Introduction to Validating Truth

When considering scientific facts and spiritual truths it is hard to reconcile the Reality claims of objective science against the subjective, interpreted spiritual explanations of how things are.

The one thing scientific explanations has over spiritual explanations, is that science includes empirical testing and analysis. The very basis of science is that an observation by one scientist can be verified by another scientist. After doing an experiment, the researcher writes down exactly how they created the experiments, and how they stopped other things from contaminating the data, so that other’s can repeat the experiment. This repeating of an experiment by others helps to verify the truth of the original observation. There is a caveat in science that states that if one merely tries to confirm the results of a previous experiment, then vital information will be missed – we will be blind to even the most obvious corruption of the data – so it is better to try to prove the initial experiment to be false in it’s conclusions.

Therefore, from the first experiment and observation, there builds a growing amount of evidence to prove, or disprove, the original conclusions. If the further explorations disprove the initial conclusions then there is now something new to scientifically explore and the scientific knowledge has grown.

To see more on the scientific method, see the article: “Proven by Science”?

The problem with scientific research is it cannot take into account the subjective, the interpretive, the spiritual realms of a person’s existence, and therefore

relegates everything to objects, or at best, systems with objects in them. This denies a person’s subjective experience – whether spiritual or mundane – just because it cannot be measured and easily repeated by various object oriented experimenters.

Ken Wilber, after many years of deliberating on this problem, realized that there are (at least) 4 parts to existence. See the article on The Integral Map. There is the subjective, Me part: one’s inner world of mind, imagination, and spiritual connection. There is also the objective, It part: the part science is so brilliant at recording.

There is also the collective, We part: the culture we live in with its collective assumptions, linguistic programming, etc.

As well as the subjective Me part; the objective It part; the collective psyche We part; there is also the collective Its part. Also known as the Systems part, this is where the objective observation of systems can help us to find more truth than the purely It science can unfold. The Its part is also where the Social sciences belong, because they only look at what is observable in time and space and make conclusions from observations of the function each part plays and how that fits within the social system.