What would be required for religion or spirituality to be considered scientific?

Answer 1

First Answer (not by Kunth):

In order for something to be considered scientific it must be based on evidence and make testable predictions which match reality. For example, if there was no fossil record showing transitions between species and radiometric dating did not indicate that the world was billions of years old then Christianity would match with the evidence. Christianity has made testable predictions (prophecies), but these have generally been ambiguous or have been shown to be incorrect. If it was found that prayer was able to help people move mountains, and if the city of Tyre had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and not been rebuilt after it was destroyed then Christianity's predictions would match the evidence. Currently they do not - most of Christianity's claims are blatantly contradicted by the evidence, but if they did Christianity would be considered scientific.

Science deals with the material world. In marked contrast, religion and spirituality have a large virtual (imaginary) component. This makes theism and spirituality unscientific.

Answer by Kunth:

Spirituality and Science are two aspects of the same process. They are the major Disciplines through which we study life.

A friend of mine, when asked the question, "What is life?", answered that it is people, industry, food, houses, trees, wind and rain, the night sky ... ... Life simply is everything.

In other words, life is the whole active Universe.

We have learned that the diverse stuff of stars and planets - energy, rock, dust, ocean and atmosphere - is fundamentally necessary to life. The cosmos is the ground of our being, the source from which we and all kinds of life flow.

In this widest and grandest sense, Life is the Universe in all its glory and its mystery.

In sum, life is all there is. It is all that exists - daylight, twilight, and darkness. This is what we might call an 'objective' view -- something generally observable by people everywhere.

Now, taking a 'subjective' view, life is all of that which is being experienced by a single individual. Individual experience happens as practical contact with, and observation of, facts or events impinge upon the individual's consciousness. In other words, experience is what happens as our ('inner') conscious intelligence encounters data coming in from our environment and from our thinking mind. It is because our consciousness is 'inside' us that our live experience, in fact, happens 'inside' us. Experience is whatever is going on 'inside' of us in any instant. As seen from this perspective, life is everything experienced by a sentient individual.

Putting the above two perspectives together, consciousness may be seen as an aspect of that Life which is the Universe. That Life is self-evidently extremely powerful and intelligent: The more we 'objectively' study the Universe the more we become aware of its magnificent order and its awesome creativity.

There are two ways in which we observe and study life. In one way, we are 'looking outwards' at our environment; the other way, we are 'looking inwards' at our environment. When looking outwards we observe the environment that we have termed "physical". When looking inwards we observe the environment that we have termed "spiritual". Corresponding to these are the two disciplines of Science and Spirituality. In this world, science and spirituality are finally closing in upon each other and in a relatively short time it should become evident that they are one -- Because, from both angles we are looking at the one thing - life.

Spirituality has shown that all of life is unified -- that at essence we are all one -- all things are one. Philosophers and scientists have long mused over this and wanted for many hundreds of years to resolve this question of the-oneness-of-all-things. In the new physics, a unified field theory (UFT) is a type of field theory that allows all that has normally been regarded as fundamental forces and elementary particles to be conceived in terms of a single field.

As yet there is no accepted unified field theory; it remains an open line of research. There may be no general theoretical reason why a functional description of nature must be a unified field theory. Yet, this goal has led to a great deal of progress in modern theoretical physics and continues to motivate research. Hence, after a two year upgrade, at a cost of $150 million, The Cern Large Hadron Collider has just been recommissioned with double the power. It will be running, non-stop, for the next three years.

It is important to realise that Universal laws exist and apply not only to physical reality, as in the laws of physics, but also to the domain of consciousness, mind and intellect. There is a book out by Margo Kirkitar PhD that contains descriptions of 269 Universal Spiritual laws from such diverse sources as the Holy Scriptures of all religions, mythology, Fairy Tales, business success literature and allegories that describe the essence and nature of man. Many personal development and life-coaching enterprises now base much of their training on spiritual laws and how they may be applied.

It is realised by the majority of people, religious and non-religious alike, that our long-standing religious traditions were and are too narrow to realistically serve our world -- especially now that the world has become one global village. For this reason, even our major religious denominations are evolving and expanding, so becoming more inclusive. Finding and adopting a mutually (universally) acceptable spirituality is the only road to enduring peace and harmony for our one world.

In the last hundred years we have seen fundamental science become very abstract and mathematical, to the point of appearing metaphysical. And, now, Spirituality is gaining recognition for becoming practical and systematic (like a science).

I suggest that those continuing evolutionary trends in the two Disciplines as they develop toward their common end, are, and will be, what is required for Spirituality to be considered scientific.