Why is (modern) science often pitted against (ancient) spirituality, when both science & spirituality are fundamentally rational?
I don’t believe science and spirituality are ever really pitted against each other. Now, if you mean science and religion, that’s a different story. Religion is the formalized and dogmatic institution that encompasses spirituality. And through being formalized and dogmatic, religion is often seen to be at odds with science because they both look for the same things, albeit through distinctly different routes. Religion requires faith. Faith does not require proof; it only requires belief. In this way, it is not rational because it can never be proved nor disproved. This does not mean that religion is unreasonable, it’s just not rational. Science, on the other hand, requires no belief or faith. It only requires facts that have been acquired through experimentation, observation or the extrapolation of such empirically derived data into hypotheses and theories. Science, therefore, is seen to be rational because it can either be proved or disproved through the scientific method, which is a
I cannot accept that spirituality is fundamentally rational. It may be right or it may be wrong, but it is not based on rational deduction, it is based on faith. From premises based on faith, you can make rational deductions. But those initial premises are not rational, so that no deductions from them can be called rational. And what has happened over time is that *some* faith based statements made in the past have been found to be in conflict with rationality based science. For example, it was assumed that the planets, which were in the heavens (God’s place) *had* to travel in circles, which were the perfect shape. The logic behind this now seems strange – what is a circle perfect, and few now think of Gos as “up there” – but it was believed as a matter of faith for centuries. A lot of things which were taken as faith in the past have been shown to be opinion invested with a spurious infallibility. Inevitably, when such opinion meets science, there will be conflict. That does not men
