Challenges and Criticisms in the Field of Spirituality, Religiousness, and Health

Abstract

Research in the field of spirituality is young. Empirical research started in the 60s, but conceptual issues have only been addressed recently. We sketch this history briefly. We also discuss some difficulties: Due to the implicit opposition to meta-physics that entered science through the process of enlightenment many see spirituality as an “un-scientific” topic. We argue that there is no such thing, but only methodology that can be called inadequate and hence unscientific. Mostly, the research field is beset with the problem that different authors use different definitions and concepts in their research on spirituality. We introduce some prominent ones, starting with a very vague definition that only requires some meaning-making for something to be spiritual up to a clearly theistic concept of God to be included. King and Koenig (BMC Health Serv Res 9:116. https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-9-116, 2009) postulated four dimensions: faith, practice, importance for wellbeing and experience to be necessarily included in any definition of spirituality in research. We advocate a simple description of spirituality as “implicit or explicit relatedness towards a reality beyond the needs of the individual ego, in cognition, emotion, motivation and action” (Walach H, J Stud Spiritual 7:7–20, 2017). We point to the difficulty of previous research that has only included cognitive concepts, such as faith, or coping, into research, decoupling spirituality from its experiential component. We introduce our own attempt at capturing this using the novel questionnaire “Exceptional Experiences Questionnaire” (Kohls N, Walach H, Spiritual Health Int 7:125–150, 2006). We close with pointing to the problem of how to evaluate statements of inner experience or introspective epistemology.