Eighth in a series on the edges of science
It is fashionable to consider science somehow to be contrary to faith. Many have replaced faith in God with faith in science.
It was not always so. Australian historian Peter Harrison wrote “…many of the leading figures in the scientific revolution imagined themselves to be champions of a science that was more compatible with Christianity than the medieval ideas about the natural world that they replaced.” These leading figures in the 17th century developed scientific method as a way to explain what they perceived as God’s world. Today, such ideas are considered scientific heresy.
Most unfortunately, the antagonism originally sourced from the established church in Europe, where the scientific revolution began. Such figures as Galileo, Copernicus, and Bruno were all placed on the lists of the Inquisition. The dogmatic persecution drove scientists away from the church—and away from the spiritual.
Today, the antagonism is kept alive by extremists on both sides: religious leaders who insist on denying science, and scientists who refuse to look at uncomfortable facts because they can’t explain them.
The spiritual is yet another area in which science doesn’t seem to work well.
In actuality, the two concepts—science and the spiritual—interleave in amazing ways. Science advances through the development of new theories, but the scientists themselves usually cannot identify the inspiration for each theory. They observe the world, but that observation in itself does not create the theory. Rather, there is a logical leap, that “aha” moment, in which the scientist sees the data in a new way. How does such a leap happen?
The inspiration for a new theory seems no different than many similar events only explained easily as spiritual manifestations. Spontaneous healing of fatal disease. (How many of us know someone cured of cancer?) Incredible recovery from life-destroying addiction. Unexplainable interventions that change someone’s life path. Sudden, amazingly effective changes in character.
Surprisingly often, the recipients of such events attribute them to prayer or other spiritual practices. This happens even when the subjects are not religious and claim no faith at all. Yet they say to others, “I was healed of my cancer,” using the passive reflexivity of the verb but never considering what agency actually did the healing. Hard-line believers in science shrug and say, “We just don’t understand it yet”—not realizing such an attitude is the same as acknowledging the existence of the supernatural.
Throughout history, and up to today, people believe in spiritual occurrences.
They believe because they have no other explanation. Science has tried to study spiritual matters. It consistently fails because of the scientific chimera of repeatability. Spiritual happenings are indeed repeatable. They have occurred throughout history. The problem, however, is that they do not repeat on command. No one has yet devised a way to create repeatable experiments for them as required for scientific method.
In a prior post on “Science and Unobservability,” I mentioned the Kassel experiment (and many others) that “proved” dowsing to be a hoax. The dowsers claimed the experiment was flawed because the scientists were unable to reproduce the necessary spiritual conditions. According to the dowsers, the rigid study conditions actually annulled their “spiritual forces.” Based on the observed data, the scientists concluded dowsing not to work—yet they could come up with no explanation for the centuries of reliance on dowsing other than “People are just fooling themselves.” Hardly a valid scientific conclusion.
Perhaps, as the dowsers said, scientific method may actually be contrary to spiritual methods. Science relies on our human ability to create repeatable experiments. Spiritual methods rely on some higher power to create the conditions that we cannot. Human versus supernatural.
This was the argument of the church leaders during the scientific revolution. They were aghast that these new “scientists” would presume to use their own earthly methods to understand God. Today, most people take the opposite position, being aghast that some would claim spiritual “truth” without the firm underpinnings of science. After all, we say, only objective evidence can be trusted.
Meanwhile, we live in a world filled with ordinary spiritual events that cannot be tested with objective evidence. A friend calls out of the blue just when we desperately need contact with someone. A mother has a frightful premonition, and later discovers it coincided with her daughter’s terrible accident. A man gives up on his own life, then opens one last piece of mail to find a check sent to him three days earlier. Such occurrences happen frequently. The only approach science can use is to call them “coincidence,” but that is no explanation at all, no better than “spontaneous remission” in medicine.
As with the prior topics in this series, it appears that science completely fails when faced with the seemingly random—yet very real—spiritual occasions with which we are all familiar.
My conclusion? Keep an open mind. Be aware that science does not and cannot study everything. Instead of relying only on objective evidence, I’m willing to realize “there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Doc Honour
November 2023
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