Marginalium

The Spiritual Is Not Weird:

I want to argue that this is all beside the point, since what can legitimately be described as the spiritual actually plays a significant role in our everyday lives. It is not to be found on the edges of experience but is central to the human condition and yet cannot be reduced to naturalistic causes. Through its zealous desire to rid the world of irrational ‘superstition’, naturalism has thrown the baby out with the bath water, leaving us with a world view that seems to leave no room for some of the most important experiences we have. The spiritual is not weird because it is completely familiar. One of its distinguishing features is, I believe, that it does not play a role in the causal nexus of reality
… Take our encounters with other people. We don’t primarily see someone we meet as a set of amazingly complex bio-chemical and bio-mechanical processes. We see a person, a centre of self-conscious subjectivity, with hopes, fears, passions, responsibilities, and a particular story and perspective on the world that is unlike any other … To say what it is we see when we see a face, a smile, a look, we must use concepts from another language than the language of science and make connections of another kind from those that are the subject matter of causal laws.

I’m not the only one pointing this out.