The institutional affiliation
Spirituality is a broad concept which contains a sense of connection to something universal, to something bigger than ourselves. A spiritual experience is often described as transcendent and even sacred, and can be connected to an ultimate or immaterial reality. Spirituality allows a person to discover the essence of his/her being and the deepest values with which a person takes a place in the society. Philosophy relates spirituality more to a personal search finding a greater meaning and a purpose in the existence (Groff & Smoker, 1994). Spirituality within patient care helps to address the patients’ understanding of illness or change. Spiritual perspectives provide a context wherein stress or anxieties about physical and mental functioning can be understood. As for me, I associate spirituality with a search for the deeper meaning and sense of everything, love for God, for yourself, and for everybody.
Recently, the interest to the relationship between spirituality and science including medicine has grown significantly. Many medical schools have added spirituality seminars in the medicine courses to their training programs. Doctors and nursing personnel are learning how to apply a spiritual history within the patient’s medical history. Moreover, many current scientific researches and studies demonstrate an increasing connection between spiritual faith and health. For example, a prayer decreases anxiety and stress, and improves a patient’s ability to recover. Even medical professionals recognize that a patient’s religious beliefs influence medical decisions and the way the recovery process is going.
Researches on the relationships between religion, spirituality and health have been developed dramatically over the past century what influenced the further development of theoretical concepts. Thus, taking the characteristics of complex adaptability seriously also means taking into consideration the pluralistic order-and-disorder of nature (Pedersen & Wright, 2013). Pluralism can be identified as a theory or a belief containing more than one view or basic idea as the ground of reality. The pluralistic order-and-disorder is itself explaining what is relevant in the environment around us. Accordingly, there are as many surroundings as adaptive systems. The pluralism's basic belief is the notion that human beings do not simply discover and copy, but the way we see the reality and take it as truth is always influenced by our social and historical context (Pedersen & Wright, 2013). For example, each religion, community or culture has its own idea of what death is and what happens to a person at death. Thus, there is no universal right or wrong. That is why each view always contains elements of subjectivity, and reality itself consists of the many rather than the one. However, pluralism identifies values and their nature as an objective, and the pursuit of them is the essence of a human being (Pedersen & Wright, 2013). Nevertheless, we all have our own set of values and may detest the opposite ones or just accept the presence of other ideas.
Scientism started emerging as a new method centuries ago proving to be one of the main weapons to help people to make their lives more comfortable. Scientism is a quite speculative world theory about the ultimate reality of the universe; the belief that there is all the real knowledge contained within the frames of science (Artigas, 2000). Within its concept there is no objective moral truth in the universe to discover outside a human being context. Scientism claims that all human knowledge is empirical emerging from contact with empirical reality (Artigas, 2000). As long as we agree on that empirical reality is a unified whole, so our knowledge of reality is also unified across different subject fields. Nevertheless, it mainly focuses on human behavior and beliefs broadly generalizing entire fields of the academic expertise. I believe scientism is just at the center of the disputes about the relationship between science and religious spirituality. Scientism can be usefully considered in terms of an excessive admiration for science grounded in an erroneous conception of the history, culture, nature, and methods of science.
The concept of postmodernism turned out to be a turning point between centuries and has been defined as both the beginning and the end of modernity. Postmodernism is an approach to reality that is having a great effect on culture, education, healthcare, science, the study of history and people's views (Rodriguez, 2009). It sees the reality as a conceptual construct and result of scientific practice. Some theories of postmodernism took an additional step saying that since fiction is all we can know, humans should treat life as an abstract stage for acting. In place of realizing that reality is a construction, we can start inventing ourselves and alternative "realities," as forms of social experiments (Rodriguez, 2009). According to postmodernism, we all create our own reality and God has nothing to do with it. Denying the absolute truth, postmodernism concentrates on feelings, emotions, and reflection. Each person develops his or her own moral values which are shaped by the culture and society, but still there is a strong emphasis on self-expression and individualism (Rodriguez, 2009). However, it has its own negative sides as numerous rewriting of history what led to the point when no one could be sure about this or that event in the past. The postmodern philosophies can be espoused in order to develop a complete and adequate science for different disciplines as, for example, nursing. This becomes possible due to an appeal to pragmatism. Without philosophical basis there can be no substantial development of nursing perspectives (Rodriguez, 2009).
References
Artigas, Mariano. (2000). The Mind of the Universe: Understanding Science and Religion. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press.
Groff, Linda, Smoker, Paul. (1994). Spirituality, Religion, Culture and Peace: Exploring the Foundations For Inner-Outer Peace In The Twenty First Century. UNESCO-Sponsored Contribution of Religion to the Culture of Peace conference. 12-18-1994
Pedersen, N., & Wright, C. (2013). Truth and pluralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rodriguez, Tom. (2009). Postmodern Philosophies of science: Pathways to Nursing reality. Retrieved 7 March 2016, from http://www.resourcenter.net/images/snrs/files/sojnr_articles2/Vol09Num01Art02.pdf
