[...in a reply to River...] The spiritual stuff would seem on its face to violate science's methodological naturalism. So we would need to invent a new non-natural science to addresss them, in contrast to natural science. Unlike some on this board, I don't think that's necessarily impossible.
Even though science etymologically means "knowledge", "to know", etc... It's gotten very conflated with naturalism and "what can be measured or is a system of measurements" (quantitative disciplines) in recent centuries. That might be a problem should all the assorted rival meanings of "spirituality" be brushed aside and it is narrowed down to one revolving around "spirit":
- The term spirit means "animating or vital principle in man and animals".
I don't know how that
elan vital like meaning of "spirit" could survive in the current day. Unless the "animating principle" it now refers to was that of cognition transiting from the brain-state of one moment to the next and those after, producing the appearance of a living body and the world changing (in motion). H.G. Wells as mere fictional author referred to that in "The Time Machine"; but also physicist / mathematician Hermann Weyl decades later in the context of the Einsteinian era.
- WELLS: "There is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it."
- WEYL: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [worldline] of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time."
But I personally don't feel that older interpretation is necessary anymore. The awareness of one's lifetime would be meaningfully divided into discrete intervals (correlating to their applicable neural patterns of particular moments), each declaring itself in isolation from the rest. With their relational connectivity providing the illusion of each taking its turn, as if consciousness was instead some immaterial substance that was flowing, crawling along the 4D "matter pipelines" (the twisting worldlines of particles constituting a block-universe version of skull meat).
From the same Wikipedia article on "spirituality" (as convenient a source as any on a subject like that):
- Modern spirituality is centered on the "deepest values and meanings by which people live." It embraces the idea of an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality. It envisions an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being.
What is immaterial? It's tempting to habitually define it as what lacks size, measurability, mutability, substance (including as exhibited qualia), as well as no form. But Plato couldn't get away from the latter with his abstract general entities. If "formal" in any non-abstract geometrical or spatial-image respect, then immaterial wouldn't seem to accordingly be able to chuck the quantitative properties. So "formal" might have to refer to an intelligible manner of existence as governing rules or principles. IOW, what makes a sensible cosmos possible, what just has universal regulating potency / effects on "material stuff" without being a literal object or objects itself residing at some location or in some container (i.e., the why / how of matter having any coherence and predictability to its behavior at all).
But immaterial principles seem unnecessary if time can be treated as a higher dimension (there would be more than just "now", all moments co-existing with each other). If the railroad tracks that the train follows are already laid out. Principles could still be abstracted from the patterns along that higher dimensional structure, but the latter's organization is prior to them.
However, one might still contend that a higher dimension isn't really extended in a spatial way, like the familiar three. That it instead has to "exist" as an immaterial standard (as just potent influences alone), and the law-abiding behaviors those rules enforced upon the cosmos as an unfolding process would simply make it seem as if the world was substantively extended into a hyperspace.
If we try to invent a spiritual science, what kind of phenomena would it address? What is a spiritual phenomenon? How would a spiritual phenomenon be distinguished from one that isn't spiritual? A closely related question addresses how we become aware of spiritual phenomena and what kind of information can we obtain about them? Do sources of information exist apart from and in addition to our conventional senses and their objects? How would this spiritual science establish objectivity? (Or would it even try? But if it's entirely subjective, why call it 'science'?)
We already have one obvious example of what might be called a non-physical science: mathematics. But as different as mathematics is from physical science, mathematics has a unique methodology all its own in its very rigorous logical proofs, that produce results that mathematicians everywhere on Earth can agree on. So what kind of methodology would proponents of parapsychology and creation science propose to address their peculiar subjects? That's a task that they don't seem to have ever really addressed.
Then the spiritual science would need some explanatory hypotheses. It isn't enough to name a hypothetical 'PSI phenomenon' (let's say), in order for parapsychology to be a productive science, it would need to take a shot at explaining what is observed. About the best that I've seen is a crude classification of 'PSI phenomena', and if things move around mysteriously, people saying 'Oh, that's telekenesis' or 'Oh, that's poltergeists', as if naming it somehow explains it.
The spiritual sciences need to be able to generate hypotheses that are open to further investigation. In conventional science, scientists investigate this, which raises questions about that, and investigations kind of snow-ball. Investigating what's inside animals' bodies leads to anatomy and physiology, which lead to histology, biochemistry, cell and developmental biology... questions upon questions. The new spiritual sciences need to be able to generate productive research programs that enable deeper and deeper investigations into their chosen subjects. And that returns us to the subject of explanation, since as science progresses deeper and deeper into its rabbit holes, explanations proliferate as surface phenomena are reduced to whatever lies deeper. So previously inexplicable organ function in animal bodies can now be explained by the new information from biochemistry, histology and physiology.
The new sciences need to be capable of surprising us, revealing entirely new and unsuspected kinds of phenomena.
And they need to display what philosophers call consilience, where entirely different lines of inquiry, using different methods and presuppositions, arrive at essentially the same results. In natural science we see that when paleontologists hypothesize an evolutionary history for an organism based on fossil evidence, and when the molecular geneticists independently produce the same history based on genomic evidence.
I'd agree that if such ever did get rolling, it would have to be more disciplined and internally coherent with itself than whatever current "paranormal scientists" often seem to be or whoever / whatever those folk identify themselves as nowadays. Since many if not most "funny events" are contended to be explainable by non-extraordinary affairs, there would have to be a "dual conception" approach of interpreting events and circumstances. Which somehow did not interfere with and intrude upon the natural or mechanistic approach side of that fence. Such broader scale "can't we all just get along?" dual-conceptionism goes at least back to Leibniz, and probably well before in a less discernable manner as advertised by today's history of philosophy.
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