What is the best way to prove or disprove a viable scientific spirituality?

Best way to get oranges!

@nick, but i did! A serious lack of humour is BUT a hallmark of serious science! Not to mention serious spirituality...Unless you transcend both or inhabit both to such an extent, you find that nebulous boundary where all things meet, a la a shankara or an einstein. i do wonder if the former ever stuck his tongue out, it would be a pity, where he not to have done so...

and my argument is that nobody has the right questions...

Oh yes! That too!

I really love these people being apparently "aloof" and so above it all, then being very precise on what you ought to do...

That's no criticism of you as such precisely, Radhadevi, I think I've liked you so far. But, well, highly cynical of this stuff I'll be renowned to be here. Funnily, it doesn't mean I don't believe in any of it.

You mentioned Rumi before: You will be aware many of these classic Sufis stood at the forefront of a very rigorous scientific method. And were no little persecuted for it, precisely because it was deemed to be a "heretical" method. It was after all disproving some religious dogmas. That as we all know won't always be happily accepted. No few of these folks were literally executed for their beliefs. Yes, nice poetry, I agree; but would you be willing to die for it?

sorry i have no idea what you are talking about...

best!

Ah, we like to quote Rumi, but have no idea what the man really stood for, which however doesn't stop us from forming our world views based on what we don't know... right.

Good luck with it, in turn. (Look up the works of al-Ghazali [better known as Algazel in the west], for instance. Western science would have been nowhere without these folks. Rumi included, yes; although the latter rather more the poet. And no, they didn't have an easy time for it. These are the more orthodox among the Sufis, mind. The more heterodox were put to the gallows and whatnot for it.)

Concepts create an echo of all kinds of weird assumptions in our minds.

In Buddhist terminology this process is called Papanca. When an object is presented to our senses, say the eyes, there is an immediate reaction in the mind that creates the impression and experience of : "I see the object." Along with the perception of the object come reactions of like and dislike, and memories of past such experiences are triggered plus subconscious processes that may or may not have much to do with the initial sense-data.

Is a scientist 24 hours a day what he is called, namely scientific?

When we think "scientist" we tend to think of a person who approaches all of his daily experience with a methodically systematic view. Sometimes our idea of a scientist may imply that he or she is very critical, very observant and so on. In reality, however, scientists have as many prejudices, preconceived ideas on things, and even in their field of specialisation they may not be that well informed, that they are really up to the task that people like you and me imagine them to be.

Pertinent to this discussion is a reference to Thomas Kuhn's The structure of scientific revolutions, which showed how there wasn't really a gradual progress of scientific theories, as was assumed but a sometimes abrupt change in assumptions enabled by bolder people depending on the specific ways they saw the world as a whole. That means that preconceived ideas played a role in how a scientific theory was preferred, formed or interpreted. Paul Feyerabend went a step further by showing how things of a private nature could and should play a role in formation and acceptance of scientific theories.

Personally I prefer Feyerabend's conclusions of the equality and validity of many different approaches to reality (Including rain dances, astrology, or religious preferences), while I see with Sir Karl Popper the inherent danger to authoritarianism in any theory or world view that wishes to establish itself as the one and only; the problem here is that insistence in a particular theory or any ideological view of reality, as we IMers practise here too, has necessarily a dogmatic side, and that due psychological as well as just plain argument-related necessities.

What is dangerous about science is how it has become the religion of our age and the ideology that rules the world. And that mostly due to the ignorance of people in general regarding its limitations and incapacities. This again has to be excused on the grounds of the complexities involved. Nobody knows everything. It is hard enough to know a little about something. Ars longa, vita brevis.

Should it not be! Spiritualist and religious heads have only given yadi-yadi-yada when a person is faced with troubled times, whereas, science has provided actual answers.

Of course, I am not blaming the field, but the field is as good as the players in it, and this is where the science has no competition.

please mr. mac if you insist on picking a fight, i recommend someone who is actually engaging with you and/or your copious comments. i am sadly not in the running for that priced position.

best!

That is school-boy imagination of schoolboy scientists. They're human, is what you are saying, and, yes, we knew that! Apparently, Einstein's wife had plenty of reason to complain! Science is as much a job as way of life. Many scientists are even ...spiritual!

As to the practical skills, that would depend on their speciality. On her mentioning something about my health, one day, I was amazed that my GF had noticed such a small detail that gave rise to the comment. She said, "I'm a nurse! I'm trained to notice detail like that, and it is what I do all day!"

Science doesn't rule the world: money does. To some extent, marketing men use "science," but, apart from that, it is (like most spiritual subjects, I suppose) simply a matter of passing possible interest to most people. It is hardly the demon of the age, is it? The "Man in the white coat" tells us what vitamins (that we don't need) to buy and what makeup (that harms our skin) will make us look younger. Marketing: not science.
Wrong! Science has provided actual theories. Yada-yada too, sometimes. Science, a few centuries ago, had the answer that the world was flat. Any less yada-yada than one man saving the world?

But... most of us would find it a lot harder to live without what science has given us than we would to live without some of the other stuff.

Then again, it was science that came up with facts!

Yada-yada will be a part of process to new theories...how many of them will remain Yada-yada and how many will provide us answers, will be all judged by science through process of deletion, a very important part for any field.

No sir - never said that there is no merit to what science knows, you need to re-read what i wrote. Just said that science does not even know what it does not know and any good scientist will probably acknowledge that. I have been a science student and can understand reasonable level of physics and mathematics (infact my work at one stage involved making complex mathematical models) and not really overawed by the experts in either (kind of have interacted with PhDs in mathematics from Standford and Harvard on some issues) - again doesn't mean I don't respect them for their knowledge of a very limited field.

You are also wrong in assuming that I have blindfolded myself for last number of years in pursuit of spirituality to logic and evidence of the theory I enumerated above. The creation is neither random nor lacking in direction, it has a design and once you know the design you can find the evidence as follows:

1. Compare in writings of the great men / women (people who meditated and transcended to the material plane and a rare few who transcended to the spiritual plane) and mystical texts. You can take the allegoies in the bible, Koran, Geeta, Ramayana, Buddhism and Gurugranth, take Zorastrian texts, Rumi and other sufis - you will have a roomful of books.

Check the design of creation against their spiritual experiences (and not their teachings) and you will find a commonality. Ofcourse not every great man has transcended all the way, so they write up to the point they have seen.

2. Meditate yourself - that my friend will take time for the entire journey to complete but when you have the path laid out in theory, matches with what other great men have written and then see some of it yourself, I guess only thing left to do is keep walking.

Enough said - there is surely nothing to gained with arguementation. I am only interested to engage with someone truly seeking an experience within - vide a PM please.

You're calling for that again and again. Why, because there'll be no nasty disapproving interaction?

But this is a public forum, not some private chat room, it gets a little iffy to insist as much on taking your discussions or "knowledge" off-board.

(Besides, you'd previously offered it to someone who as it turns out was only here to spam their HR affair. See where that gets you.)

Er, no, that's not at all how I personally think of it. Any more than I would expect say a chess player to have chess on their minds all day long.

So how can we discuss this if the premises are not even clear?

Just for example:

Er, sorry, in the modern West that's called Creationism and it's no more than an assertion and a pretty retrogade and conservative one at that, it's based on no evidence. (Rather, any evidence would seem to point to the opposite.) So let me have science over that, any day, please. It took us too long (as in most of our history) to get out of such clutches.

So what are we left with? We're a random constellation of atoms in a random universe, that has no goal or end, and we have no intrinsic meaning. Harsh, perhaps, but if so be the truth, then so be it. I can live with that; as I'll often say, be nice to your neighbors.

That is not what was meant. What I meant was that scientific theories are chosen, formulated and so on also under the influence of various personal biases, or personal preferences. Because often when we talk of science, one implies that there is a prevalent objectivity ruling it, with the unspoken assumption, where there is science, there truth or factuality is speaking.

Science is often taken as having the final word on an issue. That is how science is taken as some fictional deus ex machina which will solve the problem at hand and put an end to all further inquiry at the moment. That is where science takes on a religious role.

Your mentioning of the role of money, Nick-H, is pertinent however, in regard to how much money is spent on pushing scientific projects at universities with the end of the advancement of technological progress in mind. I think here of the mega-powers like the nuclear industry that finances high-tech programs in order to educate future qualified engineers which that industry will later be able to hire. Or pharmaceutical companies investing in similar ways, or the computer industry in their respective fields.

The final goal is indeed how much money can be made, or rather which company will survive the rest in the competition for higher market value. How science serves mankind is just a secondary almost accidental side-effect. Often enough it does not serve it at all, but further the possibilities of destruction of the planet.

(An interesting question would be how the military-industrial complex, which is by far the greatest money monger in the world, finances, uses and exploits science projects.)