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Dr. Joseph Dillard is a psychotherapist with over forty year's clinical experience treating individual, couple, and family issues. Dr. Dillard also has extensive experience with pain management and meditation training. The creator of Integral Deep Listening (IDL), Dr. Dillard is the author of over ten books on IDL, dreaming, nightmares, and meditation. He lives in Berlin, Germany. See: integraldeeplistening.com and his YouTube channel. He can be contacted at: [email protected]

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Spirituality, Science, and Metaphysics

Joseph Dillard

“Science doesn't avoid metaphysics—it tries to minimize and clarify it.” —Karl Popper

The status of metaphysical assumptions - their truth or falsity - is important to both spirituality and science, to both Integral AQAL and mainstream empiricism, because both presuppose them. Both make unfalsifiable assumptions.

You can't escape metaphysical assumptions. What you can do is reduce the speculative, less defendable ones and minimize them and just keep the ones that are necessary to think, reason, or experience coherently. To think that you can escape them, or that science can, or that meditation will, is a fool's errand. Non--falsifiable metaphysical assumptions lie at the heart of both science and spirituality.

Common spiritual metaphysical assumptions

• Consciousness is fundamental or ontologically primary.
• There is a unifying ground of being (God, Brahman, non-duality, etc.).
• Inner experience reveals deep truths not accessible by reason or science.
• The self is illusory or transcendent.

Spirituality often claims justification based on experiential immediacy (mystical experiences), intuitions, or scriptural authority. The first two are subjective and personal proofs and the third is an appeal to authority, which is not a proof at all.

How science depends on metaphysical assumptions

Even the most empirical domains assume things like:

• The uniformity of nature: The laws of physics are the same everywhere.
• Causality: Events are caused by prior conditions.
• The reliability of perception and reason: Our senses and logic are valid tools.
• Existence of an objective world: There's something external to us that we can observe.

All of these are non-falsifiable—you can't prove them within science itself, but they're operationally indispensable. That is, you can't reason or even think about problems without making some unprovable assumptions.

So, how do we distinguish essential from non-essential metaphysical assumptions?

The major approaches are pragmatic indispensability, transcendental arguments, minimal metaphysics, and phenomenological reduction. Pragmatic indispensability is associated with people like William James and Charles Peirce. It notes that if you can't reason, experience, or function without a given metaphysical assumption, it's essential. For example, belief in causality and the persistence of identity over time is pragmatically unavoidable in science and spirituality, but belief in a “cosmic self” may not be required for reasoning—it's an optional layer.

Transcendental arguments, associated with Kant, ask, “What must be true for experience or knowledge to be possible?” Kant concluded that space, time, and causality aren't observed; they're preconditions of observing. A transcendental metaphysical framework doesn't aim to describe reality but to explain how knowing anything is possible. Therefore, they are unavoidable metaphysical assumptions.

Occam's Razor (the Law of Parsimony) and empiricism are the practice of minimal metaphysics. This principle states, “Assume as little as necessary. Don't multiply entities beyond necessity.” For example, we assume there's a physical world because it makes experience coherent, but we don't need to assume which matter is ultimate or whether it's all “made of consciousness.”

Phenomenological reduction, associated with Husserl and Heidegger, wants us to “bracket,” or temporarily set aside, metaphysical assumptions and focus on lived experience itself. This approach tries to sidestep metaphysical commitments altogether, but it tends to smuggle them back in subtle ways.

The problem for spiritual inquiry is not that it has metaphysical assumptions; science has them too. The problem is in whether or not they go beyond explanatory necessity. Can you explain how and why things happen without this or that metaphysical assumption? If you can, it is speculative, not essential. That follows from Occam's Razor. Can you effectively do what you need to do without appealing to this or that metaphysical assumption? If you can, it is speculative, not essential. That follows from pragmatism.

The goal is not to eliminate metaphysics, but to be consciously minimalist about it.

To determine which are essential:

• Ask: “Could I reason, perceive, or act without this assumption?”
• Evaluate whether it serves as a framework or merely a story.
• Seek coherence across perspectives—scientific, experiential, and ethical.

Mathematics is an interesting combination, in that it creates logically coherent, formal systems which are internally true but are still based on empirically unfalsifiable, a priori assumptions. However, those assumptions are not arbitrary, as they are based on internal consistency, fruitfulness, and coherence. Mathematics is not metaphysical because it does not make claims about the nature of reality. It's probably best to look at mathematics as a useful tool for defining, explaining, and creating things rather than as a description of the true nature of the universe.

It's helpful to make an inventory of your metaphysical assumptions and ask yourself what they are based on. Are they based on personal experience, intuition, or authority? If so, they may be true, but difficult or impossible to substantiate empirically. You are better off to not even try. If they are based on consensus science, you stand on stronger ground, but it remains unfalsifiable and metaphysical, and empiricists are wise not to pretend otherwise.