Christopher Kuehl

Science & Spirituality - The New Philosophy

Given that the word “science” is derived from natural philosophy, this kinship itself is buried in the etymological form of science which reveals its exclusive allegiance to the rational. To “know” something (in the Latin “scire” sense) is to know facts, or know “about”; to know in the “cognoscere” sense is entirely different and applies to knowing people on an intuitive or emotive level. Indeed, the word “conscience” pertains to the latter sense of knowing. Yet it is clearly not part of the way of understanding represented by science. Natural philoso- phy, as already stated, pertains to wisdom that can be derived by our reason. The notion of the “rational” also has interesting roots, being de- rived from “ratio” whose meaning can be taken as an expression of relations from which the Greek philosophers derived the term “Aritmos.” However, it is clearly evident (as with the meaning of scepticism) that ratio is no longer a comparative term expressing the relations of the infinite with the temporal, and Aritmos no longer expresses the notion of an ethical universe as a result of that relationship. Both words have been picked clean of their original denotations and then bent to an entirely different service. Having “purified” the language, reality inverts to a significant extent. While it was once the case that experience shaped and informed the language, now it is language that is deemed to be real alone. Since the “said” has been acted on to exclude the spiritual from the common vernacular, the extreme form of rationalism (in its dogmatic, wintertime coat) denies any reality to matters spiritual since its language pertains to nothing that can be “seen” or “touched” or experienced in a way that will give words a significant meaning. And of course, what is “significant” is what can be proved. Spirituality is murdered by the manipulation of semantics, for the same reasons that Cain killed Abel. That makes that story an ironic prophecy for modern times. In scientific language, this is not always evident, but as natural philosophy that must admit to its rational bias, we are presented with a picture that suits the rational way of seeing alone, and not the reality it sees.