Paper delivered at First International Conference on Science Spirituality at the
Bangladesh Center for Science and Spirituality, Dhaka, Bangladesh
January 7 and8, 2008
Gerald Grudzen, PhD
The sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam all have references to the healing power of Yahweh/God/Allah and His power to cure physical, mental and spiritual afflictions. Such cures, however, are almost always connected to the believer’s faith in the divine power to heal him or her. These sacred texts indicate that illness of the body is a temporary phenomenon that pales in comparison to illness of the soul. Bodily illness is not caused by God. Human suffering may occur partly to enable human beings to realize that we do not have complete control over our human existence. It also allows us to place our human life in a more profound spiritual context that rests ultimately in God’s providential order. This divine order allows for the full expression of human freedom and does not ordinarily contravene natural processes within the biological and anatomical realms. Recent studies in neuroscience show, however, that most chronic diseases do have a mental component that can be altered through various treatment procedures that includes mental and emotional factors. Neuroscience studies now show that the mind, brain and body are intimately connected.
[1] Scientific studies confirm that there can be a form of top down causality in which the intentions of consciousness affect various bodily states. Meditative practices have become one of the treatment tools used in Complementary Alternative Medicine (CAM).
The power of thought to affect our physical being has been well documented in the past half century and the fact that our beliefs often greatly influence the state of our health and ability to heal from illness. A patient needs to have a deep belief in his or her treatment plan for it to become fully effective. We know that shamanistic healers in indigenous cultures rely extensively on rituals, that help the person seeking treatment to enter an altered state of consciousness in which the incantation or prayer can achieve its results. These prayers or rituals also have a social dimension within the context of a social or cultural group. Language is, by its very nature, social and inter-subjective.
“Neuroscience provides many types of evidence concerning the social character of cognition in animals and humans …. The person is part of a social-moral order, not something to be found in the neural account. Human actions are explained by reasons and historical narratives, not by physical and chemical causes. Through narratives we collaboratively create ourselves as persons as we enact our place in a social world.”
[2]Just as the identities of infants are created by their social interaction with their parents and others in their social world, so, too, can changes occur in our psychophysical states through the use of emotionally significant language in healing rituals. We do not consider such changes to be magical in nature but rather based upon the inescapable connection between cognition and neurological and biological systems within the human person. The state of mind of the person receiving the treatment plays a key role in its success. The spiritual power of the healer and the state of mind of the person seeking healing are crucial to the success of the treatment or ritual. In this sense a community praying for a sick person and telling them that you are praying for them, plays a similar role to that found among shamans in indigenous cultures where a community gathers together to support the shamanic ritual. The practice of community prayer for an ill person may also have an impact on the ill person in that it at least may relieve the sense of isolation that often comes with a serious illness and inability to participate in normal social relations. Prayer can also help the ill person to relax and release the stress and tension that often accompanies most forms of disturbances within a person’s physical and bodily systems. It is important, however, that the person receiving the prayer enters consciously into the action of the community and believes that it can alter the situation in which ill persons find themselves. Prayer can also help to mobilize the immune system of the patient when the “fight or flight” syndrome has been taxed beyond its capability to effectively respond to the situation in which the illness occurred. We cannot guarantee that communal prayer will effectively impact a patient to bring about the restoration of their health. We do know, however, that overcoming isolation and fear help a patient to mobilize their internal healing powers. In this sense, it seems clear also that communal prayer helps patients if they are open to its ameliorating influence in their consciousness. Obviously, communal prayer for those who are ill should only take place when the patient or person with the illness is receptive to such an intervention.
Why Does God Allow Suffering, Illness and Death?
All three monotheistic religions have grappled with the fundamental questions about why God allows suffering and illness to occur even when the person suffering is clearly an innocent victim. We know that millions of people in the past century have been tortured and killed, and that natural disasters have brought unimaginable suffering and death upon the human family. The answers to these questions seem to lie in the evolution of life on the planet earth. Recent studies on the genetic evolution of human life seem to indicate that that some form of human suffering and death are a necessary component for the continued growth of biological and human diversity and the expansion of human consciousness.
We can no longer accept the clockmaker God who designed every detail of a determinate mechanism. But one option today is a revised deism in which God designed the world as a many-leveled creative process of law and chance. Paul Davies is an exponent of this position. A patient God could endow matter with diverse potentialities and let the world create itself. We can say that God respects the integrity of the world and allows it to be itself, without interfering with it, just as God respects human freedom and allows us to be ourselves.
[3] God allows suffering to take place but always in the light of his providential goodness and mercy. Divine revelation teaches us that whatever tribulations we may face in our earthly life, they are considered insignificant compared to the rewards we realize through our life of faith. The life of faith will entail some fundamental tests that will allow us to grow in spiritual maturity. Our physical well-being is, in some mysterious sense, connected to our spiritual well being. The health of the mind and spirit do have repercussions on the health of the body. The evolution of Homo sapiens over the past 20 to 30 thousand years represents the most advanced development in the universe that we presently inhabit and has given us unprecedented knowledge of the universe that we inhabit. The Abrahamic faith traditions were key players in the initial development of philosophy and the natural sciences in the West. This early period of development of rational medicine did not conflict with the profound life of faith that characterized most of the early medical pioneers. From the time of Galen onward, Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars explored both the parameters of rational medicine without any substantial conflict with the mysteries of their monotheistic faith. They also developed a strong sense that the epistemic structure of human knowledge allowed for more than a single source of knowledge about the universe. Cosmology and epistemology were viewed as gateways to the sacred dimension of life that enveloped every aspect of human and non-human existence. The sense of the sacred character of the cosmos revealed its sacramental structure as the manifestation of God’s presence and wisdom in the unfolding of the cosmic plan.
In the early historical development of the monotheistic faith traditions, Greek medical science became the dominant scientific paradigm for treatment of bodily illnesses. The Hippocratic tradition and its further development by Galen in the late second century CE formed a powerful rational understanding of how the body functioned as a physical, organic system. This rational system of health and healing emphasized the balance of the four humors and the natural ability of these bodily systems to heal themselves when properly redirected by someone knowledgeable in the humoral system’s function and dysfunction.
The growth of contemporary holistic medicine in the West bears many similarities to the Galenic system that prevailed in many parts of the Christian and Islamic world for over a millennium and still exists today in parts of the Middle East and South Asia. More integrated models of care in the West have begun to realize that body, mind and spirit form a unity and all aspects of the human person need to be addressed in a comprehensive health assessment. Medical schools in the West have also begun to acknowledge the spiritual dimensions by including courses that help medical students to understand the role of spirituality in the lives of their patients. Stanford University School of Medicine has been one of the pioneers in this field and my wife, Marita Grudzen, has taught courses in Spirituality and Ageing to the Stanford medical students for over a decade. She has also prepared a presentation for this conference.
The growth of understanding of more natural ways of healing that rely on ancient sources of wisdom, particularly those coming from indigenous cultures, reflects a new understanding of scientific thinking. The Scientific Revolution and its accompanying epistemology based upon instrumental reason and purely empirical, quantitative methods, resulted in a type of medicine that tended to rely upon diagnostic tools that excluded the mind and spirit and viewed the human person as a purely anatomical, biological and neurological construct without a central principle of entelechy such as was common in the period preceding the Scientific Revolution.
The work of Thomas Kuhn in Structures of Scientific Reasoning helped to clarify that scientific reasoning has had different organizing principles in different historical epochs and that the scientific method is not univocal in nature. Even though we must admit that much of previous scientific thought was clouded with superstition (e.g., astrology) and bias (misogyny), it contained insights that contemporary science could well emulate.
Among the most important insights of the medieval era was its ability to understand theology as a sacred science with its own logical structure based upon the core principles of divine revelation. The central concept of theology was fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. The act of faith was not blind or without rational justification. The medieval philosophers and theologians were often also schooled in the medical science of their era. Among the most notable were Avicenna, Albert the Great and Moses Maimonides. Each of these wisdom figures bridged the realms of medical science with reason (philosophy) and revelation (sacred texts). They did not avoid the complex questions that resulted from their synthesis of faith and reason, but instead attempted to show that natural reason did not contradict the truths of faith.
Classification of Sciences within Islam
One of the earliest attempt at a classification of scientific thought within Islam
occurred with the Arab philosopher and scientist, al-Farabi (870-950 CE), often called the “Second Master” after Aristotle because of his mastery of both philosophy and the natural sciences. He is also known as the “Father of Islamic Neoplatonism.” In the Latin West, he was known as Abunaser. Much of his writing was influenced by Neoplatonic theories of emanation but he did recognize the value of knowledge arrived at through music, philosophy and the Aristotelian natural sciences. Like Plato, Al-Farabi also wrote an important work on political philosophy entitled The Virtuous City. In his Book of the Enumeration of the Sciences, al-Farabi developed the first Islamic interpretation of the full range of knowledge available to humanity within a Neoplatonic and Islamic perspective. Within the Neoplatonic view of metaphysics, the deity does not have direct
contact with the earthly realm but rather acts through a series of intermediary steps or intelligences that emanate from the ultimate source leading down to the origin of the human intellect which had several dimensions. For al-Farabi all knowledge had its source in the First Intellect, which emanated from the deity or First Existence or the One.
[4] Because of the importance of the celestial realm in Islamic Neoplatonism and also because many of the interpretations of Qu’ranic passages, the study of Astronomy became a central focus of the Islamic sciences. Ptolemy remained the central figure in the Islamic understanding of the heavens, but the tables used to compute the movement of stars were largely drawn from Persian and Indian sources. Later in the Middle Ages, Islamic astronomers began to suspect that the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic picture of the celestial and heavenly realm did not fit adequately into their mathematical tables of the stars (Zij). Islamic astronomers were open to the contributions that they found in other cultures. In the field of medicine, Islamic scholars interacted extensively with Jewish and Christian medical philosophers and scientists.
[5].
The influence of Neoplatonism upon the Islamic and Christian interpretation of scientific thinking was pervasive through most of the medieval era. The arrival of the Aristotelian corpus into the West via Arabic sources began to change in the thirteenth century. Aristotle had developed a hylomorphic theory of body and soul that did differ from that of the Neoplatonists. Aristotle concluded that the soul was the actual form of the body and not a separate subsisting being independent of the body. Much of the earlier spirituality found within Latin Christianity had viewed the soul as the rational, directing force of the body and led to the neglect or even contempt of bodily desires. The resurgence of Aristotelian thought and its resultant synthesis in the works of Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica) resulted in a reformulation of faith and reason within the Roman Catholic faith tradition. The decline of this harmony of faith and reason began to take hold in the philosophy of William of Occam, who held a nominalist epistemology leading to the separation of faith and reason. According to Occam, faith and reason were completely independent sources of truth. The attack on philosophical reasoning within the Islamic world of scholarship after the Scholastic era, led to the literal reading of the Qu’ran as the font of all knowledge without the need for philosophical or scientific truth. In both cases (Christianity and Islam) divine revelation began to be seen as independent of any philosophical or scientific reasoning, even though philosophy remained an important discipline in certain sectors of the Muslim and Christian world.
[6] Current philosophical trends within the field of spirituality and science emphasize process thought as a key to development of a contemporary natural theology that may be acceptable to members of the Abrahamic faith traditions. The leading exponent of this view has been Ian Barbour, often cited as the originator of the scholarly study of religion and science.
[7] Barbour follows much of the thought of Whitehead and John Cobb and attempts to solve the problem of why God could create a world in which so much suffering and evil seem to exist.
But the God of process thought is actually very personal and responsive to ongoing events in the world. God is present in the unfolding of every event but never exclusively determines the outcome. This is a God of persuasion rather than coercion. For process theologians, God is not (acting) as an omnipotent ruler but the leader and inspirer of an interdependent community of beings. John Cobb and David Griffin speak of God as a “creative-responsive love,” which affects the world but is also affected by it. God’s relation to human beings is used as a model for God’s relation to all beings. Process theologians stress God’s immanence and participation in the world, but they do not give up transcendence.
[8] Process thought can be helpful in understanding the nature of healing within the
Abrahamic faith traditions. God’s mercy and love are always present in our afflictions, but God also depends on human beings to understand the nature of their illness and take the steps necessary for healing to occur. The curative process involves both faith and reason within the monotheistic religions but also resonates with the philosophical and medical systems found within Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism. Buddhism particularly emphasizes the role of the mind in suffering and presents ways to eliminate much of this suffering based upon the false self or ego. Hinduism draws extensively upon the concept of Maya or illusionary thinking as one of the causes of suffering. Taoism stresses the need for balance in one’s life to find the Tao or Way to inner peace and solidarity with all living beings. The relationship of health and healing to various forms of spirituality deserves further study and exploration as we enter the global era of health care. The growth of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) represents an important sector where further study of the spirituality and medical science can occur. It is important, however, that researchers exploring this field have a solid grounding in the philosophical dimensions of the major faith traditions. Various non-reductionist, scientific models may be necessary to accommodate the underlying epistemologies found in the diverse cultures represented within the Abrahamic faith traditions and other forms of spiritual practices found in Asia, Africa and among indigenous cultures.
I would like to close with a quote from Professor Barbour about the importance of a holistic approach to spirituality and science that is relevant to health and healing.
Theism and materialism are alternative belief systems, each claiming to encompass all reality. If science is taken to be the only acceptable form of understanding, then explanation in terms of evolutionary history, biochemical mechanisms, or scientific theories excludes all other forms of explanation. I suggest that the concept of God is not a hypothesis formulated to explain the relation between particular events in the world in competition with scientific hypotheses. Belief in God is primarily a commitment to a way of life in response to distinctive kinds of religious experience in communities formed by historic traditions; it is not just a substitute for scientific research. Religious beliefs offer a wider framework of meaning in which particular events can be contextualized.
As an alternative to reductionism, I will defend holism, the thesis that the behavior of a system affects the behavior of its parts. In addition to the bottom-up causal influence of parts on integrated wholes, wholes exert a top-down influence on their component parts – not in violation of lower-level laws but by setting boundary conditions for these laws.
[9] Holistic health practices can represent a form of the holism of which Barbour
speaks in the quote above. Only when we view human persons in their complete unity of mind, body and spirit can we effectively address either health or illness. As the field of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) continues to grow, spiritual practices will become a new field of study for alleviating pain and promoting wellness.
[1] See “Brain, Mind and Behavior,” by Malcom Jeeves in Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, Edited by Warren S. Brown, Nancy Murphy and H. Newton Malony (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), Chapter four, pp. 73-98.
[2] Ian G. Barbour. Nature, Human Nature and God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002) p. 75.
[3] Ian Barbour, Ibid., p.26.
[4] Gerald Grudzen and Shamsur Rahman. Spirituality and Science: Greek, Judaeo-Christian and Islamic Perspectives (Bloomington, Indiana: Author House: 2007), pp. 122-123.
[5] See also Grudzen’s Medical Theory about the Body and Soul in the Middle Ages: The First Medical Curriculum in the West (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007). This book deals extensively with the interaction of Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars in the development of the first Western medical curriculum called the Articella.
[6] See the work of Seyyed Hossein Nasr for his interpretation of Islamic illuminationist philosophy as a contining force within Islam, particularly in Iran. Nasr’s critique of Western secular culture can be found in Man and Nature, The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (Chicago: ABC International Group, 1997).
[7] See Ian Barbour’s classic work, Religion and Science; Historical and Contemporary Issues (2007).
[8] Barbour. Nature, Human Nature and God. p. 34.
[9] Barbour. Ibid. page 5 & 6.
