Spirituality in Evolutionary Epistemology

Objectives

The Main Objective

Naturalists, say the Supernaturalists, can provide adequate explanations of the world of facts but fail miserably in their explanations of the world of values. Examples of such knowledge cited by Supernaturalists include:

• spiritual experiences,
• the certainty of moral knowledge and knowledge given by faith,
• the awareness of moral and aesthetic values
• and the experience of an inner life and of free will.

Our main objective in this article, and its four related articles, is to provide a robust account of human (and other sentient) spiritual experience in naturalistic and evolutionary epistemological terms, that is, to deal with the first of these Supernaturalist objections.  We argue that not only does our account not "fail miserably" but offers a superior explanation of human spiritual experience to those offered by Supernaturalists.

The Differences and the Relationships between Ordinary and Spiritual Experience

Two secondary objectives of this set of articles are to identify the differences between ordinary and spiritual experiences and to describe the nature of the relationship between ordinary and spiritual experiences.

Ordinary experiences are identified by enumerating them, beginning with momentary sensory experiences and proceeding through stored past sensory experiences, imaginings, dreams, concepts and various types of genralizations and abstractions.  A more detailed enumeration of ordinary experiences is given in the second article in this series, Universal Spiritual Experience. Spiritual experiences are identified as additions to ordinary experiences in which a sentient mind assigns a value to an ordinary experience.  We call such an assignment an "appreciation".

Ordinary experiences represents facts.  Spiritual experiences create values.  We hold that although spiritual experience begins with ordinary experience, it does not arise out of ordinary experience, but instead arises out of the ability of a sentient mind to appreciate.  These appreciations vary in their degree of richness and complexity - but it is always the presence of the appreciation which marks an experience as spiritual.

The role of appreciation as the defining mark of spiritual experience is easiest to see in the case of Universal Spiritual Experience.  We will therefore argue this point for Universal Spiritual Experience first.  The primacy of this role in the cases of the two types of privileged experiences is harder to establish; so, we will re-examine the question when we discuss the special features of each of those two cases.

Degrees of Richness in Spiritual Experience

Ordinary Experiences exhibit different degrees of richness.  Seeing a patch of yellow is a simple Ordinary Experience. Seeing patches of a  number of colors is a richer Ordinary Experience.  Seeing those patches in a spatial pattern is even richer.  Addings sounds and smells adds further richness.

Spiritual Experiences also exhibit different degrees of richness.  But their degree of richness comes from the number and types of values assigned to the underlying Ordinary Experiences.

We will discuss this richness in the article on Universal Spiritual Experience.  We do not believe considering Privileged Spiritual Experience adds any new details.

Degrees of Complexity in Spiritual Experience

Spiritual Experiences exhibit different degrees of complexity.  The ability to create Spiritual Experiences of each degree of complexity depends on acquisition of the ability to construct various types of Ordinary Experiences.  For example, the abillity to construct a spiritual experience of beauty is dependent on the ability to construct an ordinary experience of an object.  Once a sentient mind constructs the experience of an object, it can assign to it a value as beautiful.

The table below summarizes the five degrees of Universal Spiritual Experiences:

Spiritual Development

Spiritual Growth

Spiritual Transformation

The Meaning or Significance of Spiritual Experience 

Types of Spiritual Experience

A Cassification of Types of Spiritual Experience

We roughly classify spiritual experiences into three types:

1. Universal (or Unprivileged)  Universal Spiritual Experiences are experiences shared by nearly all human beings.
2. Partially Privileged  Partially Privileged Spiritual Experiences are experiences shared by nearly all human beings who undergo specific training, ingest specific substances or have certain illnesses.
3. Fully Privileged  Fully Privileged Spiritual Experiences are experiences which are unique to certain individuals.

We adopt this classification because each type has a different epistemic status in terms of its relative certainty and verifiability by humanity as a whole.  In particular, for the two privileged types, there is an asymmetry between those who have the experience and those who only have the experience described to them.  For the privledged types of spiritual experience and for those who only have the experience described to them, there is the additional problem of evaluating testimony.  The asymmetry is that between being a witness and being a hearer and evaluator of a witness.

Universal Spiritual Experience

When asked to provide examples of spiritual experiences available to nearly everyone, the following examples come to mind:

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