Spirituality & Development

Friday, 26th Jan 2017Lecture by Dr. Asad Zaman, VC PIDE

Religion & Development Paper, Center of Development StudiesUniversity of Cambridge

For 40m Video Lecture; see http://bit.do/azspirit

What Is Spirituality?What is Development?

How do Islamic Concepts Differ from Western on these matters?

What is Spirituality?

• In your place, I would not know how to answer this question.

Standard Modern Answer

• Spirituality is a literary term, used to spice up poetry and novels.• It is like Phlogiston, Unicorns, Ghosts, Souls, God

Standard Modern Answer (Continued)

• Terms which the ancients used to believe in, but which have been proven to not exist. Like flat Earth, ancients made many mistakes. •Moderns study religion and spirituality as a disease

which afflicts weak minds not properly trained in scientific reasoning.

Why don’t we understand spirituality?

•We have all been trained to think like Logical Positivists• EVEN though this philosophy has been proven wrong!• Unobservables do not matter for science • Science explains the observable patterns. It may postulate

things like atoms, gravity, but this is just for convenience. Existence of gravity is not part of scientific assertion.

Why don’t we understand spirituality?

(Continued)

• Kant: Thing-In-Itself is not knowable, not relevant for science. • SCIENCE is the ONLY source of valid knowledge.

Million Dollar Question:

What is Knowledge?• A paradigm shift is required to understand spirituality•We cannot achieve paradigm shift by rational process.• To shift paradigms, we need to change perspectives, point of

view. • As in movies, suspend judgment to enter a new world.

Knowledge: True, Justified, belief•What about intuition?•What about things about which we can never be sure

whether they are true or false?• NOT knowledge, NOT scientific, NOT importantAccording to Current Definitions of Knowledge which you have learnt.

Current Dominant Positivist Paradigm (articulated)

• Central positivist idea: sentences must be true or false, in order to be meaningful. If sentences cannot be assigned truth values using empirical methods, they are MEANINGLESS.

Implications of Positivist Philosophy

• Intuitive and Un-Verifiable statements with unknown and unknowable truth values are MEANINGLESS.• Spirituality, Soul, Morality, God, Angels, Heaven, Hell

are all meaningless concepts.

AJ Ayer (1936) Logical PositivismWe can now see why it is impossible to find a criterion for determining the validity of ethical judgements … because they have no objective validity whatsoever . . . They are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood. They are unverifiable for the same reason as a cry of pain … is unverifiable.

AJ Ayer (Continued)

“Cry of Pain” is meaningless to Ayer, but the most meaningful thing in the world to ordinary human beings !We have been trained to believe in OBJECTIVE reality, and to denigrate, de-emphasize, and treat as secondary, SUBJECTIVE realities. “Just give me the facts – I don’t want your opinions.”

Paradigm Shift

Central Importance of Intuitive and Unverifiable Knowledge

The World we live in is our subjective reality

• I live in a world in which civilization started along the rivers of Euphrates and Nile. • There was global conquest and colonization by Europe, two world

wars in the 20th Century. Hiroshima & Nagasaki were bombed. • Global Financial Crisis occurred in the 21st century. • I did not experience any of these events – they have been reported to

me. • My experience of the world is mediated by my recreation of a picture

of the world within my mind. This picture is HIGHLY subjective.

Objective and Subjective: “Inextricably Entangled”

• How do we taste food, drink? Chemicals in food, taste buds in tongue, interpretative apparatus in brain, and Social Norms.• How do we see the world? Replication of picture (inverted) on our

retina, interpretation using brains and experience! • Optical illusions base on our experience.• The reality we live in cannot be partitioned into a subjective part and

an objective part, and separately analyzed.• This is even true in Quantum Physics. Our Observation is entangled

with the Observed. There is no objective reality out there!

Fabric of our personal lives woven with:Intuitive & Unverifiable Knowledge

• Communication skills: “What do you think about what I am saying?” – I make guesses about this, as I lecture, based on experience• We got dressed, cleaned up, took care of our appearance: what other

people think about us is of extreme importance in our lives.• O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us• I can never know or verify how you feel about me. Yet it can be of

supreme importance to me in conduct of my life.

I have never met you, BUT I know a lot about you!

• I know that you enjoy laughing.• I know the kinds of things that can make you happy.• I know about the things which can make you sad, angry, excited.• Under suitable circumstances, I would use this knowledge to build a

deeper relationship with you.The bonds of humanity we share are very powerful, very strong. Just the knowledge that you are a human being means that you and I share a huge amount of common thoughts and feelings.

Human Knowledge is built on Paradox

• Vast majority of humans on the planet live, laugh, cry, love, hate, despair, hope and die. We are all the same.• Each human is completely unique – no one like her/him ever before

or ever after.• Snowflakes – all the same, and all completely different.To live, we must understand the SIMULTANEOUS truth of our sameness and our uniqueness. Zen Koans designed to teach us these truths which go beyond the capabilities of logic.

Science can blind us to our infinite potentials

• Every moment in time is unique, ephemeral• Offers possibilities which shimmer with the possibility of being

realized. • We can reach out to grasp these, BUT if we think about our

experience, use logic, reasoning, we will never see the unique.• How many possibilities came up, and vanished, unseen, unrealized,

unappreciated?? Science is based on replicable patterns in the past, and fitting the future onto these patterns. Systematically ignores unique, rare, exceptional events.

Knowledge?

Experiences?Love?

Feelings?Uncertainty?

Ethics? Rationality?Courage?

Actions?

Being Human…

What makes us human? A thought experiment• Would you kill a baby for a million dollars? [No one will know]• I would bet a huge amount, that you wouldn’t. • Why? It is totally irrational. • In fact, Real Politick, human experience, teaches us otherwise.• Yet I would still stake my life on it. Thought experiment: so would you• WHY? It is not so much that I have infinite trust in you. For me, it is

part of what it means to be human. But also, I believe in the infinite potential of all human beings.

Knowledge: Uncertain, Unprovable Feelings: not Justified, Not True/False• This knowledge makes us human• At all times, we are guessing about how others react to us.• Sometimes, we guess at our own internal psychological state.• OFTEN, these guesses are not justifiable, and not true/false. • This “uncertain” knowledge is what makes us human.• This knowledge differentiates us from “Siri”AJ Ayer realized positivism was “all wrong”. Positivist fake anesthesia.

Decisions and Actions

• Depend on our Visions – Imaginary Futures.• “I have a dream” – many have died for these dreams. • Vision of Marx for a classless society, where laborers would not be

exploited by capitalists, shaped the twentieth century• Our dreams, entirely without material substance, are very powerful in

shaping the world.

What is spirituality?• It is a capacity of the heart to feel for others.• This allows us to sense our collective humanity. • Joins us at the root, allows us to rise above individuality, selfishness.• Like other human capabilities, requires nurturing • With growth, spirituality can sense the presence of God.

Love, Courage, Strength: Spiritual Qualities

Unmeasurable, Unquantifiable, Unobservable

“The believer loves, and is loved” Prophet Mohammad peace & blessings

“Being deeply loved gives you strength, Loving gives you courage” Lao-Tzu

How can we have the strength and courage to love and be loved?

Multiple Stages of Spiritual Growth• Primitive Egotism – • Awareness of others.• Empathy, Compassion.• Feeling of Unity with the Creation of God• Union with GodAldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy – introduction to spirituality for rational skeptics.

End of Part I of talkI hope that we have provided an answer to the question of

“What is Spirituality?”And differentiated it adequately from Phlogiston, Ghosts and the theories that the Earth is flat.We move on to the question of What is Development? In the second part of the talk.

EndNotes: Not relevant, but very important

• It is widely believed that science leads to Knowledge (JTB style)• In fact, science is also based on intuition, and un-verifiable hunches.• Think about Newton’s apple – intuition about gravity. Plus, since it is

unobservable, it can never be verified.• Similarly, Godel’s Theorems on Undecidability show that the set of

provable statements is much smaller than the set of truths. Only intuitions can guide us about mathematical theorems which are true but unprovable. • Knowledge about mathematics is also based on unprovable intuitions.