THE VALIDITY CLAIMS OF SPIRITUALITY

by

Stephen Chilton

DRAFT: Not for quotation or citation without author's permission

A preliminary version of this paper was presented to the University of Minnesota Interdisciplinary Team for Spirituality, April 3, 1992. I am indebted to Lois Erickson, Catherine Peterson, and members of the Team for encouragement and intelligent commentary.

THE VALIDITY CLAIMS OF SPIRITUALITY

ABSTRACT

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THE VALIDITY CLAIMS OF SPIRITUALITY

Studying spirituality within the academic community, we run into problems about our claims at two different levels. At the philosophical level, we (and others) are uncertain (i) what we are claiming, (ii) exactly how we redeem our claims, and (iii) exactly what our good reasons are for believing them. "Mainstream" academics currently believe that spiritual discourse is privileged and unverifiable: that spiritually oriented academics make claims without intellectual restraint, hold such claims to be unchallengeable, and reject the idea that there can be any rational discourse about them. On this view, spiritually inclined people maintain no protection against fraud, self-delusion, or even psychopathology.

It should be apparent that spiritual discourse can and must be conducted according to standards of proof, although those standards can be different than those of, say, physical science. In order to demonstrate that, however, we must clarify what the variety of our claims are and to what standards we hold them.

At the political level, we also have to recognize that spiritual claims challenge the ruling model of intellectual discourse, and so these claims are subject to suppression, distortion, and trivialization. We ourselves are confused about the cultural hegemony of a limited but culturally-approved vision of science and, more broadly, of academics.

Both of these levels - the philosophical and the political-hegemonic - require a greater clarity on our part about the variety of claims we are making and the standards of proof we employ. At the philosophical level, we must acknowledge that even the most open-minded academic has a right to standards of proof. Even if such standards do not match those of physical science, there must be some means of distinguishing justifiable from unjustifiable claims. At the political-hegemonic level, we must solidify our own grasp of what is at stake. We must be able to face in a unified way the instinctive opposition of academics (and others) whose lives are supported by the cultural rewards that go to claims other than ours.

I . A Spiritual Claim

I start with an article that might have appeared in the National Enquirer instead of, as it did, in the Duluth News-Tribune of Saturday, April 4, 1992, p.6C. It demonstrates that we, like physical scientists, need to offer our own defense against pseudo-science.

GURU CLAIMS ALIENS KIDNAPPED HIM

Santa Monica, Calif.

Before Claude Vorilhon became the prophet Rael, before the space aliens he claims he met bequeathed to him the lost wisdom of the ages, he was a race car driver happily spinning around the tracks of France.

Fifteen years and no car later, he decided to start a magazine for aspiring drivers like himself. He wrote glowing reviews of the latest models and, in return, was allowed to sit behind their wheels. Surrounded by fast cars and pretty women, life seemed right on track.

It was then, Vorilhon says, that the aliens came.

According to Vorilhon, the first encounter occurred Dec. 13, 1973, at a large volcanic crater in central France. The prehistoric landscape of stunted vegetation and slag-covered slopes was shrouded in a thick morning fog when Vorilhon saw a flying saucer land and a small childlike creature descend a lowered stairway.

The encounter is detailed in Vorilhon's first book, "The Message Given to Me by Extraterrestrials: They Took Me to Their Planet":

"Do you come from another planet?" Vorilhon asked.

"Yes," replied the little creature in the green spacesuit.

"Why did you come here?"

"Today, to talk to you.... We have been watching you for a long time.... I have used telepathy to get you to come here because I have many things to tell you.... Listen to me. You will tell humans the truth about what they are, and what we are."

The creature--who had almond-shaped eyes; long, black hair; and a small, black beard--promised to return with the answers to the mysteries of life. Vorilhon would bring paper and pencil and write it all down in a book. He was the prophet chosen to spread "the most important message given to humanity by extraterrestrials."

As he pondered the encounter and searched his past for clues, Vorilhon found parallels to the life of Christ. "It's all very, very close," he said in a recent interview.

What are we to make of this claim? It is tempting to dismiss such claims out of hand as deluded at best and fraudulent at worst. The problem is, our own claims are being similarly dismissed. It is accordingly worthwhile for us to undertake two tasks:

• to assert clearly what our claims are. This differentiates them from easily dismissed claims. It also clarifies for us what our claims are so we won't be sloppy in making them--slopping over from the ones we want to make to others that get us into trouble.
• to explicate the means by which we redeem our claims. It isn't enough just to make them; we also have t say what evidence and standards of proof we have. If we are asserting something, it must be subject to proof and disproof.

II. Type of Claims

According to Habermas (19xx), any speech act makes three validity claims.

• Truth: I am reporting the objective truth.
• Truthfulness: I am reporting my own experience (as accurately as I can, anyway).
• Rightness: I am reporting something in terms meaningful to us both.⁽¹⁾

The above passage yields examples of these three claims, as follows:

• About an external, mutually observable reality. "There are little green men. If you had been there, you would have seen them." Philosophical speculation about whether there is a real world isn't really pertinent. Our race car driver isn't making any such subtle points. In our materialist world, such claims are privileged--hence his eagerness to make the claim, and the continued obfuscation over its redemption. [Fog everywhere; keep it a secret; we have chosen you; etc.]
• About one's own meaning. If we leave aside the above claim of physical reality (or even dismiss it entirely), we still face a second claim, that something is meaningful to Mr. Vorilhon. From this perspective, we look at the tale as a metaphor for his meaning, or the best way he can point to it. I think the personal meaning goes beyond solipsism, however. "Nothing human is strange to me"--we can communicate our meanings and thereby clarify them. We have to ask, then, what is he trying to tell us? Possibilities: "I'm worried about the future of the world." "I want to lead." "I want people to listen to me." "This doctrine is important." "I am important." Meaning-making is important to learning. Meaning is a tremendous reinforcer.
• About how we should relate to one another.

III. Parsing Jones

Roger Jones (1982) presents a claim that physical laws do not refer to some external, objective reality but rather are human constructions. He claims that the common, "dualistic" metaphor among physicists - that they are moving steadily toward an objective Reality that exists outside of themselves - fails to recognize the human creation inherent in their laws.

I believe that we must distinguish between two claims - implicit or explicit - raised by Jones. The first claim, that human beings construct physical laws and more broadly our understandings of the world, seems straightforward. Piaget's work involved the child's construction of this or that: the nature of space and time, the material world, and so on. The physical laws we advance are not wired into our neural systems, are not immanent in nature: we construct them and in that special sense can well be said to invent them.

As regards the second claim, however, Piaget is always careful to say that reality is constructed in interaction with the world. Our ways of understanding the world may be our own constructions, but they are nevertheless made, as Marx said of history, not just as we please or in the circumstances of our choice. It is unclear to me to what extent Jones recognizes any limitations on our constructions. I find no direct statement to the effect that one can make up laws as one chooses, so perhaps Jones does not intend that claim. On the other hand, I do sense a yearning toward such a claim, which may be the source of other physicists' irritation with the work. Only Jones can clarify whether he wishes to make the latter claim.

If he does take the point of view that our constructions are unlimited, it seems to me that he is still obligated to test the constructions by the standards of science--in particular, the criterion of reproducibility.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Jurgen Habermas (1979). Communication and the Evolution of Society. Boston: Beacon Press.
• Roger S. Jones (1982). Physics As Metaphor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• xx (19xx). xx book. xx: xx.
• xx (19xx). xx article. xx xx:xx-xx.
• xx (19xx). xx paper. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the xx, xx.
• xx (19xx). xx book chapter. Pp. xx - xx of xx, ed. xx. xx: xx.

This table is adapted and expanded from Habermas (1979:68).

COMMENTARY ON THE TABLE

Science and the current Academy privilege the validity claim of Truth, and our culture privileges material goods, its product. Note, however, that this privilege arises not from the logic of the table but from cultural hegemony. There is nothing inevitable about the nature of this hegemony.

* What spiritual experiences have you had, or what phenomena would you point to as spiritual? What consequences flow from them? What validity claims do you make for them?

>> Truth: How would you test the objective truth of any aspect of these experiences or phenomena?

>> Truthfulness: What did the experience mean to you? How has that experience changed your life around it?

>> Rightness: How would you communicate this experience to another?

Each of these validity claims is redeemed in a different fashion.

>> Truth is redeemed by the scientific method.

>> Truthfulness is redeemed by psychoanalytic methods; essentially, the issue is not the objective truth of the experience but rather whether one attests to one's own beliefs by voting with one's feet: remaking one's life in terms of the myth. (Here the term myth is used without a connotation of "falsehood" or "fiction" but rather with the connotation of something by which one orients one's life.)

>> Rightness is redeemed by the methods of normative discourse, both in terms of how we are to understand language ("normative" in its broader, less moral sense) and in terms of how we are to press claims on one another (the more moral sense of "normative"). We claim that others should understand our language as we do (although it is important to notice that we are mutually bound by this structure of meaning), and we claim that they should act as we say they should (and again, it is important to notice that we are mutually bound by this structure of morality).

I have a friend, call her Hermione, who tells me that when she was four or five years old, she regularly saw plant spirits. (She says they looked like elves.) She sees them no longer, but still feels and believes in their existence. Her announcement of the presence of these spirits was not welcomed by her family, particularly given her simultaneously-expressed doubts about God, the Church, and so on.

Now, what sort of claim is she making? First, her claim does not seem to be one of objective reality. The spirits may be objectively real, but she does not have any special instrument (outside her childhood mind) for detecting their presence and thereby testing their existence. She may believe in their objective reality, but she has no means for proving it and does not appear especially concerned about this inability.

Now, we can leave this claim suspended, recognizing that there are still meaningful things to talk about even if we are not certain of an objective reality. We can ask

>> "Is Hermione being truthful in her report of her experience, regardless of its objective origins?"

>> "Even if she is being truthful, or even if we are forced to leave that question also suspended, is she claiming anything about what we should do? More loosely, is she even claiming that her experience is mutually understandable?"

Her claim certainly includes truthfulness, in that she is claiming that she did see these spirits. How does she prove this? Well, basically, she has held onto her vision, and oriented her life in its terms. [I'm not really sure how it affects her. Vegetarianism is a shallow sense; it may have much more profound effects: pervasive but not uniquely identifiable.] Testing the validity claim: what would it mean to you to give up this belief? Or, how is this belief intertwined now with who you are?

Now even if Hermione is being truthful, or even if we are forced to leave that question also suspended, is she claiming anything about what we should do? More loosely, is she even claiming that her experience is mutually understandable? Her claim might include rightness, but she doesn't proselytize. [Nevertheless, we could assert those claims for her; Habermas would say that the claims are "always already" there.] She does speak with others about it and makes herself understood. Can she talk with people like me, who never saw such spirits? What do I make of her experience?

Lois talks of "seeing people as light".

In conclusion, I would say that the claims we make for spirituality are certainly of truthfulness. This is not sufficient to be taken seriously, however; for a university of pay much attention to such experiences beyond psychopathology, we must make claims of truth and/or of rightness.

Different views of prayer:

• Just a wish: "I wish I had a Winnebago. Sure would be nice to have a Winnebago." etc.
• A command or request that God intervene
• "Opening oneself to the universe" (but what does that mean?)

In November 1996, just before and during finals week at UMD, signs appeared around campus saying, "Why study? Put God to the test! Pray for good grades!" I am pretty sure they came from a member of a group against religion who I know.

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1. Habermas also notes a fourth claim, of intelligibility. We will ignore it here.

These three validity claims correspond to Parsons's trichotomy of systems.

• Truth: the social system: objectively observably forms of interaction.
• Truthfulness: the personality system: subjective experiences.
• Rightness: the cultural system: shared understandings of interactions.