by Xauri'El Zwaan

Created on: January 03, 2008

A great problem that has afflicted much of global society over the last few centuries is the widespread perception of a 'rift', or 'war', or otherwise incompatibility between the knowledge gleaned from science - that is, the evolution of theories about the universe gained from the exercise of inductive experiment - and the experience of spirituality, or intuitive insight into the nature of reality. This is a mis-perception based on a category error. Not only are science and spirituality perfectly compatible; they are only part of the many modes of perception and reasoning enjoyed by our complex human brains.

Consider a question like the existence of God. I won't try to debate that at this point, but it serves as an excellent example. It is often said that 'logic' cannot prove the existence of God. This is nonsense. Logic, the deductive reasoning of conclusions from premises, can create plenty of logically consistent 'proof' that God must exist. The problem is that nobody can come up with an experimentally testable prediction about the existence of God; it's way too big a subject. Theoretically, sometime in the human future when our capacities and technology have expended to an immense amount, somebody might be able to experimentally test a scientific theory of God. Many people take this to mean that there is no such entity as 'God', despite logical proof that there must be a supreme being.

But then, inductive testing can't 'prove' in a logical sense that the sun is going to come up tomorrow, or that gravity will continue to work the entire time that you're reading this sentence; it can only say that it's highly probable, since it's always happened in the past. Science by necessity focuses on quantities which can be minutely measured and theories which can predict future phenomena from past evidence.

On the other hand, there are plenty of theories which could be experimentally tested, and in some cases already have received some degree of testing; but even though there is evidence that, at the very least, something weird is happening, a 'legitimate' scientist could never touch the subject because he would be laughed out of the community. I'm not talking about crackpots here. There really is reliable evidence of such phenomena as 'faith' or magical healing and magic curses, communication (between both humans and animals) at a distance, and energy phenomena that could be described as 'ghosts'. Certain instances of these experiences have also been disproved or shown

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