Is spiritual science a valid branch of science?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
so what do we exactly mean by spiritual science essentially science can be understood in three different ways one is as a particular subject that is studied in the universities today the other is as a systematic body of knowledge and third is as approach to knowing the three different things so in our academic studies when we study science we have certain subjects within science, physics, chemistry, biology as we go advance we may have many more specializations these study a particular section of nature and go deep in trying to understand the mechanisms by which the things work so thermodynamics analyses how dynamics or thermal dynamics work so like that there are different fields when we use science in a normal conversational sense we do necessarily restrict ourselves to this particular method or this particular we are not, when somebody says is the concept of soul or god or spirituality scientific then we are not really talking whether it is about physics or chemistry it is not exactly like a branch within science but we are using the second meaning is a systematic body of knowledge is it systematic is it verifiable, is it provable now in science itself there are different methods of proof that are used so broadly speaking there are three kinds of reasoning that is used, see when people are seeing is believing now most of scientific advancement has been by going beyond seeing is believing in fact in all branches of knowledge we progress by moving from the visible phenomena to invisible principles for explaining the phenomena so when newton saw the fruit falling at wolfers manor in his house so he basically saw a visible phenomena, fruit falling and what did he do he proposed an invisible principle, that is gravity so actually most of scientific progress is not about seeing is believing, it is about proposing something to explain what we are seeing and what we propose is not visible most of the principles that science proposes electricity we can’t see, we can see the bulb illuminated, so we can see the effect but most of the principles that science talks about, we can’t see them and in fact as science advances more and more, even the fundamental entities in science say for example in Einsteinian physics, we have space time now space time is not perceivable not perceivable at all it’s a conceptual entity and science considers that to be existent we go into particle physics then even there also most of the entities they can’t be seen at all so recently a few years ago there was this huge sensation about the discovery of a god particle but Higgs boson that cannot be seen at all by any means so even in science this idea of seeing is believing is not applicable if Newton had stuck to seeing is believing he would not have been able to postulate gravity so it is wrong to say that science operates on seeing is believing science operates on proposing something invisible to explain what is visible and within science there are three broad methods of reasoning that are used one is deductive, second is inductive and third is abductive so deductive reasoning is basically mathematics, it’s based on principles 3 plus 5 is 8 4 into 4 is 16 these are like these are basically fundamental definitional things, mathematics is considered the most exact of sciences now most of science that we function with, most of reality is not precisely mathematical so it is based on inductive reasoning, not deductive inductive means that we do say 100 experiments and based on that we find a pattern and we say the 101st will also follow that pattern so when Newton proposes the law of gravity now he saw a fruit falling, he observed other objects fall and he proposed the law of gravity and then he observed whether it’s true, whether other objects also fall as per that law, he said it’s true so here basically what happens in induction we observe and then we extrapolate now this is the way most of the technology that we use in today’s world, it functions based on inductive science but when science talks about origins we cannot do any inductive science so origins means origin there are 3 basic questions of origin origin of everything, origin of the universe, origin of consciousness and origin of human beings whenever we go to anything about origins, it’s a one time event we can’t do any experiment to tangibly repeat and check it so how do scientists find out what happened hundreds or thousands of years ago or millions of years ago, so what happens is science has to use an entirely different method for that that is called as abductive reasoning and why we are talking about these 3 kinds of reasoning because spirituality can also be understood through abductive reasoning but when most people think of science they think science is limited only to inductive reasoning or inductive inductive, so to explain say abductive reasoning consider a mystery for an investigator say in a particular room a person was found murdered and it’s like a mystery novel is there so you have to find out, say 9 o’clock in the night a person was alive 6 o’clock when the maid went into the house, a person was dead so who came in between now how do you find out, you cannot tell the murderer, please come and murder once again, we want to catch you on camera we want to do a repeatable experiment to prove it no, so how do you find out there there it’s a the method is abductive reasoning or it’s called IDE, inference to best explanation so you find out what are the cameras so the camera was shot at around 12 o’clock one boy went into the room that boy is 5 years old, he could not have he did not have enough strength to stab then there was another woman who may be some other woman went in she is 80 years old she also did not have enough strength to stab so then there was a 25 year old butler who went in at 5 am he is young and healthy so now the inference to best explanation would be that butler would be the killer this is not an irrefutably provable thing, in the house there might be a trap door and somebody might have come into a trap door and killed and gone out also so when we make an inference to best explanation it depends on the information that we have so if new information comes in we might make a different explanation, so basically when scientists talk about origins there is a fundamental limitation that scientists have, that they can’t replicate historic limits and that’s why the scientific knowledge about origins is far more speculative and tentative than scientific knowledge about operational things right now so we often think of science as one body of knowledge I don’t think there is a law of gravity and there is say the big bang theory these are both scientific theories and because we see technology working so well, so we think that if scientists say something it must be true yes, scientists are proposing something, but which branch of scientific knowledge is proposing it, so if it is if that particular scientific theory is coming from inductive reasoning where there are repeatable experiments which can be done right now to see things then it is on far more stronger ground than if it is based on abductive reasoning, where actually we are simply allowing an inference to best explanation but still having said this science does use abductive reasoning quite extensively so when we look at the world around us and we try to infer how did this come about for example we have the continental drift theory how did the continents come out in the position they are the idea is that all the continents were together at one time, they drifted away so now this is a we cannot make the continents drift once again, so we are simply doing it, it is a inference to best explanation so like that with respect to spirituality we can do inference to best explanations so for example the fundamental spiritual entity is the soul inside the body there is a source of consciousness which is what animates the body now we cannot because the soul by definition is spiritual we cannot empirically quantify or measure it we cannot place it under a microscope and see it, because the microscope sees material things, it is a spiritual thing but what is the inference to best explanation that we can do in this case we can look at the nature of the body we can look at the nature of the soul or nature of consciousness consciousness involves feeling, thinking feeling, willing, experience of emotions, thoughts there is nothing in matter that experiences that suppose I ask one of you, do you exist? what a stupid question you would say obviously I exist but, now does this mic exist? see it exists there is a big difference you are aware that you exist the mic is not aware that it exists but if you look at it from a physical perspective, this is made of the same building blocks essentially atoms and molecules as is our body so where does our awareness come from even we say it comes from the brain but the brain is also made ultimately of chemicals same atoms and molecules they have been arranged in more complicated patterns but there is fundamental difference between complexity and quality there is a qualitative difference between matter and consciousness so consciousness is spiritual just like if I have if you know something about the history of computers basically they started the basic thing that computers do is they simply crunch numbers 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 that’s what happens at a digital level but they do it so fast that they can actually make amazing calculations amazing information processing but ultimately all that is happening in the most sophisticated computer is numbers are changed 0 1 0 1 0 1 now if you had a computer in which say digital display 0 1 0 1 0 just changing rapidly would you say that if it is changing from 0 to 1 at say 1 minute per second then it starts changing from 0 to 1 at 1 second per change now you say was it conscious when it was changing from 0 to 1 at 1 minute per change no so will it become conscious because it starts changing from 0 to 1 at 1 second per change whether it is at 1 microsecond per change no so the speed or complexity itself does not lead to consciousness so consciousness does not come from the body consciousness actually has to come from something entirely different so this way this is just a simple analysis I am giving and the point is that spirituality is also a science in the sense that it uses the scientific method of inference to best explanation and by that method the inference of the fundamental spiritual entity the soul as well as the supreme spiritual entity the infinite consciousness both can be inferred