Science And Spirituality
Jun. 5th, 2023 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo Just as I feel awkward about using the word "God" because of its bastard associations, so I flinch from "spirituality". I think it's a false category. We use "science" of the study of material things and "spirituality" of the study of non-material things, but that's only in common speech- which lags behind the actual state of our knowledge. Now that we've established that there's no such thing as matter the distinction has become meaningless.
Science and spirituality are in a continuum. No, scrub that; what they are is the same thing. No-one thought of making a distinction before the 17th century- and it's only in the 19th century that the mud and spit barrier turned into a Berlin Wall, complete with watchtowers and shaming spotlights. The older clever guys- from the earliest times up until Newton (who was not only a "natural scientist" but also a Biblical scholar and alchemist) were simply after knowledge- and her sister Wisdom. They didn't make divisions, they knew mathematics was at the basis of everything- and as germane to the study of angels as the study of angles. I think the word they'd have been comfortable using of themselves was "philosopher"...
Science and spirituality are in a continuum. No, scrub that; what they are is the same thing. No-one thought of making a distinction before the 17th century- and it's only in the 19th century that the mud and spit barrier turned into a Berlin Wall, complete with watchtowers and shaming spotlights. The older clever guys- from the earliest times up until Newton (who was not only a "natural scientist" but also a Biblical scholar and alchemist) were simply after knowledge- and her sister Wisdom. They didn't make divisions, they knew mathematics was at the basis of everything- and as germane to the study of angels as the study of angles. I think the word they'd have been comfortable using of themselves was "philosopher"...
