Will spirituality and science unite?

Question: Will spirituality and science unite, and how will that look like?

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They've already been united.

Science is the way to learn about the physical world.

Reason is the way to learn about anything, which includes the physical world and the metaphysical world (including a person's state of happiness.. his psychology.. spirituality). Now, with the physical world we are able to acquire sense data -- we are able to measure the physical world. That allows us to improve our method of reasoning.


Reason applies to the physical world and the metaphysical world. It goes like this:

1. A person has a problem -- something he wants to change.
2. He makes guesses about how to solve the problem.
3. He refines his guesses with criticisms.


Science is reason and sense data, and so it only applies to the physical world. It goes like this:

1. A person has a problem -- something he wants to change. [The something is that he doesn't know how physical thing X works and he wants to change that by learning how it works.]
2. He makes [hypotheses] about how to solve the problem.
3. He refines his [hypotheses] with criticisms [and experiments]. [Note that experiments are criticisms that include sense data.]


Psycho-epistemology (which I'm using in place of 'spirituality') is reason, and it focuses on people's psychology with the premise that a person's philosophy causes his psychology/attitude.

1. A person has a problem -- something he wants to change. [The something is a conflict between his inexplicit knowledge (e.g. emotions, gut feelings, etc.) and his explicit knowledge.] And he wants to change that resolving the conflict.]
2. He makes guesses about how to solve the problem.
3. He refines his guesses with criticism.


To be clear, in step 1 we are guessing at what our problems are. We have to refine those with criticism too.

Here's a longer version of that:

(1) What is the problem? In other words, "what are you searching for?"

(2) Why is it a problem? In other words, "why do you need/want it?"

(3) What are/were your proposed solutions? In other words, what are your "best guesses"? These are the guesses that you did real life testing on.

(4) What are your outstanding criticisms of your proposed solutions? In other words, "why [do] you think those proposed solutions didn't work?"

(5) What are your attempted criticisms of the problem? For example, have you considered that maybe you don't need to do X since there's another way Y that meets the same goal as X?

(6) What are your attempted criticisms of the idea of working on that problem right now? For example, is there something else of higher priority that you should be working on instead?


Note that in this version, I've omitted the fact that all of our answers to these questions are guesses. And remember that guesses are iteratively refined with criticism. Also, even the questions themselves are just guesses. We do not have omniscient sources of knowledge. We never reach perfection.

For more on guesses, and the relationship between wild guesses and best guesses, read this essay.

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