The Meeting of Science and Spirit

"Knowledge of our spirits and knowledge of the world are mutually enlightening and empowering. The ultimate aim of both is to dissipate suffering."

The other day I had a fairly engaged conversation with Skeptical Friend. By 'fairly engaged', I mean that I was actively trying to avoid the reduction of the conversation to the level of rhetoric and dogma. When pressed, Skeptical Friend's concerns were these...

1) Belief in one paranormal/New Age phenomenon leads to a widespread embracing of other phenomena, without the appropriate skepticism to each claim. Embracing claims without the appropriate skepticism is tantamount to being a target for every charlatan who wishes to prey upon your ignorance.

2) Belief in paranormal/New Age ideas is equivalent to belief in God, or some other equally-unprovable idea. Belief in an idea for which the evidence is tenuous at best puts you at the mercy of 'representatives' of that idea who claim special knowledge and/or abilities, unless your knowledge happens to exceed theirs. Again you are a target for those who would shape your behavior according to their ideals.

3) Somehow those who are not so gullible will end up paying for the actions of those who were not appropriately skeptical.

(I'm being generous. SF wasn't so concise or articulate.)

My response to this (in part) was that the line in the sand that lumps the anomalous psychic experience with ghost and UFO abduction on one side, and 'hard science' like physics and chemistry on the other, is part of the problem. Scientists who loudly denounced a 'psychic' or 'spiritual' experience as impossible and therefore hallucination or hoax do not convince people who believe that they have had such an experience that nothing happened. Rather, they suggest or reinforce the notion that the person must go elsewhere (somewhere other than science) for an explanation.

Where else do you go if you are a person who has had an experience or series of experiences that you cannot dismiss? You look for 1) someone who will acknowledge your experience, and 2) someone who will offer an explanation for what happened. Perhaps the best that mainstream science (and I use the term 'science' loosely) can do at this point is the psychoanalyst who tells you that your subconscious is trying to tell you something important, and who then works with you to deal with any problems you are having in your life. But the psychoanalyst is in fierce competition with the priest and New Age section at the local bookstore. Science is in a competition for the minds of the masses as long as it continues to deny the experiences of rational, intelligent people that it cannot yet explain. As long as scientists perpetuate this kind of arrogant denial, they leave open the gate that allows people to go elsewhere for explanations. Science doesn't have to have complete understanding of the world in order to be useful, but it will only be useful to people if it acknowledges its incompleteness.

Until science can explain the natural laws that give rise to these mental and 'spiritual' phenomena that are consistently experienced by people of every age, level of education, and cultural background, it would be wise to do the following...

1) Encourage scientific investigation into these phenomena. Ridicule and isolation of those scientists who do investigate these areas only slows our ultimate progress towards a complete understanding the source of these experiences.

2) Educate our children in basic psychology and self-awareness. Nothing engenders a healthy skepticism like seeing your own vulnerability to illusions of memory and perception exposed. Nothing protects a person from being taken advantage of like an understanding of the social and psychological motivations for behavior.

3) Avoid the dogma that science is all-knowing, and that what does not fall under its current understanding must not exist. Chastise scientists whose claims exceed the boundaries of their actual knowledge. No scientist should be able to state that God does not exist, and for exactly the same reasons as no scientist should be able to state that God does exist.

4) Understand the needs that are currently being met by religion and/or metaphysical beliefs. It is not the place of science to address these needs, but science can play a vital role in identifying how to meet these needs without introducing any unnecessary beliefs or behaviors.