15.1 — What Science Can and Cannot Say About Spirit

Most arguments between science and religion are territorial disputes conducted by people who have not agreed where the border is.

So: the border.

What science is

Not a body of facts. A method with a specific requirement.

A claim is scientific if there is some observation that could show it to be false.

And that single requirement determines everything about what science can address.

It can address: anything that makes a difference to what is observed. The age of the earth. Whether prayer affects recovery rates. Whether meditation changes the brain. Whether a flood covered the world. Whether there were two humans at the start of the species.

It cannot address: claims that are compatible with any observation whatever.

And the second category is where most religious claims that survive actually sit.

The claims science has settled

And they should be listed, because the traditions did make empirical claims and some of them lost.

The age of the earth and the universe. 4.5 billion and 13.8 billion years respectively, established by multiple independent methods that agree. Chronologies derived from scripture are wrong by six orders of magnitude. Volume IV covers the evidence.

Common descent. All living things share ancestry, and humans are not a separate creation. The evidence is overwhelming and comes from fossils, comparative anatomy, biogeography and — decisively — genetics. Volume V covers it.

Disease. Caused by pathogens, genetics and environment, not by sin, possession or divine displeasure.

Weather, earthquakes and eclipses. Physical processes.

Mental illness. Not possession.

And intercessory prayer for the recovery of strangers. This has been tested in large randomised trials, and the well-conducted ones found no effect.

In each case a tradition made a claim about the observable world and the claim was checkable and it did not hold.

And most traditions have adjusted, and the ones that have not are in a permanent losing position.

The claims science cannot settle

And this is where the honesty is required in the other direction.

Whether there is a God. Not testable, because a sufficiently transcendent being is compatible with any observation. Arguments exist on both sides and they are philosophical rather than empirical.

Whether there is a purpose to existence. Not an observable property.

Whether anything survives death. 14.1: there is no reliable evidence and the absence of evidence is not proof, and the question of what consciousness is remains open.

What is valuable, and what you should do. 13.1's is-ought problem: no set of facts entails a value. Science can tell you what an action will cause and cannot tell you whether to do it.

And whether there is subjective experience at all, and why. 15.2.

The three positions

And they should be distinguished, because people conflate them constantly.

Conflict. Science and religion make competing claims about the same territory and one must be wrong. True for the specific claims in the settled list, and it is a poor general account, because most religious claims are not in that territory.

Independence. They address separate domains — one the observable world, the other meaning and value — and cannot conflict. Aquinas's move (10.7), and the twentieth-century version is Stephen Jay Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria."

Clean, and it is too clean. Traditions do make empirical claims, and telling them they may not is not neutral — it is asking them to give up a large part of what they have always asserted.

And engagement. The domains are mostly distinct and they overlap at specific points — consciousness, free will, the origins of morality, the effects of practice — and at those points the two have to be in genuine conversation.

This book takes the third.

Where the overlap actually is

Four places, and each gets a chapter or a section.

Consciousness (15.2). The traditions have made detailed first-person claims about the structure of experience for two and a half thousand years, and science has no account of why there is experience at all. This is the one place where the traditions may have data.

The effects of practice (15.4). Fully testable, being tested, and the results are mixed and interesting.

The origins of morality. Evolutionary and psychological accounts of where moral intuitions come from are advancing, and they do not settle whether the intuitions are correct — 13.1's gap again — but they change how you read them.

And claims about the physical world made in the name of tradition (15.5). Where the claim is empirical, it is checkable, and most of the popular ones fail.

The two dishonest moves

And both are common enough to name.

The retreat

A religious claim is made, it is tested, it fails, and it is reinterpreted as metaphor.

The reinterpretation may be correct — a great deal of scripture was always metaphorical and the literal reading is frequently the modern innovation.

And the pattern is the problem. A claim that is literal until it is tested and metaphorical afterwards is unfalsifiable in practice, and a tradition that does this repeatedly has stopped saying anything.

The honest version: decide in advance which claims are empirical, and stand by the answer.

The overreach

And the mirror image, from the other side.

Science establishes something about the brain, and somebody declares that the soul is disproved, that free will is an illusion, or that meaning is an evolutionary artefact.

None of those follows. A neural correlate of an experience is not an account of the experience (15.2). An evolutionary explanation of a moral intuition does not show it is false — that is the genetic fallacy, and mathematics also has an evolutionary origin.

And "science has shown that life has no meaning" is not a scientific statement. It is a philosophical position wearing a lab coat, and 13.1's is-ought gap applies to it as much as to any sermon.

The rule this book applies

Stated once, and it governs Part 15.

Where a claim is checkable, check it, and report what was found regardless of who it disappoints.

Where it is not checkable, say so, and do not pretend that either an absence of evidence or a philosophical preference has settled it.

And do not use the prestige of one domain to settle a question belonging to the other. Quoting a physicist about the meaning of life and quoting a scripture about the age of the earth are the same error.

What this means for the rest of the volume

Everything practical in Volume VII survives this test.

5.3's karma yoga is a claim about attention and outcomes, and it is checkable and largely holds.

6.5's diagnosis of the grip is checkable and largely holds.

8.1's defensible core of karma — what you repeatedly do changes what you are — is straightforwardly established.

12.9's overlap on conduct is an anthropological observation.

13's ethics does not rest on any metaphysics.

And 14's practices work regardless of what happens after death.

What does not survive the test is the metaphysics: the eternal self, rebirth, the ultimate reality, and what happens when you die.

And this volume has said so at each point rather than smuggling them in.

What to carry from this page

A claim is scientific if some observation could show it false. That single criterion sorts most of these disputes.

Some religious claims were empirical and lost. Naming which ones is a sign of a healthy tradition, not an attack on it.

A claim that becomes metaphorical only after it is tested has stopped saying anything.

And "science shows life has no meaning" is a philosophical position, not a finding. The is-ought gap cuts both ways.

Next: 15.2 — the one place where the traditions may actually have something science does not, and where the problem is completely unsolved.