Is your form of scientific materialism in opposition to spirituality?

Question

One form of scientific materialism is that matter is the essence of existence. In that view, we study matter because we want to study what is real, not imaginary things. This view is not in opposition to spirituality because our thoughts, our mind, etc. are just an expression of the essence of existence, whether we call it matter is irrelevant.

However, a stronger form of scientific materialism insist on an interpretation of matter in which our thoughts and our mind cannot participate in any fundamental laws like the ones we have in chemistry, biology, etc. In this view, the study of the mind and thoughts is only useful to help pathological cases like in psychology.

Before you say that the mind and our thoughts are not reliable enough to participate in fundamental laws, consider the fact that some forms of mediation has been shown to have *systematic* effects on our body and even on our environment.

Joe Atheist: You bring a good point. What I had in mind is that one can study the brain (or psychology), but yet reject the value of a careful study of meditation. The challenge is that it is impossible to define a technique of meditation without considering its teaching and all its aspects. The technique is the result of that teaching. You cannot separate one from the other. The teaching involve an explanation of how it works. Because of that a strong materialist view rejects a full study of our thoughts and our mind, which obviously should include the effect of meditation.

I guess I should have been more explicit and refer to meditation instead of spirituality in general. Indeed, the main link that I see between spirituality and science is through meditation techniques. However, it is a real link. If you change the teaching, you change the technique.

Answer 1

I think that "spirituality" is 85% composed of wishful or woolly thinking, romanticism, honest mistake, delusion, illusion, hallucination and some degree of mental disorder, be it temporary or permanent. The same thing can be said of belief in visits by extraterrestrial aliens and a host of other unlikely things like astrology though in those cases it is more like 99.999999%.

As for the other 15%, I dunno.

Answer 2

the material world is reality, but it is not the ultimate reality. It is the manifestation of ideas.

Science is based on perceived evidence. But to assume the universe is limited to what we can perceive is a incorrect.

We 'perceive' the human body as a physical entity because that is all our senses tell us it is. But we now know that the body includes a chemical electrical element that can only be deteced with equipment such as an EKG.

The EKG impulses your doctor uses to check your heart didn't just come into existance when we invented the machine, they were there all along.

Someone had to have the 'faith' to realize that there was an energy aspect to our bodies in order to invent the EKG.

Answer 3

Okay...I think I understand what you're saying...maybe?

I think science cannot know the truth about spiritual issues, because they are not measurable in quantifiable ways. Likewise, religious belief is not threatened by scientific discovery--they are two different realms.

The success of psychology, etc. is still dependent upon an individual's opening and sharing their mind with a professional of that field--and who knows if they are doing it in a truthful way? When it comes down to it, we can never be sure. We can do brain scans and tell which areas of the brain are activated during certain activities or thought processes, but we still cannot truly "see" into anyone's mind.

The study of the BRAIN is scientific--the study of the MIND seems to present much more difficulty.

Answer 4

"Spirituality" is mostly a nonsense word. It is roughly a word people use in place of "emotional appeal". Saying that you believe something because of the emotions you feel doesn't have quite the same authoritativeness that "connecting with your spirituality" has.

Science isn't in opposition to emotion. There are branches of science, even, that study emotion and human nature. I happen to like ice cream. Knowing the ingredients used for ice cream and the likely reasons why those ingredients cause a pleasant response on my palate doesn't make me like ice cream any less.

People fear that science will take the mystery out of life, and, thus, the emotion out of life (or spirituality, if that's what you want to call it). However, I think that it gives you a deeper understanding, which evokes an even tighter connection with the world and a deeper appreciation of it.

Answer 5

I don't agree with your assessment. science breaks itself into groups that focus on one area in order to learn the most possible. Now I am a science junkie and most of what i see in the trend of measuring body and not mind/spirit is because we do not have the tools to in any way measure/observe such things.

There are fields of physiological psychology which have come up with remarkable ideas and information about how mind+body are connected and cyclical.

A person's mindset can have physical effects and physical changes (chemical) can change a person's mindset. It is amazing how one affects other and vice versa.....very much like the relationship between matter and energy.

So I don't find that science is opposing spirituality but that spirituality is not something that science has the tools to work with properly....so they do not work with it in order to avoid any false "laws of spirituality"

Answer 6

Uh strange concept hurt small mind.

The brain interprets perceptions based on a number of "filters" i.e. experience, belief, knowledge, language etc. I don't know of any creditable science that looks at studying the brain and how it functions as pathological, in other words studying the brain, it's functions, and the way we think and remember are considered a valid science.

I suspect from your statements that your trying to mix too much "philosophy for philosophy's sake" into reality.

Answer 7

My form of scientific materialism is Platonic dualism. I think it leaves the door open for spirituality where the spirit is the Platonic form of "Me" in the Platonic realm. Everything has a Platonic existence but physical things are marked out especially for material existance due to their mathematical properties. Namely the equations that describe them can be solved computationally. Thoughts cannot be solved computationally. We need a mathematical "insight" to solve them and that's what we get from the Platonic realm - the world of Mathematics. When we've gained the insight our thought is transformed into a decision and that decision becomes part of the history of the computable physical world we are all familliar with.

Answer 8

That "stronger view" seems pretty weak. It seems to suggest that there is a nonmaterial "mind", and that thoughts are not material. In fact all of the phenomenal we talk about using terms like "mind" and "thoughts" are physical events as well. There's an excellent discussion of this in the beginning of Jerry Fodor's "The Language of Thought" (if you Google "Fodor Special Sciences" you should find it).

The notion of spirituality seems out of place in this sort of discussion. Talking about spirituality is a hobby, not a part of any deep explanation of anything. It's almost as though you asked "Is your form of scientific materialism in opposition to crocheting?" or "What do scientific materialists think about comic book collecting?".

Answer 9

materialism seems to me a rather misguided term. matter in physics is generally understood to be composed of massive particles, but it is certainly not all that exists - there is energy, and there is spacetime, at minimum. i like 'naturalism' better, but 'nature' is an empty metaphor that can stand in for anything so on some level this is all so much word games. if 'spirituality' can have an observable effect on nature/reality, i'm interested in it. but so often, the term seems to carry a lot of useless supernatural baggage.

Answer 10

For something to exist it has to be able to be measured in this plane (since this plane is the plane of existence). Anything outside of this plane does not exist (anything not limited by the constraints of time and space is imaginary).

Meditation does work on our body, but meditation is a physical activity.

Playing music to plants affects them.

Can meditation (or prayer for that matter) improve the health of a child in Ethiopia?

Probably not.