19
votes
New research confirms substantial majority of Scottish people are not religious and not spiritual
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- 6 out of 10 Scots are not religious and not spiritual, says new research
- Published
- Aug 14 2018
- Word count
- 514 words
I very much dislike the atheist tendency to conflate all spirituality with belief in the supernatural, and this just seems particularly egregious.
I consider myself “agnostic” because that means:
To me, Atheism seems like an absolute statement, as is Deism. There are no absolutes to me in this realm, this is all unprovable... like the techie-deism: simulation theory.
However, I do somehow feel the concept of “spiritualality” - and I have no idea how to put that into words, or how it makes sense with my other beliefs.
Sorry for all of that background, but I felt it was important to ask my question: what does “spirituality” mean to you?
This is a common misunderstanding about "atheism". As far as atheists see it, atheism is nothing more than the lack of a belief in a deity. It's a gap, a void, a nothing. It's not a positive assertion in and of itself; it is the lack of a positive assertion. As an awkward analogy, it's like someone who does not go horse-riding. There's nothing in that situation to say that the person hates horse-riding or disapproves of it; they merely don't ride horses themself. It's a lack of activity, rather than a statement about that activity. Similarly, atheism is merely a lack of belief in deities, rather than a statement about belief in deities or a statement about deities.
There are two types of atheist: agnostic atheists and gnostic atheists. Agnostic atheists lack a belief in deities because they consider that knowledge about the existence or non-existence of deities falls outside the ability of humans to know. In short, humans just don't know whether there is or is not a god or gods, so there's no point believing in it/them until such knowledge turns up. Gnostic atheists lack a belief in deities because they know there is no god. They go that extra step and make a positive declaration that gods do not exist.
Agnostic atheism is also sometimes called weak atheism, and gnostic atheism is sometimes called strong atheism.
A lot of people conflate these two subsets of atheism and think that all atheists are positively saying "God does not exist!" Only some atheists say that. Most atheists are saying "We don't believe in a god because we don't know if one exists".
There was a handy blog page, complete with a grid, that I used to link in discussions like this - but that page has been deleted. Here's a similar grid, laying out the two axes of atheism-theism and agnosticism-gnosticism, and the four resulting categories.
But isn't your definition also absolute? Suppose god does exist. Perhaps they could decide, out of pure whimsy, to provide indisputable evidence that they're god (indisputable because, well, they're god). That possibility is fundamentally at odds with your definition of agnosticism.
To me, atheism is a statement about belief: maybe god exists, but I doubt it.
Are there any natural aspects of spirituality?
"Supernatural" is defined as something "attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature" or something that "cannot be explained by scientific understanding or the laws of nature. Examples often include characteristics of or relating to entities and concepts such as ghosts, angels, gods, souls and spirits, non-material beings, or anything else considered beyond nature like magic or miracles."
Is there any aspect of spirituality which is not supernatural, and which therefore falls within scientific understanding and within the laws of nature?
According to wikipedia, spirituality is:
Not defined by the supernatural at all, unless you're going to reduce things like "wanting meaning" and "desiring goodness" to "believing in the supernatural", in which case 99% of people become supernaturally inclined.
Incidentally, I'd argue that unwavering belief in the scientific enterprise and the search for verifiable truth has become a form of spirituality for many people today.
Well... that definition you quoted does include the phrase "such as a belief in a supernatural (beyond the known and observable) realm".
But, you complained that we non-believers conflate spirituality with the supernatural. So I asked you to provide some aspects of spirituality which are not supernatural. If we're wrong to think that "spirituality = supernatural belief", that implies there are some non-supernatural, or natural (within the laws of nature), aspects of spirituality. What are those non-supernatural aspects of spirituality?
That's a total misunderstanding of "belief in the scientific enterprise". There is nothing "spiritual" about saying "show me the evidence". In fact, it's quite the opposite of spirituality, which seems to embrace non-evidential things like souls and magic and reincarnation and psychic energy and various things like that. A person who believes in science will ask for proof of these things. That's totally at odds with spirituality. Belief in science is almost the antithesis of spirituality.
Belief in science is a worldview, or a philosophy, but it's not a spiritual belief.
You're messing up the inclusions here. Belief in the supernatural is a spiritual belief, a spiritual belief is not a belief in the supernatural.
I gave you several examples of non-supernatural spiritual beliefs, for example a belief that life has meaning (not necessarily inherent, or divine-given, or objective), or that goodness is worth pursing. Neither of those are scientific beliefs, yet are helps by the vast majority of people. You could argue that because of that they qualify as "supernatural", but that would just reinforce my point that the "findings" of this article are bunk.
Why do you want the evidence and why do think it is worth pursuing? Most people will say something like "because I want to seek the truth". And that's a spiritual belief.
You're also conflating "belief in science", which I assume means acceptance of the scientific method as valid epistemological framework, with the motivations people have for pursing science, which is what I am discussing.
I don't think these things that you frame as "spiritual" are spiritual. I collect the following counter-argument from the Wikipedia article on spirituality:
but I think this is a misuse of the term "spirituality" that derobes it from any meaning at all. Personally I'd avoid such usage given the ambiguity it bears and causes. And, quoting another sentence from the same paragraph,
it seems to me that I have some decent company in thinking so.
Tangentially, that life has meaning and that good is worth pursuing has quite decent and totally rational arguments for them:
Life is all we have, so it's the sum of all meanings
If everybody pursued good, nobody would hurt
Pursuing good makes you happy
&c. I don't want to turn this into a discussion on this though.
You and I have very different definitions of "spiritual". As @cadadr says, I think your use of the word "spiritual" in this way is so broad as to be nearly meaningless.
I think I'll leave this conversation on that note. We don't seem to have a common basis on which to discuss this topic.
All of those things that were listed in the definition scream supernatural to me. An ultimate or sacred meaning implies that some conscious entity put us here. Religious experiences are obviously supernatural in nature, and I'm not sure what an inner dimension is, but it sounds supernatural. Personal growth doesn't really relate to spirituality to me at all. Wanting to get better at playing the piano or talking to people is a matter of study and practice, not prayer or spirituality.
Meaning does not have to be ultimate or sacred and I don't agree that implies a "conscious entity put us here" in any case.
yes
Your subjective conscious experience, I would guess
No one knows, probably material in nature though
Why grow? Why strive? Try justifying these things from a strict scientific perspective :)
No one is arguing otherwise.
I don't think that concepts fall into a strict separation between scientific and spiritual. It doesn't seem right to classify an entire field of study like metaphysics or ethics as spiritual simply because they're not science. I feel entirely confident saying that there are likely some things that science can not definitively settle despite not considering myself a spiritual purpose. I don't mean in the sense of proving whether god or ghosts exist, I mean that questions like "Does evil exist" are not within the realm of science. They're not supernatural, and I wouldn't consider them spiritual. They're philosophical in nature, something that can be mused over and argued about, but probably never definitely settled.
I think when most people describe themselves as spiritual though, it means they feel some sort of supernatural connection, or feeling of some entity greater than themselves (again, supernatural), not just that they believe that there questions unanswerable by science.
With that logic (assuming that you refer to it being material in the mind in the form of neurons &c) anything is material, including the entirety of possible supernatural beings, thoughts and concepts.
It makes me happy. It doesn't get more empirical than that, IMHO: if you improve your life as you wish, you are happier.
For the sake of the article, let me introduce the term "apatheism". It's the equivalent of a philosophical collective shrug at the relevance of deities and their existence or lack thereof.
Once you accept the premise that science and religion or spirituality constitute non-overlapping magisteria, and that ordinary morality is constructed independently of either magisterium on a pragmatic basis, it's easy to let go of futile discussion and just get on with life.
The perennial warfare over unprovables benefits no one. We're provably not rational animals, and engaging in dipolar arguments oversimplifies life. There are drugs that cause replicable "spiritual" experiences, so we know that people can have real-seeming and believable encounters with deity; there are equally powerful "revelations" that God and the supernatural don't exist (and I've had a couple).
Trying to establish either pole of belief as the good and righteous one ends up denying the lived experience of the other, in ways that obliterate the objectively good value of compassion.
[Let me note here, that as the UU minister in the Religioustolerance.org article indicated, not caring about religious beliefs isn't the same thing as apathy about their moral implications.]