "It’s fairer to say that science’s problem with the metaphysical is epistemological and methodological, and that individuals who claim to practice the scientific method have biases."

Very much so. I used the sentence as a shorthand, but today I shall go into Marek's observation in greater detail.

Coincidentally, yesterday, out of curiosity, I looked up the etymology of the word 'doctor' in both the academic and medical sense. The root is docere, the Latin for 'to teach'. In the pre-scientific world, medical knowledge and religious teaching were closely linked; monks and physicians often served as healers and religious authorities. Divine intervention was an intrinsic part of the healing process. (Indeed, during medieval times, many Jewish physicians were also rabbis). London's famous teaching hospital, Barts (Bartholomew's Hospital), for instance, was founded by the Augustinian Friars in 1123. The words 'hospital', 'hostel' and 'hotel' all derive their etymology from the same route (the dropped 's' replaced by the circumflex over the 'o' as in the French spelling of hôtel. With a root in the Latin hospes (meaning both 'guest' and 'host'), early mediaeval hospitals (hôtels de Dieu) provided hospitality to guests – pilgrims – and patients – alike. 

{{ Suddenly 'Paracelsus' pops up in my stream of consciousness. On we go, thus guided. }} 

From Wikipedia: [the Swiss physician Paracelsus 1493-1541] "was a pioneer in several aspects of the 'medical revolution' of the Renaissance, emphasising the value of observation in combination with received wisdom. He is credited as the 'father of toxicology'." Furthermore: "Paracelsus's approach to science was heavily influenced by his religious beliefs. He believed that science and religion were inseparable, and scientific discoveries were direct messages from God. Thus, he believed it was mankind's divine duty to uncover and understand all of God's message. Paracelsus also believed that the virtues that make up natural objects are not natural, but supernatural, and existed in God before the creation of the Universe." Bingo. A man I could see eye to eye with.

It was entirely normal to marry the natural with the supernatural before the scientific revolution brought on by Isaac Newton. (It must be said, however, that Newton was a deeply spiritual man, who spent as much of his life pursuing theological and occult interests as in developing the groundwork for rational science.) The Enlightenment chased away mediaeval superstitions and the notion of magical thinking – physical effect without physical cause. 

With the development of the scientific method, hypotheses could be put to the test and objectively proved or disproved. Over time, the scientific method evolved as a way to explain reality, becoming a powerful tool driving the industrial revolution and two centuries later, the information revolution.

The key epistemological concepts underpinning the scientific method are:

• Observation: gathering objective data from experiments or survey.
• Hypothesis: a proposed explanation for an observed phenomenon, based on existing knowledge and observations.
• Falsifiability: hypotheses should be set out in a way that allows them to be potentially disproven by observations.
• Experimentation: testing the hypothesis under controlled conditions to gather data and evaluate its validity.
• Inductive reasoning: drawing conclusions from observations, while acknowledging the limitations of generalisation.
• Replication: repeating experiments to ensure results are reliable and not due to chance or error.
• Peer review: scrutiny by other scientists to assess the validity of experiments, data, and conclusions (list summoned up via Google Gemini).

Guided by these concepts, many rational scientific minds have come to reject all aspects of the metaphysical, dismissing attempts to classify and explain them as pseudoscience. (Debunking is an interesting subset of online trolling these days!) 

Yet scientific empiricism has its limits. Above all, there is increasing awareness in the scientific community that there are many things that science cannot currently explain, and the more it looks into these, the harder they become to explain. I've written about these before; the most important ones are the nature of consciousness, the origin of the Universe, fine-tuning, the origins of life, squaring gravity with the Standard Model, and the nature of dark energy and dark matter. A rejection of a metaphysical approach here might ultimately prove to be wrong.

The most fundamental questions about the nature of reality boil down to subjective and objective reality, and here the notion of the observer, so important in quantum mechanics, plays an important role. Does a tree falling over in a forest make a sound if there's no one to hear it? Would the Universe exist if there was no consciousness to experience it? Is there some greater purpose to the evolution of consciousness than biological advantage, survival of the fittest and adaptation to the environment?

The inability of the scientific method to bring itself to bear upon first-person subjective experience of my own consciousness is to me where I'd draw the line. When a rationalist or physicalist (or reductive materialist, call them what you will), tries to explain away the phenomenon of anomalous qualia memory that I've experienced since childhood as 'misfiring of neurons' or 'memories of a film you once saw', I find such explanations hollow and lacking in substance; they just doesn't square with how it feels to have these subjective experiences.

They are what lie at the heart of my personal spiritual (or indeed metaphysical) quest; they inform me intuitively to concepts such as non-local consciousness that defies physical concepts of time and space.

Lent 2023, Day 11
Personalities and Disorders

Lent 2022: Day 11
Aliens, Angels and Daemons

Lent 2021: Day 11
The Ego, Consciousness and Spiritual Evolution

Lent 2020: Day 11
Dreams and the Afterlife