Ella S.
Well-Known Member
I used to be level 4 when I practiced Quietism as a hermit, but since then I've come to the conclusion that mysticism is the illusion, not the material world.
I answered Level 2, although with a bit of a caveat. I am a metaphysical naturalist. I'm a materialist in the sense that I think I can only rationally justify a belief in things that are either composed of matter or can be described by how they interact with matter (or at least the substrate of matter such as quantum foam or probability waves). I do think that scientific methodology (and I favor hypothetico-deductive and nomological-deductive proofs here, mostly) is our only reliable source of information about the natural world, which is the only world that I think I can justifiably claim exists.
However, I am acutely aware of the possibility that there might be many existing things and qualities which do not interact with matter at all, and are therefore not directly observable by us. Dark matter does interact with matter because it has mass and forms gravity, if dark matter exists, but it's not observable through most of our normal means. I think it demonstrates that there's a lot that could be in our universe and our natural world that might be completely immaterial.
However, being immaterial, it would also be virtually unknowable. We would not be able to receive any kind of communication from immaterial beings, if they exist, and it would likely be impossible to gain any knowledge about immaterial forces and objects at all. In fact, I can't even say that I have good reason to say that their existence is plausible, just that it's possible.
That said, I think it's likely that most of what science thinks right now is completely wrong, or at least incomplete to the point of being half-truths at best. There's too much that we know that we don't know, and there's likely a lot more that we don't even know that we don't know. I think there are a lot of "unknown unknowns" out there that will probably completely revolutionize our models of the universe, we simply have not discovered them yet. We might never discover them, if we go extinct or never assign enough resources to investigating fringe ideas.
So I don't think science is "absolute knowledge," but it's the closest we can get when it comes to investigating the natural world. That's because the scientific method is simply a rational approach to analyzing empirical content. I think reason is the one and only way of knowing anything, and I reject all other "ways of knowing" (such as intuition, emotion, religious tradition, mystical revelation, etc.) as irrational and unreliable. Science, to me, is only worthwhile as an extension of reason. But science deals only in inductive and abductive reasoning, which deals in probability, so it can never attain absolute certainty/knowledge like you can with pure mathematics or analytical logic.
This doesn't just compromise religion and conventional spirituality for me, but it also means that I reject the vast majority of philosophy, too, because most of philosophy relies on intuition. I honestly think we should stop funding theology and philosophy completely. Some philosophy is rooted in reason, sure, but I think most of that could be subsumed under other fields like mathematics, economics, political science, psychology, and theoretical physics.
I would hazard a guess to say this probably means you would consider me to have a low level of spirituality. I'm not sure that I would self-identify as non-spiritual, though. I believe that the universe has a rational order to it, and that order fills me with awe and reverence. I consider myself a pantheist.
I answered Level 2, although with a bit of a caveat. I am a metaphysical naturalist. I'm a materialist in the sense that I think I can only rationally justify a belief in things that are either composed of matter or can be described by how they interact with matter (or at least the substrate of matter such as quantum foam or probability waves). I do think that scientific methodology (and I favor hypothetico-deductive and nomological-deductive proofs here, mostly) is our only reliable source of information about the natural world, which is the only world that I think I can justifiably claim exists.
However, I am acutely aware of the possibility that there might be many existing things and qualities which do not interact with matter at all, and are therefore not directly observable by us. Dark matter does interact with matter because it has mass and forms gravity, if dark matter exists, but it's not observable through most of our normal means. I think it demonstrates that there's a lot that could be in our universe and our natural world that might be completely immaterial.
However, being immaterial, it would also be virtually unknowable. We would not be able to receive any kind of communication from immaterial beings, if they exist, and it would likely be impossible to gain any knowledge about immaterial forces and objects at all. In fact, I can't even say that I have good reason to say that their existence is plausible, just that it's possible.
That said, I think it's likely that most of what science thinks right now is completely wrong, or at least incomplete to the point of being half-truths at best. There's too much that we know that we don't know, and there's likely a lot more that we don't even know that we don't know. I think there are a lot of "unknown unknowns" out there that will probably completely revolutionize our models of the universe, we simply have not discovered them yet. We might never discover them, if we go extinct or never assign enough resources to investigating fringe ideas.
So I don't think science is "absolute knowledge," but it's the closest we can get when it comes to investigating the natural world. That's because the scientific method is simply a rational approach to analyzing empirical content. I think reason is the one and only way of knowing anything, and I reject all other "ways of knowing" (such as intuition, emotion, religious tradition, mystical revelation, etc.) as irrational and unreliable. Science, to me, is only worthwhile as an extension of reason. But science deals only in inductive and abductive reasoning, which deals in probability, so it can never attain absolute certainty/knowledge like you can with pure mathematics or analytical logic.
This doesn't just compromise religion and conventional spirituality for me, but it also means that I reject the vast majority of philosophy, too, because most of philosophy relies on intuition. I honestly think we should stop funding theology and philosophy completely. Some philosophy is rooted in reason, sure, but I think most of that could be subsumed under other fields like mathematics, economics, political science, psychology, and theoretical physics.
I would hazard a guess to say this probably means you would consider me to have a low level of spirituality. I'm not sure that I would self-identify as non-spiritual, though. I believe that the universe has a rational order to it, and that order fills me with awe and reverence. I consider myself a pantheist.
