Toward an Evidence-Based Spirituality
Today, the qualification of “evidence-based” is commonly used to demarcate that which is based on science from non-science or pseudoscience. We have evidence-based medicine, evidence-based psychology, evidence-based education, and so on. The common thread is that these are versions of each discipline which exclude any evidence that doesn’t come from science.
Defined as “the idea that occupational practices ought to be based on scientific evidence,” it’s essentially applied scientism.
So, you may be wondering, how could an approach seemingly bound to scientific materialism be made to apply to the questions of spirituality?
While I’m no fan of scientism or materialism, I am nevertheless entirely in favor of taking a scientific approach to most matters of investigation, including spiritual matters. What I disagree with is the degree to which the scope of what is considered “scientific” has become limited to highly stringent, repeatable, double-blind, peer reviewed, materialism-compatible research, for all phenomena.
Perhaps a better word for what I’m looking for, in the climate of this philosophical orthodoxy, would be empirical, which means based on systematically examined experiential evidence. Can we take an empirical, or more broadly evidence-based approach to the great questions of spirituality?
What Constitutes Evidence?
Of course, the so-called skeptical community will immediately respond to this idea with, “What evidence for spirituality? There is none!”
However, this is wholly dependent on how one defines evidence. So often, when skeptics say there is “no evidence for” various phenomena, what they really mean is that there is no evidence which they consider valid. When you set the bar for evidence extremely high, so that only double-blind, peer-reviewed, falsifiable and repeatable, materialism-compatible information is considered “evidence,” then of course there is no evidence for spiritual things.
However, if we take a much broader epistemic approach, so that a whole range of phenomena and experiences can be taken on their own terms as a different type of evidence and still studied systematically, then there most certainly is evidence for spiritual phenomena. Otherwise, spirituality wouldn’t exist.
People only engage in spiritual beliefs and practices because they’ve encountered some type of evidence, broadly defined. The question is, is it good evidence? What is good evidence for things in the spiritual domain?
Rather than a dismissive and overly-simplistic demarcation rendering the whole of human knowledge and experience into a crude duality of “science” or “nonsense,” we should be able to look out upon the experiences people have had and the study of spiritual phenomena, and reason together on how some pieces of evidence carry more evidential weight than others, and how this might imply a greater likelihood of certain spiritual ideas being true.
For instance, a single person having intuited a particular truth does not carry tremendous weight. However, a systematic study of numerous people from many different cultures and backgrounds all having a similar experience, especially if it was spontaneous and not sought-after, carries a much greater evidential weight. This is because the likelihood that it is mere personal fancy or fraud is much lower, if it was cross-culturally shared and unsolicited, in this way.
Perhaps neither carry as much weight as a fact established by the rigorous methods of the physical sciences, but so what? The choice to be limited to science is just that: a choice. Plenty of people make a different choice, to work within a looser epistemic framework and believe some of the evidence for spiritual phenomena. If that choice by some or even most people is inevitable, then why not flesh it out philosophically, according to a broad conception of empiricism?
Different Methods for Different Domains
It makes sense to use different methods where they are most appropriate. With phenomena that can be tested very rigorously, such as chemical bonds or cellular behavior, it’s appropriate to set the bar for evidence high. Why not? If we can conduct numerous double-blind studies on them, then we should set the bar at what is realistic.
For more subtle phenomena, or those things which are further from our ability to tangibly grasp, test, and measure, it makes sense to take a different approach. Granted this will be less stringent and more speculative, but nevertheless, it can be done in a way that still has intellectual and scientific validity, if systematic methods and reasoning are applied.
Why would we want to do this with spirituality? The fact of the matter is that not everyone will be a materialist, much to the chagrin of the cult of materialism that has taken over most of the intellectual subculture in the West. The majority of humanity does not have such restrictive standards for evidence, and is willing to believe in some type of spiritual reality.
Therefore, it is worthwhile to make an assessment of which spiritual phenomena are the most supported by empirical evidence, evidence that comes from systematic study of direct experience, not just tradition or pure rational arguments and assumptions.
If we see the value of an empirical approach to knowledge generally, as I think most modern people do, then it’s worthwhile to ask ourselves: What are the most empirically supported spiritual ideas?
Evidential Ranking of Spiritual Phenomena
One way of approaching this task is to assign different values or ranking to different spiritual phenomena or experiences, depending on the general concept of evidential weight just described. These don’t necessarily have to be discrete values, like temperature or electrical wattage, although to be taken seriously in the academic community, they may eventually have to be.
However, I’ll leave that systematization for another time. In this article, I’m more interested in making a general assessment of which spiritual phenomena should have the highest ranking and why, which means they should have the greatest influence on how we conceptualize an evidence-based spiritual worldview.
Lest I be accused of being too vague, I’ll reiterate that what is guiding my informal assessment of the whole body of spiritual evidence here is how unlikely each phenomenon is to be mere hallucination, delusion, coincidence, or fraud, based on how widespread, unsolicited, uniform, and contradictory to the person’s preconceptions it is.
1. Near Death Experience
Near Death Experience (NDE) research is what first converted me from atheism to spirituality, because of its strong evidential nature. I still believe it’s the strongest evidence for existence beyond the physical, so it’s what I will suggest here as the primary evidence for spiritual phenomena, with the highest evidential weight.
This is because NDEs are extremely uniform across populations of various beliefs ranging from the religious to atheists, and even to some extent across cultures. They are also entirely unsolicited; even in the minority of NDEs resulting from suicide, the person was not trying to have an NDE, they were trying to permanently end their life.
Although various attempts have been made to explain NDEs away as hallucination, oxygen deprivation, endogenous opioid release, and at least a dozen other explanations, none of these match the exact phenomenology of the experiences themselves; rather, each can only debunk a mere partial caricature of the experience.
These may serve as handy dismissals for those who never had any interest in investigating the truth about NDEs in the first place, but they can’t pass the litmus test of any in-depth examination.
Evidence of the Afterlife
by Jeffrey Long, M.D.
Evidence of the Afterlife shares the firsthand accounts of people who have died and lived to tell about it… Using this treasure trove of data, Dr. Long explains how medical evidence fails to explain these reports and why there is only one plausible explanation: that people have survived death and traveled to another dimension.
Even the most powerful materialist theory can’t explain veridical NDE cases, in which the NDE experiencer saw or came to know something in the environment they could not have known, had they not actually been out-of-body. Although these cases are the minority, when verified by numerous witnesses they are evidentially powerful.
A full discussion of the insufficiency of such debunking attempts is a matter that deserves it’s own article, which I will write in the future; for the time being, I would direct anyone who questions the evidence of NDEs to the best modern summary of them in my opinion: Evidence of the Afterlife by Dr. Jeffrey Long, linked above.
Image Credit: Alex Grey
2. Mystical Experience
Mystical experiences have been studied systematically by the psychology of religion and related disciplines from the early 20th century to the present, and are known to occur in a variety of cultures and religious contexts.
Although they are often sought-after by practitioners of contemplative or mystical traditions, they also have been known to occur in an entirely unsolicited and spontaneous way, at times. Scientifically speaking, they are somewhat unique among spiritual experiences, in that they can be reproduced with a degree of reliability in controlled settings, via psychedelic substances.
The qualities of this category of experiences are fairly uniform, when studied as a whole. Some researchers have conceptualized it as a spectrum, with varying degrees of “ego-dissolution” which seems to correspond to an increase in “cosmic consciousness.” The more that one’s individual self-concept or ego dissolves, the more they seem to experience this larger consciousness.
The Perennial Philosophy
by Aldous Huxley
With great wit and stunning intellect—drawing on a diverse array of faiths, including Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christian mysticism, and Islam—Huxley examines the spiritual beliefs of various religious traditions and explains how they are united by a common human yearning to experience the divine.
On the lower end of the spectrum, direct encounters with a transcendent reality or higher power seem to occur, but with individuality intact; on the higher end of the spectrum, individuality seems to completely dissolve, resulting in the most transcendental state known to man, Pure Conscious Events, in which a blissful pure subjectivity is experienced.
Various traditions, mostly in Eastern philosophy and Western esotericism, have used the mystical experience as a primary reference by which to define their worldview. Therefore, insight can be drawn not just from the experience itself, but the philosophies and beliefs which have been derived from it in these various traditions, particularly where they overlap.
Often called wisdom traditions, these are among the most evidence-based traditional spiritualities, because of how they emphasize direct experience, rather than abstract belief or scriptural authority.
3. Reincarnation Memory
Various researchers have investigated the reported experience of memories involving reincarnation, or in other words, memories of past lives. While the fact that so many people experience such memories may carry some weight in itself, the primary evidential value of this phenomenon is when the memories are both unsolicited, and especially when they are historically verifiable, in ways that seem impossible for the experiencer to have known.
There have been many such cases, with varying degrees of historical verification. The most famous case, which made the rounds on various television shows, was of a young boy who recalled past-life memories of being a WWII pilot, some of which were verified from records of the pilot’s life. There are other cases like this, and even more cases that are unverified, but where past-life memories nevertheless occurred, both unsolicited and solicited (often via hypnosis).
It’s worth mentioning that there is actually ongoing scientific research on this topic taking place at the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia. While memories may seem like an ephemeral thing, the more we document someone remembering something from the past that they shouldn’t be able to know by normal means, the more likely it is that reincarnation is actually taking place.
4. Psi Phenomena
Psi is a modern term for what most people probably know as “psychic” phenomena, which consists of many capabilities such as telekinesis (mind moving matter), telepathy (mind-to-mind communication), precognition (uncanny foreknowledge of future events), or psychometry (mentally reading facts from objects), to name a few.
Psi phenomena is a bit closer to home than what’s been listed so far, in the sense that it doesn’t directly imply non-physical consciousness, and some of the foremost psi researchers and advocates like Dr. Dean Radin don’t necessarily even believe in out-of-body experience. Nevertheless, I’d say it falls within the domain of phenomena most people would consider to have spiritual significance, in that it shows we are connected in some seemingly non-physical way.
The empirical evidence for psi is mostly from the discipline of parapsychology, which has achieved statistical significance on many experiments measuring psi, as outlined in the academic papers and books of Dr. Radin, Dr. Tart, Dr. Sheldrake, and others.
Entangled Minds
by Dr. Dean Radin
In this illuminating book, Radin shows how we know that psychic phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis are real, based on scientific evidence from thousands of controlled lab tests. Radin surveys the origins of this research and explores, among many topics, the collective premonitions of 9/11. He reveals the physical reality behind our uncanny telepathic experiences and intuitive hunches, and he debunks the skeptical myths surrounding them.
The statistical evidence achieved by these experiments is comparable to what would be required to prove more mundane phenomena in the physical sciences. The skeptic’s response to this is usually “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and therefore psi research must be held to an even higher standard than the normal physical sciences, which has actually led to the field pioneering some research methods to live up to that higher standard. It’s never enough for the skeptics.
It’s up to each person whether they think the evidence for psi is enough for them. Regardless, most people have had mild psi experiences, and it is among the most empirically validated spiritual phenomena.
5. Spiritual Healing
Medicine is one of the most fiercely guarded territories of the cult of materialism, with heavy derision and accusations of quackery often lodged at anyone who claims to be demonstrating effective medical modalities that are non-physical, or even simply unconventional. To some extent, this is understandable, as health or lives are at stake, but it can also be blinding to the discovery of new methods of healing.
Scientific studies have found an overall health benefit to spiritual practices and worldviews, but this could be explainable in materialistic terms, i.e. spirituality makes them feel better, and feeling better improves health, etc. Where it gets more interesting in terms of evidence for spiritual phenomena is that scientists have also found effects of healing modalities which have no explanatory basis in materialist, biological terms.
For instance, in a survey by Dr. Marilyn Schlitz of studies on the effects of prayer or positive intention on patients, cell cultures, or animals, statistical significance was found in 6 out of the 9 studies surveyed. One example was a blinded study of the effects on AIDS patients, which produced statistical significance in the outcome of standard allopathic treatments, due to prayer.
Becoming Supernatural
by Dr. Joe Dispenza
Becoming Supernatural marries some of the most profound scientific information with ancient wisdom to show how people like you and me can experience a more mystical life. Readers will learn that we are, quite literally supernatural by nature if given the proper knowledge and instruction…
Another randomized double-blind study found statistically significant positive outcome differences in “psychological robustness” as well as physiological changes in cancer patients, due to remote healing intentions directed at them over a distance by experienced healing practitioners. These are just a few examples of a body of research that is broader than most people would probably think.
Check out this long list of studies on energy medicine from the National Institute of Integrated Health, and this article in Global Advances in Health and Medicine, tentatively trying to point out the established scientific reasons to take these modalities seriously in medicine.
Of course, there are also any number of less repeatable forms of evidence for this, such as anecdotal accounts, which if collected and analyzed systematically, may also yield some level of evidence. I’m thinking here particularly of “spontaneous remission” of cancers, which have been known to occur after spiritual experiences such as NDEs.
What Are We Even Clinging to, Anymore?
Finally, one of the best reasons to accept an empirical spirituality as a valid intellectual option is the simple fact that the solidity of the material world is rapidly slipping through our fingers, based on the latest physics. In fact, it’s been an obsolete way of seeing the world for most of the 20th century, yet many still absurdly cling to it.
This is not to say that the more ephemeral nature of reality revealed by modern physics necessarily implies spiritual realities, but shouldn’t it make us more open to them? Why do so many go on insisting that we are merely dust in the wind and proclaiming this to be the scientific view, when science itself has rendered that view insufficient?
We all know now that so-called “matter” is mostly empty space, and any layman can find mainstream information about how most of what we call “solid” really consists of energy fields. Search as they might, physicists just can’t get down to a fundamental “material” that this reality is actually made of, at least not one that all can agree on. The most promising theories they have tend more and more to resemble ideas from ancient wisdom traditions, such as vibrating “strings” or universal membranes.
Add on to that the fact that quantum physics has proven non-local action-at-a-distance and that consciousness is instrumental in weaving reality into existence out of possibility to the point of irrefutability, and you really have to ask yourself, why are we so averse to considering the realities which the spiritual phenomena seem to imply? Where is this unbreakable solidity we should be averse to relinquishing?
Is it sheer modern hubris, that some of us can’t admit spiritual traditions were onto something the whole time, even as we derided and dismissed them? Why can’t we take a sober, evidence-based look at spiritual phenomena, without dismissing it in the name of an obsolete view?
This is especially perplexing when the materialist view is so bleak, and these other possibilities so expansive and meaningful. That alone is not reason enough to accept them as real, but shouldn’t it be yet another reason to at least give them consideration? Or have we wedded ourselves to the idea that anything which would be pleasing to us must be false?
Isn’t that just an equally irrational, but infinitely more depressing bias?
Epistemic Pluralism
My hope is that this miasma will pass, and a more open dialogue will lead to an empirical spirituality being acknowledged not as a dogmatic default assumption, as materialism is now, but a valid intellectual option, among many.
I believe we should strive for an intellectual diversity. Just as we recognize the benefits of biodiversity, a diversity of ideas within the cultural realm of intellectual legitimacy would be highly beneficial for us all.
I dream of an intellectual climate of epistemic pluralism, in which it’s fine if one wants to be an extremely skeptical scientific materialist, but it’s also fine if one wants to take evidence for spiritual phenomena on it’s own terms, not to the Kool-aid drinking point of gullibility, but just to the point that not everything has to match the standards of the physical sciences to have considerable ontological implications.
The Flip
by Dr. Jeffrey Kripal
The Flip is Kripal’s ambitious, visionary program for unifying the sciences and the humanities to expand our minds, open our hearts, and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the culture wars. Combining accounts of rationalists’ spiritual awakenings and consciousness explorations by philosophers, neuroscientists, and mystics within a framework of the history of science and religion, Kripal compellingly signals a path to mending our fractured world.
Rather than “opening the floodgates to all manner of superstition and woo,” as many staunch materialists likely fear, I believe this would expand our ways of knowing the world rationally, and create a more inclusive climate for many who are currently ostracized from the public intellectual conversation, and dare I say it, allow many within the academy to come out of the closet?
In his book The Flip (linked above), Dr. Jeffrey Kripal describes many cases of well-respected, sometimes Nobel Prize-winning scientists who were compelled by the sheer force of evidence and personal experience to open their minds to a worldview larger than materialism.
Sadly, most of them could only speak openly and honestly about their expanded perspective after retiring from their professional careers as professors and researchers, which goes to show the kind of stranglehold the cult of materialism has on the university system, and intellectual culture in general.
Finally, even from a sheerly pragmatic perspective, isn’t it better to offer a moderate, intellectually honest spiritual alternative, given that it’s inevitable that people will engage in spiritual beliefs, anyway? Wouldn’t it be preferable for those with the spiritual inclination to have a valid rational choice, rather than fall into the throes of truly delusional new age ideas, or the treacherous clutches of religious fundamentalism?
