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Clashing worldviews

by Greg Krehbiel on 21 November 2003

If you read that Harry Potter article I linked yesterday, there are references to two competing worldviews — a secular, allegedly scientific worldview, which tries to reduce everything to particular causes and facts, and a spiritual, allegedly magical worldview, which claims that the realities in this world are some sort of representation of another reality. The clash between these two ideologies is very capably evaluated in Tom Howard’s Chance or the Dance, which is one of those books everybody ought to read.

In reflecting on this conflict yesterday afternoon, my inner skeptic kept pointing me back to evidence. The “scientific” worldview has proved itself remarkably useful, e.g., in advancing technology. This is strong evidence for the validity of the scientific view. But at the same time, the scientific worldview could be accused of creating in-human monstrosities, like communism and Naziism. (I don’t know if those accusations are valid, but they have been made by serious, intelligent people so they shouldn’t be dismissed with a shrug or mocking laugh.)

But where is the evidence for the spiritual worldview? (I don’t mean to turn this into a discussion about ghosts!) It seems to me that the evidence for the scientific worldview is all around us. I’m typing on some of it, and you’re reading off some of it. It’s hard, tangible, clear stuff. It’s fairly undeniable that this worldview has done remarkable stuff. And it seems to me that the evidence for the spiritual worldview is all soft stuff, e.g., that a strictly secular understanding of the world doesn’t take account of the full range of human experience.

This leaves me unsettled. If all the evidence for the spiritual worldview is psychological stuff — that is, if we can’t point to some tangible thing where a spiritual worldview explains things better — then it would be easy to write off all this psychological stuff as leftovers from a primitive past — the challenge being how to deal with the odd urges of the vestigial coconut in the best (most scientific) way.

I suppose one piece of tangible evidence is the talk about the links between spirituality and healing — you know, that people who get prayed for really do recover faster than people who don’t, etc., and that religious people are generally healthier. And then there are miracle claims. But I find most of these just silly, and it’s a rather tough sell for that inner skeptic I was talking about. “Well, sure, 98.2 percent of these miracle claims are demonstrably false, but what about the other 1.8?” Give me a break!

The old skeptic gets really fired up while reading stuff like that Harry Potter article. It’s so easy to try to correlate a spiritual worldview with all kinds of silly and demonstrably goofy stuff — ghost stories, sprites and elves, and yes, alchemy.

So where is the solid, tangible, clear evidence that a spiritual worldview is a better explanation of the world than the scientific? I suppose that we’re left with something analogous to the wave-particle conundrum, viz., that the scientific worldview is better for some things (like computers, medicines and space ships) while the spiritual worldview is better for other things (like overall mental health, well-being and relationships). This has the uncomfortable sound of something the local United Methodist minister might say, but what’s the alternative?

2003-11-21  »  Greg Krehbiel