The fact is that science is not a fact!
“the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
— Muriel Rukeyser (Poet & Political Activist, 1968)
I find myself surrounded by a diverse group of people who have always empowered me with broad perspectives. For me, it’s a blessing in disguise as I have abstracted many lessons in my day-to-day interactions. The beauty of it is that I often find myself asking the questions about contradictions. One such contradiction is science v/s spirituality. History has also always juxtaposed scientific and spiritual beliefs. While my friends always have good points to defend why science is ultimate or why spirituality is supreme, I struggle to pick a team. In my experience, I think I haven’t ever looked at them as distinct but so close to each other.
A common mistake many of us make is to take science as cold hard facts, while that’s not the truth. There was indeed a time when scientist considered their findings as the ultimate truth. But the irony of ego is that it can be shattered just as easily. There were times when it was believed that the earth was the centre of the universe until Galileo hypothesised otherwise and said that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun which is the centre of our universe. For his insightful discoveries he was awarded with a death sentence by the almighty church. But today it is the well accepted truth that anyone barely argues about. Over the ages, in their curiosity to know and understand more scientists allowed more than positivists perception into the boundaries of science to accommodate philosophy, psychology and sociology. Karl Popper’s idea of falsifiability dictates scientific discoveries today. For those who are unaware of the concept, Popper explained any hypothesis based on observations, such as “all swans are white”, is scientifically accepted as the truth until a black swan is discovered. This means that all scientific discoveries are presented as falsifiable statements and remains a widely accepted truth until proven otherwise. A modern day scientist, especially those belonging to the communities of critical thinkers, constructivists and interpretivists acknowledge that the scientific discoveries might not be the ultimate truth.
Moving on to spirituality, spiritual thinkers have often considered science an enemy. Just to be clear, spirituality and religion have their differences and not always overlap. But spirituality is deeply embedded in almost every religion around the world. A well-acknowledged spiritual leader Swami Vivekanada said “when the God is the end and the world is only the means to attain the end, spirituality begins”. So as I understand, spirituality just like science appears to be a search for the ultimate truth. So if we take a moment and abstract the objective of science and spirituality, everyone is looking for answers and the answer is apparently the ultimate truth. Every man here is just curious to find what, why, when and how of existence. As a scientists who preaches spiritual enlightenment, I say why not assist each other to take a leap to the end. One way to do that is to shed the ego, pause the judgement and ask the other side why you believe what you believe.
