Feb 16 2010
Unscientific Science
Imagine this headline to a new science finding:
Selective Brain Damage Modulates Human Groovyness, Research Reveals
And a lead sentence that reads:
New research provides fascinating insight into brain changes that might underlie alterations in feeling groovy and and hip attitudes.
My guess is that most people would (or should) react this way: “What?!”
How different, I ask, is the following title and lead sentence to an actual bit of news reporting:
Selective Brain Damage Modulates Human Spirituality, Research Reveals
New research provides fascinating insight into brain changes that might underlie alterations in spiritual and religious attitudes.
Here’s the problem: most people only assume they know what is meant by the term spirituality. Yet ask people to define it, and the responses will be as diverse and vague as they would be to a request for a definition of “groovyness.”
Although it is a popular word, spirituality is a lousy variable. Strong science and strong science writing gets specific, and the term spirituality is not.
[...] above cartoon from atheistcartoons.com nicely illustrates the point I made in my brief post Unscientific Science from two days ago. I ended with [...]
Here’s a link to a more thorough discussion: Neurosurgical patients get closer to God. Specifically, they measured spirituality, self-transcendence with these questions:
I can accept for now this way of looking at the notion of spirituality — no claims that god(s) actually exist; no claims that I have a “spirit” in me that can magically connect to the spirit in you, and we are all connected in some great spirit place; no claims that when I am narrowly focused on some effort (in the zone), something otherworldly is happening. It’s all about perception of these states; spirituality is perception of transcendence.
I guess I am not very spiritual. Or maybe I take a Dao/Zen approach: The true spirituality is no-spirituality.
Sorry about the italics problem!