Chapter 3: Using A Spiritual Research Paradigm For Research And Teaching

Why do we exist? What is truth? What are its parameters? How can it be known? Do gods and spirits exist? These are some of the most essential questions that have puzzled philosophers and other thinkers since ancient times. Over the millennia, various approaches have evolved in attempting to answer these and other questions about the world and the place of humans in it. For much of the last two centuries, evolving investigative paradigms utilizing quantitative analysis and various theoretical approaches to research drawn largely from the natural and empirical sciences have come to dominate much the scholarly quest for understanding life. Consequently, today most people in the educated segments of Western and Western-influenced societies defer to a quantitative scientific approach as the most accurate method to answer fundamental questions about life. Even many who are in the fields of social science and humanities utilize aspects of the dominant quantitative paradigms as yardsticks against which they assess the validity of much of their own disciplines’ research findings (Given, 2008).