Toward a Science of Spirituality | Dr. Daniel Helminiak | IL9 Meaning Conference 2002

11 a.m. – 11:50 p.m. Invited Templeton Foundation Lecture

IL9 Daniel Helminiak, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, State University of West Georgia

Chair – Marvin McDonald, Ph.D., Trinity Western University

Toward a Science of Spirituality: Challenges to the Psychology of Religion

Whether integral to religion or separate from it, spirituality requires attention in itself. Beyond the standard social-science description of spiritualities and spiritual practices expressed through correlation with existing measures of religiosity, health, and well-being, there is need for an explanation of the essential nature of spirituality ⎯ its structures, mechanisms, and processes ⎯ universally discernible in its multiple manifestations. Questions like the following are at stake: What is spirituality? How does it arise? What constitutes its inner functioning? What norms or inherent requisites condition its usefulness or validity? How does it relate to other facets of religion and to human living overall? Three theoretical challenges confound such a nonsectarian, scientific enterprise: (a) to extricate empirically verifiable, psychological aspects of spirituality from non-falsifiable, religious, and theological tenets (e.g., God, Creator, Brahman, ultimate concern, the sacred, the transcendent); (b) to differentiate an inherently spiritual dimension of human functioning (spirit) from the quest for advance in such functioning (spirituality); and (c) to specify the inherent and empirically verifiable requisites of holistic integration, personal health, and open-ended human development (“spiritual growth”) in contrast to pseudo-claimants to the same. The third challenge is daunting, and it implicates the other two. Still, it is unavoidable. In addressing spirituality, psychology cannot avoid taking a stand on epistemology and ethics, for these matters are themselves spiritual, and they are intertwined with any treatment of spirituality and any scientific methodology. Attention to spirituality radically exposes the intenability of the notion of science as value-free and requires not only that values be acknowledged but also, be it noted, that they be assessed as to their validity. In theory, research, and psychotherapy, the psychology of religion must face these three challenges or remain in a morass of conceptual confusion regarding spirituality.
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