Category: scientific research

Since the dawn of human civilisation, people have considered the relationship between belief and observed phenomena. This tension was given greater impetus during the Enlightenment when the growing predictive power of the natural sciences often appeared at odds with religious dogma. The development of psychological sciences at the end of the nineteenth century added a new dimension. Psychology attempts to understand the human condition, which of course, includes religious beliefs. One Western approach to making sense of the potential conflict between faith and science was the Religion of Science (RoS). RoS was a philosophical idea developed by Paul Carus around the turn of the twentieth century; it proposed unity between all reliable religious and scientific knowledge.

The idea of symmetry between belief and science endured and found a new audience in the 1960s when Westerners began to embrace Eastern religious practices such as meditation and yoga. These cultural changes created the conditions for an attempted convergence between belief, science and medicine. Scientists with connections to religious traditions began to investigate the health potential of meditation, from which Jon Kabat-Zinn’s version of mindfulness meditation emerged.¹ From its very beginnings, mindfulness was believed to be an integration of Buddhist and scientific understandings. Although a systematic or scientific explanation of how ancient religious beliefs were consistent with experimental science was never provided.

Each Buddhist school has a different worldview based on overarching concepts such as the authority of scripture, the ideas of Nagarjuna or other philosophical or esoteric concepts. But no Buddhist tradition shares their world view with science; each has different ways of knowing ‘mind and matter’. So while science can measure the effects of belief-based practices from any religion, it cannot be one with them; the scientific method cannot be combined with or compromise the essential spiritual message of religious traditions.

Because of this and other misunderstandings, it was not possible to establish a theoretical framework for mindfulness. In essence, there was no full scientific description of mindfulness or how it worked. And although thousands of preliminary studies indicated mindfulness was a promising intervention, there was very little robust proof to evidence these claims.² There is much good research in this field, but most of the thousands of published scientific papers appear to have followed a preliminary trajectory. And despite an estimated research investment of over $1.6 bn, we still don’t really know much about mindfulness.

The main issue is that privileged scientists working at elite institutions in the 1970s made claims about religious knowledge without any real evidence. And many statements made in academic publications were accepted by scientific communities without hesitation. While the psychological sciences can observe the effects of religious practices on people, there is no framework for understanding the nature and significance of those practices. This is not to argue that religion or science is ‘better’, simply that they configure and understand the human experience from different and often incompatible perspectives.

Notes

1. Morris, Stephen. “The Rise of Medicalised Mindfulness During the 1970s and 1980s: The Attempted Convergence of Religion and Science.” Brief Encounters 6, no. 1 (2022).

1. Van Dam, Nicholas T., Marieke K. Van Vugt, David R. Vago, Laura Schmalzl, Clifford D. Saron, Andrew Olendzki, Ted Meissner et al. “Mind the hype: A critical evaluation and prescriptive agenda for research on mindfulness and meditation.” Perspectives on psychological science 13, no. 1 (2018): 36-61.