Spirituality – Science

Antagonism

Since the scientific revolution, the relationship of science to religion and spirituality has developed in complex ways. Historian John Hedley Brooke describes wide variations:

• “The natural sciences have been invested with religious meaning, with antireligious implications and, in many contexts, with no religious significance at all.”

It has been proposed that the currently held popular notion of antagonisms between science and religion has historically originated with “thinkers with a social or political axe to grind” rather than with the natural philosophers themselves. Though physical and biological scientists today avoid supernatural explanations to describe reality, many scientists continue to consider science and spirituality to be complementary, not contradictory, and are willing to debate.

A few religious leaders have also shown openness to modern science and its methods. The 14th Dalai Lama has proposed that if a scientific analysis conclusively showed certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then the claims must be abandoned and the findings of science accepted.

Holism

During the twentieth century the relationship between science and spirituality has been influenced both by Freudian psychology, which has accentuated the boundaries between the two areas by accentuating individualism and secularism, and by developments in particle physics, which reopened the debate about complementarity between scientific and religious discourse and rekindled for many an interest in holistic conceptions of reality. These holistic conceptions were championed by New Age spiritualists in a type of quantum mysticism that they claim justifies their spiritual beliefs, though quantum physicists themselves on the whole reject such attempts as being pseudoscientific.

Luc Paquin