lorenzop wrote: ↑Mon Nov 28, 2022 5:06 pm
I am not suggesting 'spiritual science' should not and can not be science, I am saying that at the moment, 'spiritual science' is not within the pervue of science. Put another way, I am not aware of any papers re 'spititual science' being published in scientific liturature, or such papers being reviewed by peers. Being published or reviewed by peers is not a standard for what is scientific - but it is a useful guide.
Science is a moving target - and so yes, 'spiritual science' may one day be considered a science. One could argue that many sciences begin as a philosophy or set of logic, and become scientific with evidence. Science prefers evidence.
Why do you think 'spiritual science' qualifies as a science today? Do you have an example of a finding of 'spiritual science'?
It depends what meaning we assign to words, Lorenzo.
When you say ‘evidence’ do you mean evidence in the sense of mainstream worldview? Which is to say, an objective piece of reality that stands there, separate from us the observers, for everyone to acknowledge and measure? If this is what you mean by the word evidence, then you are holding a materialistic view: we are here, searching for evidence, and evidence is out there, fixed, waiting for us to take notice of it. Maybe Hume would agree with that, as it seems, but Rupert Spira would not agree with that, Kastrup would not, the Advaita tradition would not, and Steiner of course would not… he calls this view the naive realist’s view, also called materialist view.
Steiner tells us: notice that you cannot step outside your own organization when you acknowledge ‘objective evidence’. All you can ever get as evidence, comes to you through the tight interplay of your perceptions with the thinking function. There is no ‘evidence’ that we can come to know through any other channels. We only ever know the evidence of our perceptions orchestrated by thinking. Then in the book PoF, through a long, rational, comparative, step-by-step reasoning (that we could call scientific for these reasons) he shows that thinking is primary, and evidence depends on that, cannot exist outside that. So he says: we have to understand thinking first. We have to do spiritual science, as he calls it.
What we call standard science, based on evidence, peer reviews, etc. is useful, but to understand the meaning of its findings, we have to consider how thinking operates first, otherwise we will never understand that evidence can only be found inside our experience of perceptions+thinking.
Notice, this doesn’t mean that materialists do bad science. Great results and ‘evidence’ can be gained and used effectively for defined purposes. But to understand the framework around the results, and their deep meaning, it's necessary to take a step back and look at evidence from the aware, larger perspective of spiritual science. Here ‘science’ means rational and logic analysis of the given (=everything we can ever experience). It does not mean peer reviewing, academic papers, financing experiments, collecting data, doing the PhD life, the professor life, etc.
From the above, it’s hopefully possible to see that, when you (and Anthony) ask if spiritual science can provide ‘evidence’ of its findings, it is an absurd question. Because spiritual science (as described above) is here to guide us to the understanding of how we get evidence, what this evidence means, and how we even ended up referring to evidence and science in the way we do today. Spiritual science is on a preordained plane compared to ‘evidence’. So it doesn’t make sense to ask spiritual science to comply with the habits and customs of a phenomenon - present-day scientific search for evidence - that spiritual science deciphers, contextualizes, explains, and puts in perspective.
I recognize it's a bit of a barbaric explanation attempt I've made here, but was it possible to follow or does my point remain obscure?