Challenges and Criticisms in the Field of Spirituality, Religiousness, and Health

Research in the field of spirituality, religiousness and health is a comparatively recent scientific enterprise. While the phenomenological study of spirituality and religion within psychology can be dated back to William James’ famous Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University in 1901/02 (James 1985), research in this field within the experimental-quantitative paradigm of psychology and medicine is rather new. In psychology, Allport and Ross began their research on religion and spirituality in 1967 with their classical study on the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic religious motivation and behavior (Allport and Ross 1967). They demonstrated that people with a more intrinsic form of religious motivation were happier and had less prejudices than those with an extrinsic religious motivation. Already this piece of research maps out the problems: being religious might not simply be the same as going to church, and believing in some higher entity or reality must not necessarily involve traditional forms of expression. So how to define and differentiate these various forms of religion and spirituality, and how to operationalise their potentially different, even opposite influence on variables of interest such as health is a pivotal question for establishing and enhancing this research field. Allport and Ross could show that there was a clear non-linear relationship of those constructs to prejudice. Perhaps the same is true for many other relationships like with measures of health?

In 1979 Hardy published his research from his Oxford project: he had collected numerous case reports of religious experiences from all walks of life and demonstrated that such experiences were frequent and important to those who encountered them. (Hardy 1979) But exactly how frequent? Did everybody have such extraordinary and at times even peculiar experiences? Or were they just rare occasions condensed through Hardy’s method of soliciting reports through public channels?

Epidemiological research linking religious involvement with various parameters of health and overall mortality started at the end of the 60s. Levin’s overview of 1987 reviewed as many as 250 studies linking religion – mostly religious attendance – and health and reported positive correlations (Levin and Schiller 1987), but Levin cautioned: most studies were correlative and cross-sectional in design, and the findings more a byproduct of a large epidemiologic fishing expedition rather than the execution of a systematically implemented research program (Levin and Vanderpool 1987; Schiller and Levin 1988).

In sociology, Moberg and Brusek (1978) called for an inclusion of spiritual well-being in quality of life research in 1978. They argued that the neglect of this construct is detrimental, because there might be an important relationship between spiritual and physical well-being. It had not been included so far due to the fact that the scientific community, being a pinnacle of enlightenment and supporting the separation of religion and public affairs was not very interested in the topic, and that, from a methodological point of view, measurement instruments and reliable operationalisations were lacking.

In medicine, cancer researchers started to discover the importance of spirituality at the end of the 90s, when they saw that cancer patients scoring high in spiritual well-being and meaning were also physically better off, even if they were in pain and suffered from manifest cancer (Brady et al. 1999). The first scale to measure spiritual well-being in cancer patients, the spirituality module of the FACIT, was only introduced in 1999. The discussion of the topic in the medical field is still far from consensual with voices calling for an inclusion of spirituality in medical case taking (Anandarajah 2008; Anandarajah et al. 2010; Culliford 2009), and those calling for strict abstinence (Scheurich 2003).

Thus, systematic research in spirituality, religion, and health is a recent affair, and hence, we should not be surprised to meet with a lack of consistency, contradictory approaches and some confusion. We won’t be able to clarify all confusion and solve all problems in this chapter, but we want to lay some ground for a more systematic approach by delineating problems and offering some potential roads out of the quagmire. Here is the roadmap:

We start out by analyzing the historical problem of researching spirituality and health. This has to do with the fact that the scientific enterprise with its implicit allegiance with the enlightenment movement subscribes to a materialistic ontology, at least implicitly and for the majority of actors on the scene (Kohls and Benedikter 2010). Hence the topic of spirituality is seen by many as “unscientific”. Laying this problem open is the first step ahead. Then, we find, many researchers in this field bring in their own implicit personal pet-view of religion and spirituality: either coming from a theocentric perspective starting from the assumption that there is a personal god, or coming from a more Eastern inspired spirituality that there is some form of connectedness. This situation bedevils definitions and approaches. Furthermore, the bulk of research is conducted in the Anglo-American domain, and most researchers in the field seem to start from the assumption that religion and spirituality is something good for human beings and should be brought (back) to them. Hence, we will have to face the problem of implicit positive bias, both regarding publication of negative results that do not fit the bright picture, and regarding conceptualizations that assume always positive and healthy aspects and relationships. We end with the outlook that a more mature and less covert approach, more directly addressing the problems and rather open discourse will help both the impact and the breadth of perception by the research community at large.

As elaborated elsewhere (Walach and Reich 2005): Science, from the eighteenth century onwards, was a prime engine of the enlightenment movement. This demanded a separation of religion and state, individual freedom from ideological bondage, and in its final consequence a science free from any religious sentiments. As had been visible in some cataclysmic historical events, such as the banning of 219 theses, mostly from philosophy, in Paris in 1277 (Hissette 1977), or the burning of Giordano Bruno in 1600 (Yates 1982), or the inquisition against Galileo Galilei in 1616 and 1632 and the demand he should revoke his support for the Copernican model (Fischer 2015; Shea and Artigas 2003): the relationship between science and religion, mostly the Catholic church and its inquisition, had never been easy. The impulse of enlightenment is always a threat to dogmatic teaching, whether it is religious, political, or scientific dogma.

The development of medicine as an academic profession led to an exclusion of ancient traditions of healing by herbalists, wise women and craftsmen-barbers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was accompanied by severe struggles of power and definition of terms that, very often and unfortunately so, associated itself with the inquisition and employed blackmailing of those professionals as witches. This was a process that had its heydays in protestant regions and in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when scientific rationality was already part and parcel of the intellectuals’ world-view (Decker 2005; Easlea 1980; Ginzburg 1988). Thus, the history of medicine is intimately linked to a rejection of non-official forms of (local) religion(s), occultism, esotericism and spirituality. This can still be observed in our modern days, where non-orthodox forms of medicine, such as alternative medicine, are brandished as “esoteric”, “magic”, or “irrational” by representatives of the mainstream orthodoxy (Gorski and Novella 2014; Pratkanis 1995), and the usage of alternative medicine is associated in users with a higher importance they attribute to spirituality and religion (Ellison et al. 2012).

The inherent conservativism of institutionalized religions and many of its representatives was noted by progressive minds, such as the French intellectuals that paved the way to the French revolution, like Rousseau, Diderot and others, up to our modern day politics. The debatedly most influential modern movement in this respect was the neo-positivist Viennese circle around Neurath, Schlick and later Carnap in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century (Smith 1994). With a decidedly social reform agenda that was meant to make a purist scientific worldview, built on the (abstract) principles of logics, relevant for the problems of the time, these philosophers and scientists set out to purify science from all antique costumes and old-fashioned fetters. They started with expelling religion and metaphysics from the realm of an empirical-positivist scientific investigation. They spelled out an explicit prohibition of metaphysics and banned all language from science that was not decidedly empirical or logical. The idea behind this was to ground science in strict observation and its purported objectivity, and use logic as an instrument to decide about the truth value of scientific statements. Although long proven inadequate by the debate within science studies (Laudan 1996; Suppe 1977) – as well as by Carnap himself – this neo-positivistic model of science and its anti-religious and anti-metaphysic stance is still a common topic of textbooks and undergraduate teaching, thus perpetuating the alleged incompatibility of science and religion as well as spirituality. In addition, some authors, like Draper, around the turn of the century, codified their own personal dislike of – Catholic – religion into a historically wrong but very influential conflictual relationship between science and religion. This led to the widely held, even if badly supported, view that science and religion are incompatible, and science has supplanted religion in explaining the world (Principe 2016).

Although also from Vienna and nourished by the same intellectual climate, Karl Raimund Popper developed a competitive model of science, criticizing his colleagues from the Viennese circle for overlooking severe problems (Popper 1976, 1984). But he shared their sentiment about religion and dogmatism. These two models of science, the positivist and the critical-rationalist model with its falsificationist rationale, are still very influential in modern day science. They are being taught and practiced, and with its teaching the implicit stance is being transported as well: the rejection of religious and spiritual topics as potentially valid scientific objectives. Very often they are labeled as “unscientific”, overlooking the fact that there is no such thing as a scientific or unscientific topic, i.e. a topic not worthy of systematic study, but that there are only scientific or unscientific methods, or methods that are not appropriate for a particular topic.

Thus, the development of modern science into our modern day collective enterprise has brought with it an implicit rejection of religion and spirituality, as a historical heritage. Had this process been the result of a long and open debate, it could be addressed directly. The problem is that this process was rather a subcutaneous and implicit development, working its ways in the inner sanctums of science: in the way how students are educated, how PhD-students and postdocs are being mentored and what topics are attracting attention and resources, or are being awarded publication space in high-impact outlets. The British philosopher Robin G. Collingwood coined the phrase “absolute presuppositions” for such presuppositions that inform and underlie all scientific activities without ever being discussed openly (Collingwood 1998, orig. 1940). Collingwood assumed that they are taken over from the generic culture and historical situation of a society. The prominent science theorist Thomas Samuel Kuhn later took over some of Collingwood’s ideas and incorporated them in his model of scientific revolutions that assumes stages of normal science that follow a particular paradigm until this is overthrown by a revolution (Kuhn 1962). In that sense, our current scientific paradigm excludes religion and spirituality as a topic worthy of scientific attention and merit. This is so, not because an open discourse has happened as a result of which this emerged as a scientific consensus, but rather because unconscious and undisputed absolute presuppositions in Collingwood’s sense are very strong within the scientific community.

Another way of putting this is to say that the implicit world model under which modern day science operates is a materialist model. Such a model stipulates that the most important elements in our world are material in nature extended in space, and that all complex appearances, such as macroscopic objects like trees, animals, people, cities, societies, galaxies etc. can be analysed as being constituted by smaller units. The smallest and final ones are tiny pieces of matter that were once called atoms, but are now known to be even smaller, such as quarks. This is, of course, the ancient atomistic world view first proposed by Demokritos and Leukippos in antiquity, propagated and popularized by Plinius and Epicure (Whyte 1961). Far from being scientific in the strict sense of the word – meaning methodologically well validated – this is a background philosophy that is assumed and expected to be true. Because of its strong historical ties with the scientific enterprise its proponents succeed in making the public and many other scientists believe that being scientific is the same as being a materialist or, failing to be a materialist, keeping silent about not being one for fear of being dubbed “unscientific” by powerful peers. Rupert Sheldrake has elucidated this history and the implicit materialist bias in today’s scientific discourse and shown that this is in itself a very strong and unwarranted dogma. This is an interesting case of dialectics in history, whereby the enlightenment engine of science is turning its power against its own enlightenment trajectory, becoming dogmatic itself (Sheldrake 2013).

That this is not only some kitchen philosophy we are proposing here can be seen in a set of survey data where scientists, members of the National Academy of Science, i.e. the most prestigious scientists of the United States and possibly world-wide, have been surveyed regarding their belief in God and the existence of an immaterial soul (Larson and Witham 1998): 93% of all scientists surveyed do not believe in a God and 92% do not believe in a form of post-mortem survival of individual consciousness. Most are active disbelievers (72%) and a minority call themselves “agnostics” i.e. they do not have a final opinion. These data show: The enlightenment movement and its historical consequences have been very thorough in eliminating traces of transcendental belief and religious faith from the minds of those active in science themselves. Our age, as Charles Taylor has aptly put it, is secular (Taylor 2007). While in former times those not believing in religion, its doctrines and teachings were required to explain themselves and had to face consequences, nowadays the plight is being reversed. Those finding religion important or believing in realities other than material substances face a dominant secular culture that demands explanations, if its implicit world view is not honored by prominent proponents of its institutions of rationality, such as scientists, journalists, or intellectuals. Hence, topics such as “religion”, “religiousness”, or “spirituality” cannot be addressed scientifically in the same way as, say, “intelligence”, “depression”, or “health”. They need some contextualizing, bridging, explanation and justification first.

This is so despite the fact that these topics and experiences related to them are still germane to our modern societies, even in Europe. The so called “religion monitor”, a large panel survey instrument that samples the importance of spirituality and religion across a wide variety of countries and societies, using the concept of “centrality of religion” (Huber 2007), finds that religion and spirituality are still central to between 40% and 60% of people in Europe and nearly up to 100% in other countries like India or the US (Dragolov et al. 2016; Pickel 2013). We surveyed a representative sample of nearly 900 German psychotherapists and reported that roughly two thirds of these found spirituality or religion important, called themselves either spiritual, or religious, or both and had had at least one spiritual experience in their lives (Hofmann and Walach 2011). This is closely matched by a sample of 975 psychotherapists from the US, Canada and New-Zealand (Smith and Orlinsky 2004). Although psychotherapists undergo the same – secular – psychotherapy training that, at least in psychology, is inspired by positivistic and critical-rational ideas about science, they still find spirituality and religion important as topics both for themselves and their clients. This seems to be quite similar in countries with a strong religious culture such as the US and rather secular ones such as Europe.

It is frequently this discrepancy between the “official” scientific version and the experiential background of people that seems to drive the interest in the topic of spirituality and religion. And thus, despite the implicit ban on this topic from the scientific community as a whole, a pragmatically oriented research has started to grow over the last decades. This historical understanding is important, because it shows us, where the sensitivities lie, and why even good research will sometimes have difficulty being heard, seen, and taken seriously. It is useful to be aware of the fact that the background ideology of modern science is itself a quasi-religion, namely a more or less unreflected materialistic and empirically driven naturalism that presumes for itself the label “scientific worldview”, committing a conceptual error by doing so (Williams and Robinson 2016). The term “scientific” is an attribute that is reserved for methods, not for topics, for there is no such thing as an inherently unscientific topic. And a worldview can – in accordance with Kant and Carnap -, by itself, not be scientific, as it can never be tested by any empirical method but needs to be presupposed. Thus, a worldview that is purportedly scientific and assumes a materialistic ontology to be the true one is, at best, a hypothesis or a world model, or, in Collingwood’s term, an absolute presupposition, or a paradigm. But it is not “scientific” in the sense that it has been proven or demonstrated to be true. Yet this seems to be what an increasing number of scientists, especially high profile natural scientists, seem to believe (Pinker 2018). They have formed their own religious movement that calls itself “The Brights” with the political agenda to divest religions of their privileges and mainstream the so called “scientific worldview” of a materialistic naturalism through political activities (www.the-brights.net/).

It is against this background that any serious research of spirituality and religion has to make its stand and prove its viability.

2.1 Problems of Definition and Conceptualization

Any scientific research is only as good and as valid as the concepts used and the definitions employed. Defining the subject matter of spirituality, religiosity and religion is notoriously difficult, as has been observed many times (Emmons and Paloutzian 2003; Miller and Thoresen 2003). As long as we do not know what the subject matter is that we are studying, it is very difficult to make meaningful statements and claims. Definitions are naturally beset by conceptual problems. At one end of the spectrum, we have definitions that explicitly incorporate a higher entity, such as God, in their definition and thus implicitly propose a theistic world view, for instance:

The search for the sacred is central to definitions of religion and spirituality. This focus on the sacred helps to distinguish both spirituality and religion from other social and personal phenomena … As used here, ‘sacred’ refers to a divine being, higher power, or ultimate reality, as perceived by the individual. (George et al. 2000, p. 104)

Other definitions also use “the sacred” as a defining and delimiting criterion and define spirituality as “feelings, thoughts, experiences, and behaviors that arise from a search for the sacred” (Hill et al. 2000, p. 66), whereby “sacred” refers to a divine being, ultimate reality or truth.

Those definitions that postulate some transcendent being, that the Western tradition used to call “God”, form one end, let’s call it the vertical dimension, of the conceptual spectrum. At the horizontal dimension are definitions that call anything that has to do with the larger meaning of life, sense of purpose, or incorporating meaning and the meaning-making of human beings, spirituality (Elkins et al. 1988). That broader definition we find not very useful as it is so broad as to encompass everything. Even the blandest materialist will engage in meaning making and thus, by the very definition, there would be no one who is not spiritual, which is clearly not a useful statement.

In between are definitions like the one by Swinton, who allows for some plasticity between spirituality and religion:

Spirituality is the quest for meaning, value and relationship with Self, other and, for some, with God. This quest provides an underlying dynamic for all human experience, but comes to the forefront in focused ways under particular circumstances. This quest for meaning, value and relationship may be located in God or religion, but in a secularised context such as the United Kingdom it may reveal itself in varied forms (Swinton et al. 2011, p. 644).

Other authors explicitly acknowledge the postmodern situation that religion has lost its attraction for many, especially young people, and yet there is this need for spirituality, expressing life’s deeper or higher dimension as sacredness, drawing on the anthropology of Max Scheler. (Jirásek 2013)

Two prominent researchers, Mike King and Harold Koenig, have proposed four defining elements of spirituality:

• Faith: some belief in a reality beyond the material realm of what is visible and palpable

• Practice: some more or less natural and habitual practice that happens without difficulty and exertion, such as a daily practice of meditation or prayer or visiting a Sunday mass or other religious or spiritual service

• Awareness that this is important for one’s well-being

• Experience: Spiritual practice and faith are coming from one’s experience of such a higher transcendent reality. (King and Koenig 2009)

Our own favorite definition would be: Spirituality is an “implicit or explicit relatedness towards a reality beyond the needs of the individual ego, in cognition, emotion, motivation and action” (Walach 2017, p.10).

Reviewing these attempts at defining spirituality and religion we see two large tendencies: Religion and spirituality are two distinct modes of relatedness towards some larger whole in life and in the world. Spirituality seems to imply some relationship with an experientially accessible reality that can be understood to transcend the immediate needs and perspectives of an individual. Whether this reality is understood as a subject and a personal entity, such as implied by the term “God”, or rather a numinous reality would need to remain open, if spirituality is to be a subject matter for scientific discourse, as the definition of such a reality is beyond the scope of scientific investigation. It would be a topic for theology or religious studies. But the experiential core of spirituality that seems to be germane to all proposed definitions is accessible and amenable to scientific study. Human experiences can be documented, their impact can be studied, their supposed meaning can be elicited, for instance by qualitative research, and their long-term relevance can be assessed, for instance by epidemiological research looking into its relationship with variables measuring health. Because we think that a naturalization of spirituality is useful, we have deliberately left out all references to a “sacred” or “numinous” reality. Humans might interpret the experiences and the reality that they infer from these experiences as “sacred”, but this is not a necessary part of the definition. What is necessary, it seems though, is that this reality is transcendent or going beyond the individual ego, while it is experientially accessible, at least in principle.

The defining elements “cognition”, “emotion”, “motivation”, and “action” are important. They are, in a way parallel to King’s and Koenig’s practice, awareness and experience. Experience we see as a deep mode of understanding, involving cognitions and emotions, and producing tendencies to act or motivations that finally cristallise in practices. We consider “Faith” as a cognitive structure that follows a more or less elaborate semantic-cognitive processing of the experience within the rules, images, concepts and language structures that a culture has to offer.

A big drawback of large parts of research within the current literature of religiousness and spirituality is, in our view, the fact that it has restricted itself to only parts of this defining core. It has either studied practice alone as a proxy for religiousness, for instance the relationship of church going and longevity or health. Or it has used cognitive structures of faith, such as statements or sentences of faith (e.g. “I believe in the reality of a higher being, or God”, or “I believe in the immortality of the soul”) and put those into relation with other variables of interest, such as coping with health problems. At times, it has used a mix of those. It would be the task of a future mature science of spirituality to use multifaceted instruments and try to tap into the reservoir of experience as much as possible to distinguish experiential forms from purely cognitive or dogmatic forms of religion. We have tried to achieve this by an approach that asks particularly for spiritual experiences at the expense of cognitive structures (Kohls et al. 2008; Kohls and Walach 2006, 2007; Kohls et al. 2009a, b). Our findings imply that positive spiritual experiences buffer stress to some degree, while spiritual practice particularly confers resilience and the potential to come to grips with negative experiences in life and thus contribute to mental health. Put succinctly: a lack of spiritual practice might be a risk factor for mental health, particularly if the integrity of the self is being violated by difficult circumstances such as illness, separation or lack of social coherence.

It is important to conceptually separate spirituality from religion. While religion often comprises spirituality the reverse is not necessarily true. There are increasingly people who call themselves spiritual, but not religious (Hyland et al. 2006), and the other way round (Büssing et al. 2005; Smith and Orlinsky 2004). If spirituality can be considered the experiential core of religion (Walach 2015, 2017), religion is the narrative, ritual, ethical and moral expression of spirituality in its cultural, social, historical and political environment. While spirituality is, debatedly, a human experience that can be considered a general core experience (Forman 1998,1999), religion is to some extent a historically and culturally contingent expression of this experience. While religion has produced lots of fights and wars, human experiences are uncontested. This is not to say that religion is bad, of lower value than spirituality or to be neglected. But it is important to conceptually and practically separate the two, as they operate on different domains (individual/society). Religious involvement, religious beliefs, religious practices, religious observance are all important and potentially beneficial or potentially harmful human endeavors. But there can be spiritual experiences without such religious expression and religious behaviors, beliefs and other practices without any spiritual experience or core. A lot of confusion could be avoided if researchers separated conceptually these two areas of interest. So, in studies demonstrating benefits of religious observance and beliefs, say, for mortality or health, we normally do not know: is the behavior itself the decisive factor, such as being a vegetarian and an antialcoholic, or is the belief system, the social bonding that comes with it, or the experiential core important, or a mix of all of them?

There is also an overlap between the two concepts: people who are both spiritual and religious. They very often have strong experiential backgrounds that they choose to express in religious terms. This we would call religiosity.

We hope this short discussion has made clear: It is important to at least be clear about the defining concepts one is about to employ and to explicate as much as possible of the implicit definitions one is about to use and transport in one’s research. Another implicit bias of the field often goes unnoticed: The relationship of religion or spirituality and any variable of interest – for instance, health, longevity, resilience – is often presumed to be positive. Spirituality is often seen as a kind of potential resource, at times regarded as a “booster for health”. This might be true for most people and most of the time. But we would like to point out that especially deeply religious and spiritual people often also suffer from their spiritual involvement and because of it. Some of this has to do with the fact that their commitment produces friction with their environment. The prototypical example is the historical Jesus whose mission, from a mundane point of view, cannot be called a success. He ended as a criminal with the worst penalty the Roman empire had on offer. And in his wake there were many more examples, whether it was the deep depression St. John of the Cross suffered or, in more recent times, the dark doubts that Mother Theresa reportedly suffered from. The same is true for followers of other religions, especially, when their actions are motivated by strong inner spiritual experiences, such as politically active monks or priests from Buddhist, Christian, Hindu or other denominations. Sufi mystics of all ages were often in danger of being prosecuted. The point here is: what is seen as “success” from one point of view, for instance long life, health, happiness, wealth, is not necessarily seen as success from a spiritual point of view. So we caution against one dimensional assays and conceptualizations.

We have, in our instrument assessing exceptional human experiences, the “Exceptional Experiences Questionnaire” (EEQ), conceptualized spirituality as a double structure, having positive and deconstructing sides, and we have empirically validated such a structure (Kohls et al.2008; Kohls and Walach 2006).

Spiritual experiences are, by definition, individual inner experiences and therefore have a different epistemological status from, say, statements of sense experience. While for sense experiences of our world we can point to an external referent, for instance when we say “There is a green tree here in front of my house” that can potentially be verified by other competent observers, this is not necessarily true for statements of spiritual experiences. And this is part of the epistemological problem of spirituality. How do we know that Jeanne d’Arc, the virgin of Orleans, actually heard the archangel Michael and Saint Catherine speak to her to guide the French king to coronation, as she said, and that these voices were not just the expression of some narcissistic or delusional ideas of her? So how do we distinguish true from false? In science, one might claim, we have at least a somewhat reliable methodology that has developed over the last centuries to separate true from false claims, for instance through a painstaking reiterative process of experimentation, control, replications of observations through others, and mathematical and conceptual analysis. What would be the counterpart in the inner experiences of spirituality?

Here we must clearly state that this is a task for the future. The somewhat simplistic and spiritual-positivistic claim often heard that spirituality is similar to science in that one only has to follow the injunctions – sit down on your cushion and meditate in this and that kind of way. Then there will be experiences, already described by the tradition. Those need to be observed. And by carefully observing this inner world one can delineate a spiritual map. This approach has rightly been dubbed “spiritual positivism” and suffers from various problems (Ferrer 2000, 2002, 2014). The most important ones are that we can never step out of the frames of our language and concepts and hence would have to discuss those experiences with an expressly critical-reflective stance that is not normally the injunctive mode of formal religion. Nevertheless, this is a requirement for science. We have proposed that one would first need to translate the statements of inner experience from first-person singular statements into first-person plural statements, i.e. compare individual experiences with other, collective experiences, traditions, the experiences of other people and gradually arrive at a joint view (Walach and Runehov 2010). Others have proposed to refine introspective methods, for instance by eliciting, not the what, but the how of the experience (Bitbol and Petitmengin 2013; Petitmengin 2006, 2007; Petitmengin and Bitbol 2009). But we cannot expect to do the task science took a few hundred years to complete in a few years. Formulating the methodology of an introspective science is a methodological task for the future.

Religious traditions have known pragmatic criteria of truth that in the Christian tradition go by the name of “discernment of spirits”, criteria, by the way, that are used in modern concepts as well (Ferrer 2002). Here, not the content of an experience, but the functional consequences are the elements making it likely that it was a worthwhile experience. Does it contribute to more freedom, more happiness and more social commitment? Does it increase the capacity of a person to feel empathy with others and be kind to them? Does it help to make someone an active member of a community, contributing to the well-being of others? Or is the experiential path one of contraction, growing egocentricity and growing narcissism? (Walach 2008) Such pragmatic criteria can be powerful in a very pragmatic sense and they might be a good hint as to where it is useful to look further, but they cannot replace a good epistemology. The history of science in the West has led to the situation that we have only developed an epistemology of external sense experience, of experiencing the outer world, while the East has devoted time and effort to an epistemology of the inner world (Akhilananda 1960; Rao 2005; Sedlmeier and Kunchapudi 2016). Indigenous cultures have developed still other modes of experiencing the world and conceptualizing their experience which are only gradually coming into the view of Western science (Ferrer 2013; Krippner and Sulla 2000; Rose 1956). Perhaps some fruitful dialogue might be useful? (Dockett and North-Schulte 2003; Hayes 2003; Wallace and Shapiro 2006).

Doing research in the field of spirituality and religion is also challenging the mainstream world-view of a naturalistic-materialistic ontology. For, to some extent, such research presupposes that it is meaningful to study experiences that claim such a broader ontology that incorporates non-material reality as potentially important. Of course, one can implicitly bow to the mainstream dogma and only study the adaptive strategies that such experiences provide, the coping mechanisms, the meaning making, and in the end they might even turn out to be the most important elements in such an endeavor. But by the very fact of embarking on such an enterprise one makes an implicit statement that one believes an experience of a spiritual kind or nature to be relevant not only for individual interpretations of meaning but also for a larger understanding of the world. In a sense, the metaphysics expelled by Carnap and colleagues in the 30s is coming back to haunt science anew, it seems, albeit in the disguise of functionalization. The difference is: This time it will and has to come through the route of science and this is, following Franz Brentano’s claims, thereby echoing Buddha, the route of experience (Albertazzi 2006; Brentano 1995; Smith 1994). While the philosophers of the Vienna circle, following in the steps of Franz Brentano in Vienna, were opposed to merely rational arguments around deeper principles of the world as expounded by the philosophy of their days, Brentano, who tried to install a modern introspective approach as a science of psychology, advised us to stick to experience and use methodology to purify it.

It is the research in spirituality that can and will take up this project again and in that it will become an experientially grounded and functionally justifiable metaphysics, and we should be aware that this is the project to be taken up again. This will entail studying the experiences that lie at the ground of spirituality and to describe defining elements and distinguishing phenomenologies. It will also entail intentionally creating spiritual experiences and describing them in the making. To achieve this, we need well trained observers that have learned how to make use of their consciousness without being distracted. A culture of consciousness such as is created by the systematic practice of meditation and regular practice of mindfulness may be a prerequisite for this. Edmund Husserl, calling for a special state of consciousness which he called “epochè”, the Greek name for taking a distant view and separating one’s ideas and prejudices from the pure perception, was in the process of starting this, without telling us how to achieve it. Following this path we will necessarily have to find a way of honing our consciousness as an instrument. And the result might be an empirical foundation for a scientific type of metaphysics.

To sum up, our pivotal point is: we cannot work, operate and live without metaphysics. Our only choice is: to not choose it but to implicitly take over the underlying worldview of our culture, including its metaphysics which currently is a more or less explicit materialism; or to choose consciously and use our scientific method to study which type of metaphysics is actually a better one, fitting our experiences, fitting the facts, and liberating people. This, in our view, is the challenge of a good science of spirituality and religion.