Reconsidering the Spiritual in the West
An historical, scientific, philosophical and theological long-read
Consider the following quote by a very influential 18th century philosopher:
It forms a strong presumption against all supernatural and miraculous relations, that they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations; or if a civilized people has ever given admission to any of them, that people will be found to have received them from ignorant and barbarous ancestors.¹
David Hume, the philosopher in question, was deeply suspicious of anything to do with the spiritual. In fact, he defined anybody lending too much credence to this realm as ‘barbarous’, or, at the least, as the offspring of ‘barbarians’.
Today, we live out Hume’s legacy. His work has profoundly shaped our plausibility structures, as the supernatural or the spiritual today do not intuitively strike us as very plausible or rational; our default setting is one of profound scepticism, if not utter disbelief. And while we might revolt at his terminology, we subconsciously agree with Hume’s words, especially if we can substitute ‘naive’, ‘gullible’ or ‘unscientific’ for his ‘barbarous’.
This is the air we breathe and the water we swim in. We don’t really think about it, we feel it. Even those who do profess belief in the spiritual swim in this water. Indeed, they swim against the flow, but they must exert constant effort to resist its pressure.
For example, a friend of mine, who is very much into Christian reports about angels, once rather ironically ridiculed the Islamic belief that everybody has two angels on their shoulders to write down their deeds. She said: “anybody with common sense can see that is stupid.” It is this common sense that is so hard to resist.
While the Humean rejection of the spiritual is in many parts of the West today commonly sensed to be profoundly right and reflecting reality, we are often unaware that this makes us the odd ones out in world history. The vast majority of worldviews, current and past, have simply included what we call the spiritual. And while many societies of course have had their dissidents, the modern West is truly exceptional in its widespread disregard for the spiritual.
Yet we keep thinking of the rest as the oddballs, with their outdated beliefs. “Such barbar… oops!”
So how has the West gone from a time, some 500 years ago, when the spiritual was acknowledged and experienced by most, to its modern milieu where the spiritual is highly suspect?
Is this the natural outcome of science and progress, as we so commonly tell ourselves? Or is our present perspective a cultural artefact, as transient as any other, no more than a blip on the vast scale of history?
If our rejection of the spiritual turns out to be based more on assumption than on scientific fact, perhaps it is time to open-mindedly, though critically, reconsider the spiritual?
Below, I outline such a reconsideration. I attempt to trace the “how we got where we are,” arguing that indeed our intuitive reactions against the spiritual trace their roots to contingent cultural assumptions rather than established fact.
After that, I suggest a “where we can go from here,” a constructive proposal for viewing and engaging with the spiritual — loosely defined here as the transcendent, that which goes beyond the normal, beyond the purely physical, material, natural.
One caveat before we continue: my personal background and worldview are Christian. Thus, I am biased in favour of the spiritual. However, as postmodernism has taught us, there is no detached, neutral vantage point from which I could write truly objectively anyway. Furthermore, this article is the result of my own honest struggles with the subject, not simply a repackaged version of received doctrine.
So, I state my bias upfront and invite you to reconsider the spiritual with me. It is then up to you to determine whether the perspective I present here makes good sense of the world or not.
I can ask no more.
From 1520 to 2020
Five hundred years ago, in 1520, Hernán Cortés was busy destroying the Aztec empire in modern-day Mexico; Charles V, a native of my own little Flanders, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor; and Pope Leo X was threatening reformer Martin Luther with excommunication for his 95 theses against Catholic Church practices.
All these people inhabited what we can call an enchanted world.
This is not to say that Cortés actually fought elves and orcs in Middle Earth, or that Luther protested against the Ice Queen of Narnia instead of the Pope. Although elves and orcs may indeed be part of the social imaginary in an enchanted world, the term generally refers to a world that is sensed as filled with presences we would call non-natural, or spiritual.
An enchanted world is thus more than the natural universe. It is the natural universe, open to influence from the outside, open to the spiritual. People living in an enchanted world experience themselves as porous, vulnerable to such forces that may bring blessing or curse, possession or grace, healing or pain.
Thus, in 1520, people are healed after praying to a saint. People act in abnormal and harmful ways because they are possessed by a demon. And monks have mystical experiences of union with God.
Clearly, this is not the world most of us experience today. Our world has been thoroughly disenchanted — all the spiritual has been evacuated — and we are left with a mechanistic, natural universe. Or at least we commonly sense it to be so. We sense ourselves and the world as closed to outside penetration, and we believe that everything is explainable through natural causes.
Hence, in 2020, people are healed by a doctor. People act in abnormal and harmful ways because they have a mental illness. And monks have chemical imbalances in their brains.
This take on reality is called naturalism, and the common story goes that it is science that thoroughly disenchanted the world and lead to naturalism.
Yet long before Darwin proposed his naturalist account of the emergence of species (1859), long before Hume was calling spiritual people barbarians (1748), and long before Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition for saying the earth revolves around the sun (1633), the process of disenchantment had already begun.
In 1520, the West was undergoing significant changes, as various movements were tinkering with the Western worldview.
1 Ironically, it is Martin Luther who led one of these movements that contributed to a disenchantment of the world and opened the way for a purely naturalist worldview.
Luther’s Protestant Reformation is the best known in a long sequence of lower-case ‘r’ reformations that all shared a dissatisfaction with the way the spiritual was engaged with in the Latin West.
As in many other places, Western society of the 1520’s largely accepted that only certain people would live a fully devoted and highly-demanding spiritual life (nuns, hermits, priests), while most others lived spiritually far less dedicated lives, lives more focused on the needs for this-worldly human flourishing.
These reform movements sought to challenge the common acceptance of this reality, and called everybody to live up to the highest spiritual standards, not just the spiritual ‘professionals’. The cobbler, the smith and the baker were equally called to “do all for the glory of God”.
At the same time, because these reformers argued against Catholics that positive spiritual power — grace — could only be found in God, it was no longer seen to reside in objects and rituals. The reformers thus emptied the world of saints to pray to, relics to heal us, and sacraments to channel God’s power.
This was an important first step in disenchanting the world.
2 A second movement that contributed to the disenchantment of the world was the Renaissance — the cultural Rebirth of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations in late-Medieval Europe.
Also one of many lower-case ‘r’ renaissances, the Renaissance was not as clean a rebirth as one might suppose. It was not “out with the old, in with the even older”. It was more like a grafting in of classical elements into contemporary Western culture, creating a new synthesis of Christian and classical worldviews.
For example, the Renaissance is well known for a renewed focus on nature. Artists such as Michelangelo and da Vinci started closely studying nature and developed innovative ways of realistically depicting the natural world.
Yet this renewed interest in nature did not uniquely derive from classicism. It was actually more a move of Christian devotion, related to the lower-case ‘r’ reformations. It was a move rooted in the desire to bring the spiritual closer to everyday life, to affirm the Incarnation: the spiritual expressing itself in the natural.
Hence Michelangelo’s highly realistic depictions of human and spiritual figures — Biblical and Greek — on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, and da Vinci’s painting of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples — the most reproduced painting ever.
Yet while this turn towards the natural world originally served spiritual purposes, it ironically ended up contributing to the disenchantment of the world.
Furthermore, Renaissance humanists — originally denoting students of classical literature and the arts related to it (the humanities) — unleashed upon the world a work that would push the Western worldview much further still in the direction of disenchantment and pure naturalism. The rediscovery of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things from the first century BCE reintroduced Epicureanism to Western thought.
Whereas the reformations attempted to resolve the two-tier spirituality in Western society by calling all to the fully committed and highly demanding spiritual life, Epicureans made the opposite move, calling all to focus fully on this-worldly human flourishing.
According to Epicurus, the world is purely physical and made up of atoms; any gods that might exist have no interest in the world; everything has come about through a natural process of trial and error; humans are not unique; religions are cruel, superstitious delusions; and the highest good for humans to attain is pleasure.
Sound familiar?
The Epicurean worldview was as close as antiquity got to our modern naturalism. But it took a long time for this worldview to filter through; for centuries, On the Nature of Things was prefaced with warnings about its “fanciful anti-Christian content”.
Yet whereas it was only a tiny current in the 1520’s West, Epicureanism steadily widened its reach, and provided an important framework for modern naturalism to build on.
3 The third movement that contributed to the disenchantment of the world was the Scientific Revolution.
In the centuries leading up to 1520, Western science had been deeply influenced by the same rediscovery of ancient Greek philosophy that also had fuelled the Renaissance. This influence led theologians to develop an Aristotelian-Christian synthesis worldview that had two elements relevant for our discussion.
First, the adoption of Greek thought shifted the Medieval Creator/Creation dualism to the currently more familiar spiritual/natural dualism. Whereas earlier Medieval philosophers distinguished between God and what he had created and therefore depended on him — humans and angels, animals and demons — the Greek system distinguished based on substance — matter and spirit — separating reality into two rather unrelated realms. Angels and demons were shifted out of ‘Creation’ and into the ‘spiritual’ along with God, while humans were divided between the natural and the spiritual into bodies and souls respectively.
Second, in Aristotelian thinking, the categories used to understand the world are those of essences. An object’s essence determines its purpose, what is good for it, and the object in turn should aspire to that good. For example, there is a right way of being for humans, defined in the human essence, which humans should model their lives on.
In this view, nature has inherent meaning, and scientific study of the natural world involves searching for the purposes and normative patterns that nature is expressing.
Yet some theologians objected to this perspective, arguing that it constrains God. They reasoned that, because God is assumed to always will the good, if he had created humans with a predefined good, he would then later on be constrained to only will that specific good. God would no longer be able to redefine it or choose any other good for humans.
To philosophically restore to God his freedom then, what was needed according to these theologians was to deny that there are such predefined, intrinsic purposes and goods. This led them to frame the natural world as a mechanism, which God is free to manipulate as he sees fit according to his purposes which are extrinsic to the natural world.
In that view, nature has no inherent meaning, and scientific study of the natural world involves searching for its mechanisms, its inner workings, rather than for its inherent spiritual purposes.
This move stuck, and it confined science to the natural side of the Greek dualism, leading to its adoption of the naturalist methodology of empirical observation that so successfully drove the scientific revolution.
Thus, by first following Aristotle in sharply separating the spiritual from the natural, and then reducing the natural to a mechanism, the West took another important step towards the disenchantment of the world.
The Re-formation, the Re-naissance and the scientific Re-volution made 1520 a time when the Western worldview was being significantly re-vised, re-modeled, and re-ordered.
All three movements contributed to the disenchantment of the world — the evacuation of all things spiritual — and paved the way for the later emergence of naturalism as an all-encompassing worldview.
Yet, the specific moves that enabled this disenchantment of the world were philosophical and theological in nature, not scientific. Sure, the new science contributed generously to this disenchantment, but it was naturalist assumptions that fed into the science, not the other way around.
This is the point I want to make here: the idea that scientific progress expelled the spiritual is a misconception. Rather, it is contingent philosophical and theological developments that enabled the emergence of a purely naturalist worldview. Science, limited by methodology to naturalist explanations, can do no more than attempt to explain everything through natural causes. It can only support naturalism as a worldview to the extent that it is able to explain everything naturally (and despite its remarkable success, it is debatable whether it is able to do so — I will come back to this).
Nevertheless, over time, the spiritual continued to recede into the background. A distant, uninvolved God became the last spirit standing.
Two centuries downstream from 1520, Hume, an Epicurean philosopher of science who lived in Protestant Scotland (note the influence of the three ‘Re’s) shed off the last vestiges of the spiritual and adopted a fully naturalist worldview. “God is dead. … And we have killed him.” wrote Nietzsche later.
Finally, the West was enlightened enough to call those who disagreed barbarians.
Spiritual Realities
As I noted at the beginning, Hume’s legacy still largely lives with us today. His work profoundly shapes the way we intuit the world.
Yet the story didn’t end with Hume.
Many movements in the centuries after him acknowledged a certain sense of loss and tried to recover the fullness that was given up by lopping off the spiritual. Yet unable to escape Hume, these movements have often sought a quasi transcendence in the natural.
Romanticism, for example, reacted against the sterile rationalism of Hume and the Enlightenment by seeking to intensely experience the natural world, re-infusing it with meaning.
Today’s popular mindfulness movement is similarly directed towards connecting with something more.
These movements seek to escape the hard mechanistic natural world and reclaim some mystery, without having to return to religion proper. And they usually maintain a certain ambivalence or vagueness regarding the nature of the spiritual (pun intended).
Below, I will put forward a more concrete take on the spiritual.
But before that, I would like to finally lay to rest the idea that only naive, gullible and unscientific people (Hume’s barbarians) report on the spiritual, by recounting some of the experiences of individuals that are held in high regard in the West today.
The stories will also set the stage for my take on the spiritual afterwards.
In these times of #BlackLivesMatter, it is rather fitting to start with Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights hero of the 50’s and 60’s. A Protestant pastor, like his namesake, his struggle for the rights of African Americans was deeply rooted in his Christian spirituality.
When King’s movement started to significantly disrupt the status-quo in his hometown, he began to receive death threats over the phone, up to 40 a day. One specific evening in those early days, King was ready to give up. “With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud.”
The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. “I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”
At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced God before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: “Stand up for justice, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.” Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.”³
Three days later, a bomb blew up his house. King later wrote that “Strangely enough, I accepted the word of the bombing calmly. My religious experience a few nights before had given me the strength to face it.”³
King’s experience profoundly shaped his subsequent career as well as the trajectory of the United States unto this day.
King was directly influenced in his non-violent struggle by Mohandas Gandhi (or Mahatma — Great Soul — Gandhi). King reportedly said that “Christ gave us the goals and Mahatma Gandhi the tactics.”
Gandhi, a Hindu lawyer, led India’s resistance against British colonial rule by running a nationwide non-violent resistance movement. He also used these non-violent tactics to oppose the horrifying oppression of “untouchables”, the lowest caste in Indian society. When spending time in prison for this, and in very poor health, Gandhi had the following experience:
At about twelve o’clock in the night something wakes me up suddenly and some voice — within me or without, I cannot say — whispers, “Thou must go on fast.” “How many days?” I ask. “Twenty-one days.” “When does it begin?” I ask. “You begin tomorrow.” I went quietly off to sleep after making the decision. … The doctors thought that I would not survive the fast. But something within me said I would and that I must go forward. That kind of experience has never in my life happened before or after that date. …
I saw no form. I have never tried for it, for I have always believed God to be without form. But what I did hear was like a voice from afar and yet quite near. It was as unmistakable as some human voice, definitely speaking to me, and irresistible. I was not dreaming at the time I heard the voice. The hearing of the voice was preceded by a terrific struggle within me. Suddenly the voice came upon me. I listened, made certain it was the voice and the struggle ceased. I was calm. The determination was made accordingly, the date and hour of the fast fixed. Joy came over me … I felt refreshed.
Could I give any further evidence that it was truly the voice I heard and that it was not an echo of my own heated imagination? I have no further evidence to convince the skeptic. He is free to say it was all self-delusion. It may well have been so. I can offer no proof to the contrary. But I can say this: that the unanimous verdict of the whole world against me could not shake me from my belief that what I heard was the true voice of God. … For me the voice was more real than my existence.³
Gandhi’s fast against untouchability rallied the whole Indian nation to make significant political changes, and two years after his death, untouchability was abolished.
Around the time of Gandhi and King’s activism, two British friends produced some of the most widely read fantasy novels of today: J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, and C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia.
Tolkien viewed his masterpiece as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work,” although he vehemently denied it was a Christian allegory. Lewis’s series on the other hand was in fact such an allegory, quite blatantly so, much to the dislike of Tolkien.
Lewis had not always been a Christian though. A staunch atheist at a younger age, he only adopted a spiritual worldview when a professor at Oxford, with Tolkien playing an important part in convincing Lewis of the reasonableness of such a view.
But beyond the intellectual concerns, Lewis had an experience that was crucial in his journey:
The odd thing was that before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. In a sense. I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus. Without words and (I think) almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow presented to me. I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armor, as if I were a lobster. I felt myself being there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corset meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. I say “I chose,” yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives. You could argue that I was not a free agent, but I am more inclined to think that this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done. Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, “I am what I do.” Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back — drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling. …
Remember, I had always wanted, above all things, not to be “interfered with.” I had wanted (mad wish) “to call my soul my own.” I had been far more anxious to avoid suffering than to achieve delight. I had always aimed at limited liabilities. The supernatural itself had been to me, first, an illicit dram, and then, as by a drunkard’s reaction, nauseous. Even my recent attempt to live my philosophy had secretly (I now knew) been hedged round by all sorts of reservations. I had pretty well known that my ideal virtue would never be allowed to lead me into anything intolerably painful; I would be “reasonable.” But now what had been an ideal became a command; and what might not be expected of one? Doubtless, by definition, God was Reason itself. But would He also be “reasonable” in that other, more comfortable sense? Not the slightest assurance on that score was offered me. Total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark, were demanded. The reality with which no treaty can be made was upon me. The demand was not even “All or nothing.” I think that stage had been passed, on the bus top when I unbuckled my armor and the snowman started to melt. Now, the demand was simply “All.”
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.³
Finally, let me turn to a few recent Nobel Prize winners.
Gynaecologist Denis Mukwege of the Democratic Republic of Congo was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2018 for his “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”. He became the world’s leading expert on repairing injuries of rape by treating thousands upon thousands of gang raped women in his war-torn homeland.
In parallel, Mukwege is an active Pentecostal pastor, already since the age of 13, more than 50 years ago. At his ordination, he was “baptized with the Holy Spirit”:
I started to speak in tongues [uncontrolled speaking in an unknown language]. My whole being was filled with heat and a certainty that I was not alone. The experience was so overwhelming that I knew my life was forever changed by that moment.³
He received the prize along with Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman from Northern Iraq who was captured and used as a sex-slave by the Islamic State after they overran her homeland (feel free to refer to them as barbarians). She managed to escape and today advocates for her people and other victims of genocide and human trafficking.
I used to pray for my own future — to finish school and open my salon — and the futures of my siblings and my mother. Now I pray for the survival of my religion and my people.³
A few years earlier, 17 year old Pakistani Muslim Malala Yousafzai received the same prize for her activism for the education of women in her land. She survived being shot in the head in an assassination attempt by the Taliban, and today her advocacy has grown into an international movement.
It feels like this life is not my life. It’s a second life. People have prayed to God to spare me and I was spared for a reason — to use my life for helping people.³
Note that I don’t offer these stories to disprove naturalism. I could have offered more spectacular stories that are more challenging to account for naturalistically. Rather, I chose these stories because of the public nature and respectability of the people involved, in order to respond to Hume’s critique of barbarism thrown at people with a spiritual worldview, a critique that still shapes the intuitive reactions of many today.
Even I myself, while writing the last few stories, subconsciously felt they would carry less weight, simply because they involve a man from Africa and two women from Asia. How awful! As if that makes their perspectives less credible!?
Indeed, Hume’s cultural imperialism continues to rear its ugly head. We have a long way to go and much to repent from in the West.
The Science of the Spiritual
After noting that our modern denial of the spiritual is contingent on philosophical and theological assumptions, and that many respectable people report on the spiritual, we are perhaps ready to genuinely start our reconsideration.
In what follows, I offer my own take on the spiritual, which has three aspects to it: first, our experiences of the spiritual; second, some tools for evaluating these experiences; and, third, the actual spiritual realities that underly such experiences.
I start with our experience of the spiritual, rather than discussing what I think the spiritual actually is, as I believe that approaching the subject in this order allows us to move progressively from the less controversial to the more controversial. That seems to me more fruitful than the other way around.
Therefore, to start things off, I make two claims about our experience of the spiritual.
1 My first claim is this: the ability to have spiritual experiences is a basic human faculty. It is not something only for special spiritual people, nor is it only for barbarians. Everybody has the capacity to have spiritual experiences — although some are certainly more talented at it than others.
In fact, most religious traditions provide intricate methods and techniques to help people learn to have specific kinds of spiritual experiences. Mysticism for example is a spiritual path of which most traditions claim that anybody can follow it, given proper guidance and training. Across traditions, this path leads to experiences of so-called true reality and a kind of transcendence of the self.
Buddhist meditation for example involves training the mind in specific ways, typically by focusing on the breath and performing various introspective mind exercises to increase attention and awareness. The goal is to achieve certain states of mind, certain insights, and ultimately awaken to the true nature of reality: that there is no self, that the self is only a construct of the mind.
In the words of a neuroscientist and Buddhist meditation master:
Meditation is a science, the systematic process of training the mind. … To Awaken means to understand reality as it is, rather than as we mistakenly believe it to be, to understand the true nature of the mind and the world we, and all sentient beings, are a part of.⁴
In Hinduism, mystical training takes the form of diligent exercise, also involving breathing and concentration, but diet and posture as well, in order to find union (yoga) with the divine:
All the different steps in yoga are intended to bring us scientifically to the superconscious state or samâdhi … There is no feeling of I, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know ourselves — for samâdhi lies potential in us all — for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from the finite, and its contrasts of good and evil altogether, and identical with the Atman or Universal Soul.⁵
Sufis are Islam’s mystics who train themselves to ultimately lose themselves in God. In the words of one of the most important Medieval Muslim philosophers and mystics:
The Science of the Sufis aims at detaching the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. … The first condition for a Sufi is to purge his heart entirely of all that is not God. The next key of the contemplative life consists in the humble prayers which escape from the fervent soul, and in the meditations on God in which the heart is swallowed up entirely. But in reality this is only the beginning of the Sufi life, the end of Sufism being total absorption in God.⁵
Finally, a famous Christian mystic described the human soul as a castle with seven mansions. She writes that a person can learn to navigate these mansions, progressing through prayer, meditation and the sacraments of the Church towards the final, central mansion where union with God is achieved:
In the prayer of union the soul is asleep, fast asleep, as regards the world and itself: in fact, during the short time this state lasts it is deprived of all feeling whatever, being unable to think on any subject, even if it wished. No effort is needed here to suspend the thoughts: if the soul can love, it knows not how, nor whom it loves, nor what it desires. In fact, it has died entirely to this world, to live more truly than ever in God. This is a delicious death, for the soul is deprived of the faculties it exercised while in the body: delicious because, (although not really the case), it seems to have left its mortal covering to abide more entirely in God.⁵
While these examples illustrate the ubiquity of the mystical path, I don’t mean to say that all these mystics are engaging with the same spiritual realities, if any at all. Even psychedelic drugs can achieve similar effects. Rather, I’m simply pointing out that humans, across traditions and faiths, have this basic human faculty to have spiritual experiences. And while training can help develop this faculty, it is not a requirement, as shown in C.S. Lewis’s story above.
Now isn’t all of this simply psychological? Spiritual training clearly works on the mind, teaching it to focus on and imagine certain things. How different is this from the imaginary friends that appear so real to children? Even in the cases where an experience happens to a person without spiritual training, psychological factors can easily be invoked. C.S. Lewis was already having conversations about God and thinking about the spiritual, so it’s not a huge leap to connect his experience to that.
Are all these spiritual experiences psychological phenomena then?
Of course they are!
Almost everything we do involves our brains, so saying that something is psychological does not exclude the involvement of other factors!
2 That brings us to the second claim that I wish to make regarding our experience of the spiritual: our experiences are not either purely natural or purely spiritual phenomena; they are both-and.
I argue that we should reject the dichotomy that the Greek natural/spiritual dualism created in our minds. We think that these realms are completely separate, and that therefore phenomena either have a natural explanation, or a spiritual one. God lives only in the gaps of our natural knowledge so to speak.
But why should that be so? We do not reject biological explanations because there are also chemical explanations. So why should we reject spiritual explanations because there are psychological explanations?
We do so because of our sharp separation of the natural and the spiritual, combined with a commitment to naturalism which declares the spiritual as non-existent.
Of course, it is not too hard to maintain faith in naturalism in the face of the subjective experiences of others such as those described above. It suffices to look at the brains of these mystics having an experience, see neural activity, and voilà, no need for the spiritual.
Let’s now consider spiritual experiences of a different kind, one that is more interesting regarding my claim about the overlap of the natural and the spiritual, because the experiences involved are of a more objective, verifiable nature and at least sometimes seem to demand a spiritual explanation: so-called miracles.
I write ‘so-called’ because I am challenging the natural/spiritual dualism with which our concept of miracle is so strongly tied up. We think of miracles as some divine being stepping out of the spiritual and into the natural world, interfering with some natural laws, and then retreating again.
Well, actually, let me correct that: we think of miracles as superstitious illusions explainable in purely natural terms.
This case is made very strongly by a British illusionist. He replicates Christian healing services in his shows, and through skilled psychological manipulation, hypnotism, and a reliance on adrenaline, he causes dozens of people in the audience to report healing from significant physical issues. He even has them perform tasks they could not do before being ‘healed’.
There is for example a person with tinnitus who is freed from the ringing in his ears. There is a person with reading glasses who suddenly is able to read without them. There is a person with a breathing problem who is instantly able to breathe freely and able to lift an extremely heavy weight.⁸
Yet for all the impressiveness of the show, the illusionist readily admits that after the hundreds of shows he has performed, only one person was actually permanently healed.
That is, in fact, his point.
The question is then: do phenomena like the ones employed in this show account for all miracle claims? Does the naturalist never need to consider a spiritual level in their explanations, as I am claiming we should do?
Take the following report:
There was an Indian in Zürich some decades ago who had a dagger driven through his heart, a feat that he had demonstrated before in other places. My colleagues in the medical faculty controlled and x-rayed everything. There was not the slightest doubt that a miracle had happened; he should have been dead, but he did not follow suit and remained alive. The experiment was even repeated afterwards. Yet we did not believe in that man and he did not want to lead us to believe in his god.⁹
And this report:
A Belgian peasant on pilgrimage to a statue recalling Lourdes, whose chronically diseased leg needed to be amputated, pleaded for grace to be able to work; his leg was instantly healed, converting his agnostic physician. … After careful investigation, a team of twenty-one doctors recognized that, among other things, a piece of bone had instantly grown more than an inch.⁹
And the following one:
One woman was healed through prayer from severe epilepsy and a brain disturbance that had plagued her from ages six to twenty-six. Afterward, her EEG reading was normal, and her doctors, unable to believe the change, repeated the test two more times over the next few weeks. Finally they accepted that she was well but denied the possibility that she was healed through prayer. Now they “have concluded that she must have been misdiagnosed and mistreated for the past twenty years. These conscientious and competent doctors have risked a possible malpractice suit rather than admit the possibility of divine healing.”⁹
And finally:
The surgeon examined a woman already diagnosed with rectal cancer, exploring the lesion, doing a colostomy, and the like. The woman insisted that she believed that God would heal her, and they gave what would presumably normally be good advice: “God will heal you through surgery.” When, however, they reached the theater to operate and the surgeon checked the lesion again, he could not discover it digitally or with a proctoscope. “We woke the patient up and discharged her saying we had missed the diagnosis though we were not the only ones who diagnosed her. She called it a miracle, but in our medical minds we were unwilling to accept that she had had divine healing.⁹
When I claim that the natural and the spiritual overlap significantly and that natural and spiritual explanations do not exclude each other, such as in the mystical experiences reported earlier, I readily concede that in many cases a purely natural explanation might fully satisfy the demands of a naturalist mind.
Yet there are times, as in the stories above, when natural explanations simply do not suffice. Those cases seem to strongly suggest that there is a spiritual factor involved, and maintaining a naturalist worldview in the face of such reports requires one to either dismiss the report out of hand, or to have a strong faith in a future discovery of naturalist explanations.
And remember that I am not confining spiritual involvement to cases like those above only. I am claiming that there is a spiritual and natural level to nearly all spiritual experiences, even to most phenomena in the world — think for example of the human mind, the nature of evil, or even the basic laws of nature, which we describe so well, yet what prescribes and sustains them eludes us…
I simply quoted those specific ‘miracle’ cases above because they are the most useful ones to argue for a spiritual level on naturalism’s own terms.
Of course, I realize that citing four reports of miracle claims is not sufficient to challenge a whole worldview. On the other hand, snowballing the reader with a massive amount of reports — and there are literally millions of them¹⁰ — would not have the desired effect either. I went through two massive volumes of miracle claims so that you would not have to do so.
I can only count on a willingness on your part to reconsider the spiritual with me. Remember, that is the point of this article. I’m not able to (dis-)prove naturalism or the spiritual anyway.
Assume now for a moment that I’m right, that everybody has the ability to experience what we call the spiritual, and that most phenomena, and especially spiritual experiences, have natural and spiritual dimensions to them. What do we do with that? Can we discern what spiritual realities lie behind these experiences?
And if we want to decide for ourselves what spiritual path to follow, how can we evaluate and distinguish between the various kinds of experiences and paths that are on offer?
This is actually an important question even if you don’t buy what I’ve said up to this point and don’t desire to pursue spiritual experiences. Even if there are no spiritual realities behind these experiences, even if they are purely natural phenomena, spiritual experiences do have very real effects in the natural world, and it is therefore important to be able to assess and evaluate them.
Discerning Spirits
As we saw with the British illusionist, what looks like a spiritual experience may not in fact be so. Or at least not in the way we think.
Furthermore, the various mystical traditions we considered — Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Christian —sometimes report eerily similar experiences, of transcending the self and feeling deeply connected with true reality. But they make very different claims about the actual nature of the spiritual.
Certain Buddhist experiences are congruent with pure naturalism when they reveal that the self is only a psychological construct; Hindu experiences typically reveal that each one of us is one and the same Being; Muslim and Christian experiences generally reveal a transcendent Creator God who is qualitatively different from us.
So while the experiences themselves can be very similar, the revelations or interpretations they bring are clearly not.
How can we discern what is happening? Are some experiences ‘better’ than others, are some more ‘useful’, more ‘revealing’?
Let me propose two criteria that I think can help us think about spiritual experiences and differentiate between them. The first one is a pragmatic criterion. The second is a philosophical one.
1Let’s start with the pragmatic criterion. Almost two millennia ago, Paul of Tarsus wrote the following words to early communities of Jesus’s followers:
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.¹¹
Paul was teaching these communities how to discern the work of God in their lives. If they were not growing in the virtues of love, joy, peace, etc., he said, whatever it was they thought they were experiencing, it was not God.
Based on the assumption that a good tree produces good fruit, and a bad tree produces bad fruit, Paul proposes to look at the outcomes of spiritual experiences to evaluate the experiences themselves. I adopt and adapt Paul’s idea here as my first criterion. I ask: Do the spiritual experiences in question facilitate human flourishing? Do they make us better human beings?
This criterion is probably as simple and sensible as it is vague and useless without further elaboration. What does it mean in practice for humans to flourish? What does it mean to become better human beings?
Instead of exploring the breadth and length of human flourishing, let me follow Paul here for a bit and briefly explore the role virtues can play in evaluating spiritual experiences. This discussion can then function as a template for a more general and exhaustive discussion on human flourishing that should consider the full extent of physical, psychological and social well-being. I leave that larger discussion for another time however.
So how can virtues — and vices, their opposites — serve to evaluate spiritual experiences? Consider two examples.
Somebody has a string of mystical experiences that leave them prideful and arrogant, feeling spiritually superior and looking down on others. Can we call these spiritual experiences ‘good’? The person has certainly not become more virtuous through their experiences — on the contrary. So probably we would not call these experiences ‘good’.
Somebody else has a spiritual awakening and afterwards feels deep peace and acts in more loving and compassionate ways. Was this a ‘good’ spiritual experience? Since it made the person more virtuous, the pragmatic criterion would suggest so.
Now, I don’t pretend that this pragmatic criterion is very well-defined or completely objective. For starters, what list of virtues should one use? Paul’s list is probably a bit arbitrary: Why not include justice or courage? Why self-control, and not wisdom?
I’m quite sure Paul never meant it to be an exhaustive list. I certainly don’t feel bound to his list. There are many other classical virtues that I would include if I were trying to be exhaustive. But Paul’s list captures the general idea: we affirm spiritual experiences that foster a virtuous life.
But even then, who determines what constitutes a virtue? Isn’t it so that someone’s vice may be another’s virtue? Isn’t that what all these culture wars are about?
Well, people are certainly free to add the classic vices of jealousy, hatred and anxiety to their lists, but somehow I feel like nobody will actually do so.
That is the point I want to make. I leave the criterion under-specified in recognition of the fact that there is a certain level of disagreement about the particulars regarding virtues and human flourishing more generally — what kind of love are we talking about for example? But the disagreement does not at all go deep enough to render this criterion unusable. Hardly anybody would disagree that the classical virtues are generally good and desirable, while the vices are the opposite. So I trust that there is a general consensus on the main thrust of the criterion, which cross-cultural research appears to bear out.¹²
Turning back to human flourishing more generally, a similar discussion could be held on physical or emotional health for example. While people may disagree over some of the specifics, favouring some aspects of physical well-being over others, I would again argue that there is a consensus on what it generally means to be physically (or emotionally) healthy, and that therefore the pragmatic criterion is a useful one.
If we apply this criterion to the spiritual experiences we have contemplated earlier, the results are rather positive. C.S. Lewis’s experience later produced in him a profound joy, as the title of his autobiography attests: Surprised by Joy. The three people who were healed after prayer from debilitating diseases experienced dramatically improved physical well-being. And Gandhi and King’s experiences had large-scale, long-term societal benefits.
Only the Indian man plunging a dagger into his heart while remaining unscathed is a bit of an enigma from the pragmatic perspective — I will return to this.
If we zoom out some more and use this criterion to look at the main religious traditions the world knows today, the verdict also seems to be rather positive, all things considered:
The beneficial effect of religion on health is attested in Jewish, Islamic, and other faiths, as well as among Christians, although some studies so far are inconclusive or indicate negative effects in some religious communities. … Religion appears positively associated with psychological health (particularly emphasized in studies of depression and related sorts of issues), and is often correlated with other healthy dispositions. For example, in one 1990 study involving 451 African Americans, less religious men were nearly twice as prone to depression as their more religious peers. Other studies show that religiously committed persons tended to adjust more healthily to the death of a child or spouse. Religious commitment not only helps addiction prevention but also strengthens addiction recovery. For example, patients involved in religious programs proved nearly ten times likelier to continue abstaining from heroin a year after treatment.⁹
While I don’t mean to confuse religion with spiritual experience, by and large they go hand in hand. Note also that spiritual experiences must not be limited to the kind of dramatic mystical states or miracles recounted above — they can be as plain as attending church and being moved by a spiritual song, or reading the Bhagavad Gita and being touched by its wisdom.
Looking at the Christian tradition specifically, we find further positive experiences from a pragmatic perspective.
Increasingly, …, there is evidence that the quality of someone’s relationship with God has consequences. In a study of the relationship between prayer and mental illness, when God was experienced as remote or not loving, there was a direct relationship between prayer and psychopathology; but that when God was experienced as close and intimate, the more someone prayed, the less ill they were. In another study of caregivers, prayer was associated with fewer health problems and better quality of life. In a study of people with devastating medical conditions — cancer, spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, and the like — belief in a loving higher power and a positive worldview were associated with better health. In a private Christian college in southern California, the quality of someone’s attachment to God significantly decreased perceived stress and did so more effectively than the quality of that person’s relationships with other people. A secure attachment to God (compared to an insecure attachment) protects college women against eating disorders and college men against excessive drinking and drugs. … Going to church weekly, as compared to not going at all, has the same effect on reported happiness as moving from the bottom quartile of the income distribution to the top quartile. That’s a jump.⁸
Meditation specifically has also been the subject of many scientific studies:
A regular sitting practice has been shown to enhance concentration, lower blood pressure, and improve sleep. It is used to treat chronic pain, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Meditators develop valuable insights into their personality, behaviors, and relationships, making it easier to recognize and change past conditioning and counterproductive views that make life difficult. They have a greater awareness and sensitivity to others, which is enormously helpful at work and in personal relationships. The calming and relaxing effects of meditation also translate into increased emotional stability when confronting the inevitable stresses of life. … Fully developed meditation skills also give rise to unique and wonderful mental states characterized by physical comfort and pleasure, joy and happiness, deep satisfaction, and profound inner peace. … A fully Awake, fully conscious human being has the love, compassion, and energy to make change for the better whenever it’s possible, the equanimity to accept what can’t be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.⁴
Clearly, a lot of spiritual experiences can be considered very positive from the perspective of our pragmatic criterion. But note that among the reports above, there were also acknowledgements that sometimes, in some communities, with certain practices, the spiritual experiences produced bad fruit.
Consider the following as an elaboration on such negative experiences.
Whether one accepts the historically and culturally widespread explanation of invasive spirits or prefers the modern Western materialist rejection of such explanations’ tenability, the transcultural character of the experience of possession behavior is impossible to evade. … Studies have shown “an altered neurophysiology” during many possession states. While neurophysiological studies cannot determine whether possession phenomena derive from “an invading alien being” or from other psychological factors, clearly neurophysiological changes, including hyperarousal, do frequently occur. Incidents of possession on a notable scale have also been documented, although Westerners may tend to attribute these to mass hysteria, including in earlier Western history. …
In a number of diverse cultures where it has been observed in the modern world, spirit possession sometimes yields superhuman strength that makes restraint difficult or impossible and often yields “violent thrashing” or destructiveness (sometimes requiring isolation), including at times self-laceration. For example, among traditional !Kung bushmen, younger and less experienced trancers have to be restrained from injuring themselves or others; they are known for grabbing live coals and smearing them on their bodies, contact with fire from one to five seconds producing burns. … In many African societies, spirit possession drives the person to live in the forest, to jump into fire, or to use sharp objects to hurt oneself. According to one report, a possessed child being exorcised of an ancestor spirit hurled “a huge burning log from the fire place” at the prophets, who dodged it and expelled the spirit.⁹
While I am cautious of judging experiences in other cultures, our pragmatic criterion, which considers whether spiritual experiences contributes to human flourishing, would suggest these latter experiences are rather negative and undesirable.
To conclude this part, I acknowledge that the pragmatic criterion is not a silver bullet that always produces clear-cut results. For example, coming back to the Indian man with a dagger in his heart, what should we think of his feat? It is not clear whether it contributes to or detracts from human flourishing. There is no simple ‘good’ or ‘bad’ evaluation here. Reality is complex, and the pragmatic criterion is not a detailed map that conclusively labels everything; it is rather like a shaky compass that points in a general direction.
While acknowledging that reality is complex does not reduce this criterion to uselessness, it does, however, suggest that the criterion has limitations, and could use the help of a second perspective to evaluate spiritual experiences from.
2 The second criterion I propose for evaluating spiritual experiences is again rather simple and sensible on the surface, but needs quite a bit of elaboration to make it practical. I ask: Do the spiritual experiences in question lead us into a greater understanding of reality, into deeper truth?
Whereas the first, pragmatic, criterion was rather subjective, in the sense that it focused on the experiential life outcomes that spiritual experiences produce, this second criterion complements it, by taking a more objective perspective, in the sense that it attempts to lay hold of ultimate reality, of truth.
But how do we determine whether our understanding of reality is growing or not? We can’t simply equate our preconceived notions of reality with ‘truth’ and judge spiritual experiences by them — that denies too easily that these experiences may provide new insights into reality. Nor should we too quickly change our beliefs about reality based on spiritual experiences — that would place too much importance on phenomena that we saw can produce contradictory truth-claims.
The age-old question thus remains: how do we know what is true?
Modernity has lead us to believe that it is quite straightforward: truth is what we see when we objectively look at reality through empirical observation. Any truth claims that are not falsifiable, replicable and generalizable are false or at least meaningless. The statements “I feel peace”, “I experienced Ultimate Reality” and “I met God” are not provable through scientific experimentation, and are therefore subjective, personal belief statements, not ‘true’ because not verifiable. Spiritual experiences are therefore always meaningless and dismissed out of hand.
Postmodernity objects that we cannot objectively look at reality at all. All that we can really be sure of is our own sense-data. The world that I construct in my mind based on my sense-data may be radically different from someone else’s, which again may be radically different from external reality (if that even exists). We can therefore make no universal truth claims, and all truth is subjective, whether I claim that I met God or that the earth is round. Every spiritual experience therefore leads to truth, though this truth is possibly only valid for the person having the experience.
Neither modernity’s nor postmodernity’s perspective helps us much forward in evaluating spiritual experiences. In both cases, they are deemed to have little to say about reality beyond our personal experience.
But more problematically, I believe neither perspective fully captures what happens when we pursue truth. We must explore this a little bit more before returning to the truth criterion for evaluating spiritual experiences.
Postmodernism is correct in its critique of modernity. Modernity has been overconfident in claiming that through the scientific method we can simply work our way up from empirical data to confident and objective statements about external reality.
Consider how we actually do science, in contrast to the way we believe we do science. Philosopher of science Bertrand Russell writes:
In arriving at a scientific law there are three main stages: the first consists of observing the significant facts; the second in arriving at a hypothesis which, if it is true, would account for the facts; the third in deducing from this hypothesis consequences which can be tested by observation.¹⁵
This appears a very clear and objective process. But is the reality of science as clear and objective?
- To start, what constitutes “significant facts” is a matter of personal judgement. A good scientist is someone who is able to identify significant facts — a good problem — from all the random facts that are lying around. The scientist senses a rational coherence lying behind seemingly incoherent data, and, based on some hints, they have a sound intuition about the shape a potential solution may take. Taking a leap of faith, the scientist pursues the problem, risking that their intuition is wrong and that they will waste years of research. Einstein described it this way: “The supreme task of the physicist is the search for those highly universal laws from which a picture of the world can be obtained by pure deduction. There is no logical path leading to these laws. They are only to be reached by intuition, based upon something like an intellectual love.”¹⁵
- Russell’s second step, “arriving at a hypothesis”, is equally much based on intuition. There are no logical rules, no fixed procedures for devising a hypothesis. It is a leap of imagination that produces a vision of coherence in the “significant facts” — a new hypothesis. This typically happens after long contemplation. Einstein reflected on this aspect of the scientific method, writing that “the mechanics of discovery are neither logical nor intellectual. It’s a sudden illumination, almost a rapture.”¹⁵ “Eureka!” shouted Archimedes, running through the streets naked.
- Russell’s final step is the verification of a hypothesis, “tested by observation”. A true hypothesis will indeed prove itself in subsequent experience, often in all kinds of unexpected ways. Yet all the time experiments produce anomalous data that contradict theory, data which is mostly disregarded for various reasons. Only if the scientist believes these anomalies are “significant facts” will they be pursued and will the cycle be repeated. The old theory is typically only abandoned when a more intellectually and aesthetically pleasing theory is proposed that accounts for more of the facts. Einstein’s theories for example were accepted after much debate based on their beauty and completeness — experimental validation came only much later.¹⁴
So it appears that there is a good deal of personal intuition and appreciation — dare I say subjectivity? — involved in the scientific process.
Does that make science useless? Of course not. I do not want to suggest that what I described is wrong. But we should not pretend it is completely objective — it is much more an art than is commonly appreciated.
Postmodernism, however, draws the radical conclusion that we cannot obtain any objective knowledge about the external world at all. One can only be really sure of one’s own existence and sense-data, nothing else. Such radical doubt, however, does not make sense of our day-to-day experiences.
If the world we construct in our minds can be so radically different from external reality, how to explain our ability to survive? We could indeed assume that we are living in the Matrix, kept alive by robots that harvest our life-energy, but then why not make the arguably simpler assumption that we are actually doing quite alright at interpreting our sense-data regarding reality?
In contrast to modernity and postmodernity’s perspectives, I suggest we understand knowledge and how it relates to reality as follows. Knowledge is not what we plainly and objectively see as true. Knowledge is also not completely divorced from reality, subjectively constructed in the mind. Rather, knowledge is a personal faith commitment to truth claims about reality, made for good reasons, and with the intent of objectivity.
The intuitive and imaginative leaps we make from our sense-data to truth claims constitute personal faith commitments. As post-modernism shows, they are constructs in our minds. But these can be made for good reasons, I believe. Empirical science indeed often provides extremely good reasons for making a commitment to a truth claim. But other experiences of life must also be accounted for and not simply dismissed as subjective. Those experiences, such as spiritual ones, may supply important data, potentially providing good reasons for committing to certain truth claims.
And these commitments should be made with the intent of objectivity — believing them to be objectively true — though understanding that we are not infallibly objective. Intent of objectivity implies that this is not a blind, once-and-for-all commitment, but that further experiences will be sought to confirm or invalidate the truth claims.
This perspective breaks down the sharp objective-subjective distinctions that plague our Western world and acknowledges what really happens when we do science. It offers a more nuanced understanding of the ways we can pursue truth critically without ultimately letting go of reality.
I suggest it is very helpful to apply the scientific method, with this model of knowledge in mind, to all aspects of life, including our spirituality.
Returning to the truth criterion we are contemplating here: How do we evaluate whether spiritual experiences lead us into a greater understanding of truth?
I once read an interview with a formerly atheist Belgian teenager, who spoke of the following spiritual experience:
Reading the first verse of the Qur’an, I felt as if God was really speaking to me.¹⁹
This experience supported the truth claim that God speaks through the Qur’an and therefore that Islam is the way of God. So the teenager converted to Islam.
How do we evaluate whether his experience indeed led this teenager into deeper truth?
From what I discussed earlier, it is clear that our intuitions play an important role in our pursuit of the truth. They influence the kind of facts we find significant and the kind of truth claims that we can imagine or choose to accept (commit to).
These intuitions of course don’t come out of nowhere — they reflect our worldview and are the result of all the forces that have shaped us throughout our lives: the communities we have been part of, the traditions we have been educated in, the experiences we have encountered, the decisions we have made.
Many people are unaware of their worldview in the same way that people who wear glasses are usually unaware of them. People don’t look at their glasses; they look at the world, through their glasses. Our worldviews and intuitions are often similarly unseen and left unexamined. This can make us blind to the parts of reality that do not conform to our subconscious worldview assumptions, the parts of reality that we do not find intuitively plausible.
As I noted in the beginning, our basic intuitions about the world have been deeply shaped by Hume’s naturalist and anti-spiritual assumptions. If we uncritically live within such a naturalist worldview, we will never discover spiritual realities (if they exist). They are simply excluded by assumption, although one may encounter puzzling anomalies (so-called miracles for example).
Of course, the same may be true for any worldview. In early modernity for example, scientists had to bravely battle some of the mistaken assumptions that dominated in that Christian world.
But, again, the currently prevailing intuitions and assumptions in the West are deeply naturalist. Since I argued that these emerged out of contingent historical developments in philosophy and theology, we may need to be critical of them.
That is the point of this whole article: to propose a reconsideration of the spiritual (and our naturalist intuitions). I suggest we dare to take a harder look at the anomalies that present themselves to our naturalist intuitions. Actually, to even actively seek them out. And then, to seriously consider whether they constitute “significant facts” or not. If they do, we must pick up the courage to imagine (or more likely, borrow) a hypothesis, an updated worldview, that accounts for those facts, and test it out in real life, to see whether it indeed makes more sense of the world.
This is obviously no small request. Reconsidering one’s worldview may change everything. The young Belgian who converted to Islam allowed his experience to challenge his worldview, and came out with a radically different one. It shook up his life significantly.
Let me finally try to answer the question of how we can apply the truth criterion to evaluate spiritual experiences. How do we evaluate for example whether the Belgian teenager’s experience led him into deeper truth?
First, I believe that the immediate question we must respond to when we encounter a spiritual experience is not whether the experience reveals truth or not. Rather, the first question that poses itself is whether the experience challenges our worldview or not. The truth question is played out in the longer run.
If a spiritual experience does not challenge our worldview, then we obviously must not change anything. We have a robust explanation for the experience (just-so stories don’t count), which we can provisionally call true. Its truthfulness is tied to the truthfulness of our worldview, which is also provisional. Future “significant facts” may challenge us to come up with a different worldview, which may demand a different explanation for the spiritual experience.
On the other hand, if the spiritual experience does challenge our worldview, if it constitutes an anomaly, we have two options. The first option is to dismiss the experience as not significant, reasoning that “we will find a natural explanation for this in the future,” or that “it’s all psychological” without really looking into it. Now, I’m not saying that this is not a valid strategy oftentimes — we are finite beings after all and can’t follow up on every little datum that puzzles us. But we must make sure that we are aware of that when we do dismiss anomalies, and that we do not always dismiss anomalies simply to protect our worldview.
The second, more interesting response to an anomaly, is that we travel down the rabbit hole that the experience opens up, and see where it leads us. We may need to update our worldview, or even scratch it and adopt a radically different one. Conversion, this is called, and it happens all the time.
People convert from one religion to another. People convert from one political ideology to another. People convert from one scientific paradigm to another (I’m not dramatizing here: rejecting a Ptolemaic cosmology for a Copernican one, or substituting Einstein’s theory of relativity for Newtonian physics is not for the faint of heart).
Recalling my definition of knowledge and the scientific method, I do suggest we make these worldview changes only for good reasons though. I am arguing that we be more open to have our worldview challenged, but not that we change our worldview with every turn of the wind.
The young Belgian atheist let his anomalous experience challenge his worldview, he traveled down the rabbit hole, and came out a Muslim convert. Whether or not his experience led him into deeper truth is a question he and each one of us can only answer from within our own worldviews, which we provisionally hold to be true, though, again, with objective intent.
In conclusion, the truth criterion which attempts to decide whether or not a spiritual experience leads us into greater truth only provides answers on a provisional basis, as it is strongly tied to our worldview. Our estimation of the experience may change in the future, if and when our worldview shifts.
But assuming that we regularly allow our worldview to be challenged by truth claims that don’t fit our worldview — not just those emerging from spiritual experiences — there are truth claims about the spiritual that millions of people have been making for thousands of years — and assuming that we always try to make sense of as many of the facts as possible, we can only hope that we will increasingly understand reality and whether or not certain experiences lead into deeper truth or not.
The two criteria I proposed for evaluating spiritual experiences make a lot of sense. Truth and human flourishing are important, and spiritual experiences can be appreciated from those perspectives. But I have also indicated how things are not as straightforward as we would like them to be. These criteria will not give us the final word on spiritual experiences.
All of us are on a life-long journey of experiencing (in the broadest sense of the word) and trying to make sense of our experiences. But if we shut out a whole range of experiences, deliberately or not, because they threaten our worldview, we settle for an impoverished view on reality.
I don’t mean to say that we have to go around and try every possible experience that exists. I don’t think that is the way forward, or even healthy.
I would suggest though that we start by listening to people with a different worldview and with different experiences of the world. The atheist needs to listen to the Hindu, the Christian to the Buddhist, the New Ager to the Muslim. Not because all these worldviews are equally true, or because they equally contribute to human flourishing. Rather, because these conversations may highlight “significant facts” that we have not yet considered and that we need to wrestle with. The criteria I have proposed can help us in this process and will allow us to then make more informed decisions about which truth claims to commit to and which experiences to pursue.
Finally, if we are confident of our worldview, we should not feel threatened by exposing ourselves to alternative viewpoints. We may even be able to help the other see more of the truth, and to grow in human flourishing. If we are not confident of our worldview, however, I suggest it is even more important to wrestle long and hard with our perspective on reality and that of others.
So let me now end this long piece by telling you what I think the spiritual is, as a way to start this inter-worldview conversation.
The Nature of the Spiritual
Based on my personal experience of the world — everything that I have read, seen, felt, heard, thought, spoken, touched, tasted and smelled — in dialogue with people of similar and different worldview, I have made a personal faith commitment to the following truth claims, with objective intent; that is, I believe them to be objectively true. This of course does not mean that there are no anomalies left for me to explore.
The ultimate spiritual reality is a person. It is the Father Jesus referred to, whom we commonly call God. The Father, who is also sometimes described as a mother, loves the world fully and unconditionally. We are his creation — though perhaps not in as plain a way as traditionally imagined — and he desires to live in eternal fellowship with us as his children.
The oppression and bondage and shame that we experience in our lives deeply grieve him, and he continuously reaches out to us, to bring healing and reconciliation, to restore us to fellowship with him and each other. This reaching out climaxed in the Incarnation: God, who is the ultimate spiritual reality, became flesh and was called Jesus of Nazareth. It is the supreme example of the natural and spiritual overlapping.
Walking on earth, Jesus embodied the ultimate virtue: enemy love — the kind of love that causes one to give all of oneself, to the point of death, for the good of one’s enemies. And he led us into the deepest truth, revealing the character of ultimate reality. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” he said. To look at Jesus is to know what God is like.
Continuing his program of reconciliation today, God sends his Spirit to dwell in those who draw near to him and invite him in, and the Spirit produces good fruit in them. Yet the Spirit’s work is found everywhere that good things are. By God’s grace, all have the capacity to experience him, and every positive spiritual experience is a good gift, though not all such experiences lead into greater fellowship with him; some even lead away from it.
Evil is equally much a spiritual reality, which cultivates the oppression and bondage and shame that are an integral part of our experience in this world. Its goal is death and destruction. In a perplexing way, God demonstrated his victory over Evil when Jesus rose from the grave, and pledged that love and justice will have the last word, not death.
That is roughly what I believe the spiritual, and more generally, reality, consists of. Again, this is based on my personal struggle with what I and others have experienced.
If this makes me a barbarian, then let it be so.
Sources
- For David Hume’s influential essay on miracles and barbarians, see Of Miracles.
- For two works on some of the changes the West has undergone in the past 500 years, see The Swerve and A Secular Age. For a shorter ‘field guide’ to the latter voluminous work, see How (Not) to Be Secular.
- The quotes by Martin Luther King Jr. (first and second quote), Mahatma Gandhi, C.S. Lewis, Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad can be found in their respective ((auto)biographical) works. Malala Yousafzai’s quote comes from an interview with ABC News.
- For a fascinating brain science-cum-Buddhist perspective on meditation, see The Mind Illuminated.
- For a classic in psychological literature, reflecting on a wide range of spiritual experiences, see The Varieties of Religious Experience. Although the book provided, among others, the quote on Christian mysticism, I used a different translation for this quote. For a re-appraisal of the book in light of Freud’s challenges to religious experience, see The Authenticity of Faith — The Varieties and Illusions of Religious Experience.
- For a modern psychologist’s perspective on mystical transcendence, see this TED talk.
- For an open-minded anthropological and psychological account of experiences in the highly spiritual Christian Vineyard movement, see When God Talks Back.
- For an illusionist impressively imitating a Christian faith-healing service, see Derren Brown’s Netflix show Miracle. For an open discussion between Brown and a Christian radio show host, see this podcast.
- For two large volumes compiling hundreds of miracle claims — mainly Christian — from the Majority World and the West, modern and pre-modern, see Miracles.
- A Pew survey in 2006 on Pentecostal Christians in 10 countries suggests that among this one denomination of this one religion alone, more than two hundred million people claim to have “witnessed divine healing”.
- For Paul’s list of virtues, which he called the fruit of the Spirit, see his letter to the church in Galatia.
- For cross-cultural research on virtues, see Character Strengths and Virtues.
- For a treatise on distinguishing between spiritual experiences with God from other ones, see Religious Affections, written by one of the leading figures in the Great Awakening.
- For a profound work on epistemology — the theory of knowing — and its challenges to the hegemony of positivist science, see Personal Knowledge.
- For a later work exploring some of the main ideas of Personal Knowledge in the context of religious pluralism, see The Gospel in a Pluralist Society.
- For a description of various ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies, see Practical Theology and Qualitative Research.
- For a description of critical-realism, the epistemology that I describe in this article and that builds on Personal Knowledge, see The New Testament and the People of God.
- For an analysis of various worldviews, including the modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern (!), see Transforming Worldviews.
- The interview with the young Belgian convert to Islam can be found here, though only in Dutch.
