And to Atheists who do not believe in something spiritual about life, be it spiritual beings or spiritual teachings. What are your thoughts about spiritual wisdom?
To me, an agnostic atheist, there are only spiritual experiences, not spiritual beings, which is a vague term needing clarification before we can begin to discuss whether such things exist or by what means we can know if they exist, nor spiritual teachings nor wisdom.
And spiritual experiences are psychological phenomena characterized by a sense of mystery, awe, gratitude, and connection. Looking out at the night sky at a single star and recognizing what you are experiencing - how connected we are to that star, how far the drop of light has traveled to inform one's eyes of its presence, and the understanding that we are made of stardust, is an authentic spiritual experience with no gods or spirits involved.
Regarding wisdom, it doesn't need any qualifier like spiritual. There's just wisdom. If intelligence is knowing how to get what you want, wisdom is knowing what to want to be happy. If you mistakenly think that great wealth will make you happy, and are intelligent, you can probably amass great wealth, but you didn't choose what to want wisely, so you probably aren't happy. Calling some wisdom spiritual really means nothing to me.
Sure, plenty of people will adopt a pose or role sitting cross-legged while wearing loose-fitting sheets, burning incense, and
claim to have great insights for living life, but I don't turn to such people for anything. They might possess wisdom, such as the teaching that some desires are harmful and often lead to unhappiness, and thus should be quieted, and that's good advice, but there's nothing spiritual about it. One need not evoke spirits or go into deep trances on entheogens to come to understand that.
since many atheists say there is nothing except this physical existence, why is there to you no chance that something "invisible" can exist without you understand it or see it?
What a rational skeptic - a person who doubts all unsupported claims and requires compelling evidence before believing anything - should say is that nothing is known to exist except the physical, natural world, not that he knows that there is nothing more than the physical. He also should not say that there is no chance that there are undetecable elements of reality, but that such ideas are of little interest or value. They can't be used for anything except to deceive oneself
Can only science hold the truth?
This will be a long answer, but I think the topic deserves a thorough treatment.
Truth? The term can be problematic, especially when one is seeking such elusive and unobtainable entities as absolute truth and objective truth.
For example, were Newton's physics correct? Did he have the truth? Some of his physics falls short, as Einstein showed us, but most of it is useful. Is it true or not?
I've learned to not get bogged down in that discussion, which is unproductive. Newton's ideas have empirical adequacy (defined below) in the realms in which it is applied, such as the New Horizons space probe. It works, and nothing else is relevant to deciding if this idea is a keeper or not.
For me, truth is the quality that facts possess, facts being linguistic strings (sentences, paragraphs) that accurately map a portion of reality. This is decided empirically - does the idea work to help us anticipate and at times control outcomes? Any other idea is confusing and leads to semantic inefficiencies and errors, or metaphysical claims with no practical value...
Let me illustrate. Correct ideas work. That's what lets us know they're correct. If I tell you that I live five blocks north and three blocks east of the pier, the deciding factor of whether that is correct or not will be whether this idea can be used to get me to the pier. If walking 5 blocks south and three blocks west works as hoped to get me to the pier, then the idea is correct. If I end up anywhere else, it was wrong. That's what I mean by true - it works.
Here are some closely related and useful ideas in this area:
Correspondence definition of truth - a statement is true to the extent that it conforms to / corresponds with / accurately reflects (objective) reality.
Empirical adequacy - A theory or claim of fact is empirically adequate, roughly, if all of what it says about observable aspects of the world (past, present, and future) can be confirmed
Instrumentalism - belief that statements or theories may be used as tools for useful prediction without reference to their possible truth or falsity. Peirce and other pragmatists defended an instrumentalist account of modern science.
Fallibilism - the principle that propositions concerning empirical knowledge can be accepted even though they cannot be proved with certainty.
I really like this formulation by an anonymous Internet source, who has affected my thinking in this area:
"
Truth has no meaning divorced from any eventual decision making process. The whole point of belief itself is to inform decisions and drive actions. Actions then influence events in the external world, and those effects lead to objective consequences. Take away any of these elements and truth immediately loses all relevance.
"We should expect similar decisions made under similar circumstances to lead to similar outcomes. Pragmatism says that the ultimate measure of a true or false proposition lies in its capacity to produce expected results. If an idea is true, it can be used in the real world to generate predictable consequences, and different ones if that idea turned out to be false. In other words, the ultimate measure of a true proposition is the capacity to inform decisions under the expectation of desirable consequences.
"All we need to know is that we have desires and preferences, we make decisions, and we experience sensory perceptions of outcomes. If a man has belief B that some action A will produce desired result D, if B is true, then doing A will achieve D. If A fails to achieve D, then B is false. Either you agree that truth should be measured by its capacity to inform decisions and produce results or you don't. If you agree, then we can have a conversation. And if we disagree about some belief, we have a means to decide the issue.
"If this is not how your epistemology works - how you define truth - then we can't have a discussion, and I literally don't care what you think, since it has no effect on anything." - AntiCitizenX
That's where I am with a lot of these claims of spirituality and higher truth. If such ideas can only be used to make one feel that he has special knowledge, but not to make better choices in life, then like Anticitizen X, I won't call that knowledge, truth, fact, or wisdom - just feel-good ideas.
This is a pragmatic approach to truth, fact, knowledge, etc.. It's not distracted by sterile metaphysical speculations. It's all about empirical results and obtaining desired outcomes. That is the sine qua non of a correct idea - that it can be used this way.
When you ask if science is the only path to truth, what I would say is that the application of reason to empirical evidence is the only known path to truth as I have defined it. Scientists do that in laboratories and observatories, but we all do it every day as well, as when looking both ways before crossing a street. We are acquiring empirical evidence about the present condition of the traffic in the street, and making rational choices to effect a desired outcome, namely, crossing the street safely. If that's science, then yes, science is the only known path to truth.
What's the alternative to this approach too navigating reality? Faith, which arriving at a belief without going through the reason and evidence route.
I consider that a mistake - logical error. Faith can't possibly be a path to truth if any idea or its mutually exclusive, polar opposite can equally well be believed by faith, even though at least one such idea is incorrect. And if you happen to guess correctly, you cannot know that you have until you acquire evidence, anyway.
When you resort to evidence properly understood, you get one answer, such as the speed of light, you get the same answer (within the limits of measurement) every time every time you remeasure, and if that answer can be used to successfully predict outcomes, such as how long it will take messages from a probe orbiting Saturn to reach tracking stations on earth, you can call it correct, true, or any other related term, and add it to your fund of useful knowledge.
