Can Spirituality be Superior to Science?

[mikkel_the_dane]

Science required more "clear" and "accurate" logical explanatory information or knowledge, that explain the physical or natural phenomena, particularly to explain HOW THINGS WORK.

Creativity and aesthetics don't require accuracy or precision.

As to philosophies, there are many, and not all philosophies concern itself with logic.

Well, for some forms of art they in fact do.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

Is science and spirituality interchangeable.

Bizarre that you would even ask.

 

[Jimmy]

Idk about superior but it will tell you how we got here and how it will all end. Science tells us nothing regarding these matters.

 

[gnostic]

Well, for some forms of art they in fact do.

I meant “accuracy or precision” in EXPLANATIONS or KNOWLEDGE.

Have you ever artist to explain what he or she is painting? Why the painter use that color or line? What the subject matter of the composition? The background story behind the artworks.

Or is it the art historian or biographer, art teacher, art critic, connoisseur, collector, etc, who draw their own conclusions or interpretations of the painting?

Artists don’t explain, they draw, paint or sculpt, with all their simplicity or with all their complexity...

 

[Nakosis]

Bizarre that you would even ask.

It seemed to be what you were implying so I was just trying to clarify.

 

[Nakosis]

Idk about superior but it will tell you how we got here and how it will all end. Science tells us nothing regarding these matters.

And with spirituality how we got here and where it will all end can be anything you want?
Whatever makes you feel comfortable?

 

[Jimmy]

And with spirituality how we got here and where it will all end can be anything you want?
Whatever makes you feel comfortable?

There’s only one correct answer

 

[Nakosis]

There’s only one correct answer

And some have faith they have it. Even though they seem to have trouble agreeing to what "it" is.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

It seemed to be what you were implying so I was just trying to clarify.

You asked if spirituality were superior to science. I said no. That is because you are comparing oranges to armadillos. Hardly implying they are interchangeable.

 

[Nakosis]

You asked if spirituality were superior to science. I said no. That is because you are comparing oranges to armadillos. Hardly implying they are interchangeable.

You mentioned math and art. Math and art have had a long historical relationship. Also science is now using AI to create art.
Maybe art and math wasn't the best example.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

You mentioned math and art. Math and art have had a long historical relationship. Also science is now using AI to create art.
Maybe art and math wasn't the best example.

Math and art are not interchangeable. Your question as to whether spirituality and science were interchangeable was not based on anything I said. You simply asked a bizarre off the wall question. I'm done with you.

 

[Nakosis]

Math and art are not interchangeable. Your question as to whether spirituality and science were interchangeable was not based on anything I said. You simply asked a bizarre off the wall question. I'm done with you.

That's ok. It is more interesting when folks are willing to defend their claims anyway.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Math and art are not interchangeable. Your question as to whether spirituality and science were interchangeable was not based on anything I said. You simply asked a bizarre off the wall question. I'm done with you.

Well, they do share that you can't point to their referent. In other words they are in the mind.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

It would still be an ought and the problem is that there is no objective, universal, same standard for all cases of good,

I disagree in one way and agree in another.

It's a bit like what "beneficial" means in evolutionary biology.
There is no universal rule there, because context matters.
A specific trait is beneficial in environment X and harmful in environment Y.
Likewise, a specific action / behavior might be moral in context X while immoral in context Y

But nonetheless, in the larger context of evolutionary biology, the word "beneficial" has a universal objective meaning.
And imo, the same goes for the word "moral" in context of social behavior.

 

[Yazata]

Can spirituality be superior to science?

Depends on how we are deciding superiority.

My point is that science and spirituality seem to have different purposes and goals.

Science provides a propositional sort of knowledge of how various items of sensory experience behave and inter-relate.

Spirituality offers a more intuitive and emotional sense of atunement with one's life and surroundings.

Each would seem to be superior in its own sphere, by its own lights, in terms of what it is trying to accomplish.

Science is better at providing the intellectual foundations for engineering and medicine.

Spirituality is probably better at making life beautiful, at making somebody feel happy, fulfilled and ethical.

 

[Yerda]

Depends on how we are deciding superiority.

My point is that science and spirituality seem to have different purposes and goals.

Science provides a propositional sort of knowledge of how various items of sensory experience behave and inter-relate.

Spirituality offers a more intuitive and emotional sense of atunement with one's life and surroundings.

Each would seem to be superior in its own sphere, by its own lights, in terms of what it is trying to accomplish.

Science is better at providing the intellectual foundations for engineering and medicine.

Spirituality is probably better at making life beautiful, at making somebody feel happy, fulfilled and ethical.

This is a good answer.

 

[RestlessSoul]

In his extended essay 'A Confession', Leo Tolstoy describes the dilemma that led him to existential despair, and the efforts at resolution that eventually led him back to God, but not to church (He was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church).

Put simply, Tolstoy had a midlife crisis of a kind recognisable to affluent Westerns some decades after the great man died. At the height of his literary success, wealthy, universally admired, husband and father to a loving family, he was overcome with a sense of futility and hopelessness. Suddenly acutely aware of his own mortality, and that of all his fellow humans, he was confronted by the question which has troubled man for millennia; What is the point? What does it mean, he asked himself, to be a finite being in an infinite universe?

Being a product of the European Enlightenment, the greatest writer of his generation looked for answers from science and philosophy. Science, he concluded, could provide clear answers to a multitude of questions, but wasn't equipped even to ask the questions that were troubling him. Philosophy, on the other hand, could and did ask the big and important questions, such as 'Why are we here and how should we live?' But it was equipped only to ask the questions; it couldn't answer them in any satisfactory or conclusive manner.

Drawing a blank with science and philosophy, Tolstoy found his answer in The Gospels, and briefly returned to the Christianity of his childhood. However, he soon arrived at the conclusion that whatever Orthodox Christianity was promoting, it was a long way from the message of The Gospels. Being by nature an outspoken critic of authority, he didn't stay quiet about this, the result being that he was excommunicated for heresy in 1901. Convinced that Christ himself would almost certainly be excommunicated should he return to fin-de-siecle Christendom, the great man retained his conviction that humanity's destiny and purpose were spiritual, and the answers could be found only in religion; but that religious institutions, being hierarchical in nature, were inevitably subject to the same corruption as all human institutions.

Like Mahatma Gandhi with whom he kept up a correspondence until the Russian's death, Tolstoy had a far higher opinion of Christ than he did of Christianity. Nevertheless, it was spirituality, not science or philosophy, that stopped him blowing his brains out, and enabled him to live to 82, developing in his later years his doctrine of Christian anarchism and non-violent civil disobedience.

 

[exchemist]

That's ok. It is more interesting when folks are willing to defend their claims anyway.

But surely this question of yours does not relate to a claim anyone has made in this thread? No one suggested maths and art might be "interchangeable". (In fact, as neither maths nor art is science, it seems an odd question to ask in this context.)

More broadly, I don't know whether you are playing Devil's Advocate in this thread, but the stance you are adopting seems to be a rare, actual example of "scientism". (We had a thread on that a while ago in which I argued it is a much-abused term that rarely applies. But here it seems to.) Several contributors have offered descriptions of what spirituality is, and what function it performs in human experience. It seems to me your attempts to whittle that down to nothing are looking a bit unconvincing.

The key, surely, is to realise that individual experience is where everything about the world begins, for each of us. Your world of (supposedly, but never entirely) objective facts and rational deduction is always at one remove from that individual experience. It is inferred from experience and forms only one, rather limited subset of it. Spirituality and science are orthogonal, surely? Why does one have to decide between the two or consider them rivals?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

But surely this question of yours does not relate to a claim anyone has made in this thread? No one suggested maths and art might be "interchangeable". (In fact, as neither maths nor art is science, it seems an odd question to ask in this context.)

More broadly, I don't know whether you are playing Devil's Advocate in this thread, but the stance you are adopting seems to be a rare, actual example of "scientism". (We had a thread on that a while ago in which I argued it is a much-abused term that rarely applies. But here it seems to.) Several contributors have offered descriptions of what spirituality is, and what function it performs in human experience. It seems to me your attempts to whittle that down to nothing are looking a bit unconvincing.

The key, surely, is to realise that individual experience is where everything about the world begins, for each of us. Your world of (supposedly, but never entirely) objective facts and rational deduction is always at one remove from that individual experience. It is inferred from experience and forms only one, rather limited subset of it. Spirituality and science are orthogonal, surely? Why does one have to decide between the two or consider them rivals?

Well, let us start with a classic. What is God? Well, there are several ways of doing that but for a sub-set of Gods, God is the objective source of what is correct.
Okay, but for a naturalistic explanation it turns out that it is a subjective claim in a given brain. So the general rule for not just natural science, but also sociology and psychology is that in some cases, the following behavior can be observed:
Someone will subjectively claim, something is objective and as long as the subsequent behavior following as the effect of that claim is in fact possible for the world as such, it is happening both cases.

Now that is the general case. So can we find a similar case for non-God claims, where it works the same?
Yes, because science as an actual methodology is not the same as science in effect claiming for what is correct for the world as such.
This is not a critique of science. It is an explanation of a different kind of behavior that uses the same words, but in effect have a different meaning and effect.
So back to God and the many different versions. The same is the case for in effect only objective reality is real as with evidence as per science.
Now the actual words may vary, but it always in effect that only the objective is real.

And there is a subvariant that is really absurd. Everything that goes on a brain is objective and physical, because only the objective and physical is real and with evidence.
Everything in the mind, thoughts and content are in effect objective and physical.
So if we nitpick objective and subjective for their different definitions we can find the following 2:
Something is objective if independent of individual thought and something is subjective if dependent on individual thought.
Such fun.

So what is it that God is the real and the objective, physical reality/world/universe is the real have in common? They are both connected to the fallacy of concreteness, in that both are consider correct facts independent of brains, but they are not.
In effect it is the same cognitive behavior for similar claims for in sense for different metaphysics/ontology, but they end up as being the same psychology.

There are in these debates and not just this one generally always two versions of science at play. The actual science and all the variants of only the objective is real.

Regards.

 

[Nakosis]

But surely this question of yours does not relate to a claim anyone has made in this thread? No one suggested maths and art might be "interchangeable". (In fact, as neither maths nor art is science, it seems an odd question to ask in this context.)

I agree that's why I was trying to clarify the response.

More broadly, I don't know whether you are playing Devil's Advocate in this thread, but the stance you are adopting seems to be a rare, actual example of "scientism". (We had a thread on that a while ago in which I argued it is a much-abused term that rarely applies. But here it seems to.) Several contributors have offered descriptions of what spirituality is, and what function it performs in human experience. It seems to me your attempts to whittle that down to nothing are looking a bit unconvincing.

My stance I think was stated in the OP. I don't see spirituality as part of reality.

The key, surely, is to realise that individual experience is where everything about the world begins, for each of us. Your world of (supposedly, but never entirely) objective facts and rational deduction is always at one remove from that individual experience. It is inferred from experience and forms only one, rather limited subset of it. Spirituality and science are orthogonal, surely? Why does one have to decide between the two or consider them rivals?

Yes, so in understanding that, I'm looking to hear from folks with opinions other than my own.