I can understand when spirituality is driven by fanatical religions, mythical stories and powerful religious organisations ... and people don't like it. Fine. But what I am talking about is secular spirituality that is free of any cultural or regional or historical baggage. Why people should have such an emotional issue with it is not clear.
Unfortunately, there's partially the issue of being tarred with the same brush to an extent, but there is an underlying issue. If there's no independent means by which we can verify these spiritual claims, then in order to accept your right to claim truth for your understanding, we have to extend the same courtesy to those with more hateful or immediately apparently damaging spiritual claims. On the evidentiary level, where is the difference between your spiritual claim that all life is interconnected on a non-physical level and the Westboro Baptist spiritual claim that homosexuality is vile? You aren't expecting political regulation to enforced your claim in the same way they are, but the claims themselves have to be afforded the same respect because they are functionally identical claims: spiritual claims with no evidentiary backing or basis.
In fact, we need not even call it spirituality. It is just philosophy.
It's not just philosophy, it's making claims about reality which is the realm of science.
It tries to explain many aspects of human life. It is a hypothesis or conjecture like so many others that we accept readily as possible. It explains life & death, NDE's, morality and the many complexities that science does not explain except as random or coincidence.
It explains life and death, but so does Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Jainism, Norse Mythology, Egyptian Mythology and Lord of the Rings. None of which has any independent support. You aren't expecting or 'demanding' that we accept that you are right, and I appreciate that live and let live attitude, really I do.
What I can't understand, though, is why you accept that it's true in the absence of any of the evidence. You have, presumably, some sort of subjective sense that it's right, that it makes sense and 'feels' appropriate, but I have those feelings about things which they evidence contradicts or fails to support and so I accept that human subjective experience is eminently fallible and follow the evidence. In the absence of evidence, or in those instances where the evidence actively suggests other causes for the effects that you are experience, how do you cleave to your spiritual claims?
It explains the 'why' of life and not just the 'how' that science manages.
Which presumes there is a why. Why do you think there's a why?
Of course, science will argue that there need not be any'why'. But that is a cop out and not an argument!
Uh.. no, I don't think it is. Nature is uncaring, nature is unswayed by our wants or needs, nature merely is, so far as we can see. 'Why' is presuming a consciousness, because you need to have a 'want' in order to justify a 'why' - otherwise there is simply an inevitable series of cause and effect. (Arguably, from some views, even with the 'why' there is just the inevitable series of cause and effect, but that's a different discussion again).
When leading philosophers and even scientists suggest anything remotely dualistic or non material or in agreement with such philosophies, it is dismissed outright. Why?
Again, i don't think it's dismissed outright, although there is a healthy degree of scepticism after all this time. It's dismissed because, on investigation, there is no justification for the claim beyond 'but we don't have a complete explanation from science'. 'Science doesn't (currently) know' does not inevitably lead to 'therefore metaphysical concept beyond science's remit'. Duality repeatedly falls over because when asked for some evidence for the non-physical part the answer is invariably a variant of 'but you can't explain...' That's not an argument for anything, it's an argument against thinking science has all the answers, which is an argument the overwhelming majority of the scientifically literate aren't making.
As far as evidence is concerned, what evidence do we need for 'Life'? Nobody can deny that Life exists...and no one really knows what it is.
The evidence for life is all the living things - again, that whole tying variation down to neat definitions and classifications, as you suggest, is something of an issue here.
The argument is just that... whether it is something independent of the body or not. We have NDE's to suggest that life (and consciousness) is probably independent of the body.
NDE do not suggest that either life or consciousness are independent of the body, they suggest that extreme conditions in the brain result in extreme sensations or interpretations - that's hardly radical. It requires us to take on face value the subjective account of some of the near death experiences as accurate, whilst ignoring the innumerable instances of human experience in extreme states being unreliable to presume that claims of 'leaving the body behind' have validity. I dream of place I'm not on a regular basis - is that justification for assuming that something of me has actually left my body?
What do scientists have to suggest that life is just a physical process? Any proof?
Notwithstanding that all scientific understanding is provisional... Every reliable understanding we have of the human experience is rooted in physically demonstrable phenomena. When we step into subjective understandings, such as psychological understandings, so the reliability and precision of the understandings plummets precipitously. Science hasn't 'proven' life is just a physical process, and doesn't claim to have done. However, science proceeds on the presumption that life is just a physical process based on the fact that there is ample demonstration of physical phenomena well-linked to the processes of life, and absolutely no support for any claims of non-physical instances.
They will of course, throw the Negative Proof fallacy at me. It is an almost robotic response. That argument is however not correct. So far science only has evidence against specific religious mythology, not against fundamental philosophical issues.
The negative proof fallacy is valid - that it gets thrown around a lot is because people fail to accept the burden of proof lies upon anyone making a claim.
If the philosophical point about Life (and consciousness) being independent of the body is not acceptable, science should be able to prove it wrong.
It's not the obligation of 'science' to disprove a conjecture. The onus is on whomever is making the claim to demonstrate reason why their claim should be accepted, and at that point the details of their claim can be validated or refuted.
If not, accept it as an alternative possibility. What is the problem?!
It is an acceptable alternative possibility, but that's currently all it is, a possibility. In order to elevate it into something that should taken seriously as anything more than an intriguing thought experiment should require some sort of evidence, but instead we have multi-million pound marketing machines selling people 'non-religious spirituality' as an alternative to the multi-million pound military-industrial 'religious spirituality' complex that we've still not effectively gotten a sensible handle on.
O.
