It was over this background that, in the mid-1970s, I had an opportunity to demonstrate to sceptical psychiatry residents that practice of psychotherapy follows hypothetico-deductive model of science, just as does the rest of clinical medicine. During those decades, psychotherapy out-come studies were highlighting the importance of such subjective phenomena as confidence, motivation, faith etc., suggesting that science cannot afford to ignore these predominantly subjective entities. Here, and in subsequent text, the word ‘faith’ is used only in the sense of complete trust or confidence on the basis of authority or assumed correctness. At that time, I realised the dimensional quality inherent in science in relation to the objective-subjective nature of phenomenal data. For example, the physical sciences deal exclusively with data generated from objective, physical events. Psychology and psychotherapy deal with both objective and subjective or experiential events. At the other extreme is the study of those phenomena like telepathy, consciousness, whose data are predominantly subjective experiences.

Over the years, my understanding of science evolved into a set of simple principles and concepts that could integrate both objectivity and subjectivity, faith, and spirituality into the fold of scientific enquiry within its standard hypothetico-deductive frame-work. This article is a brief description of these principles and concepts divested of complicated and controversial issues, with a view to stimulate further debate on these issues, without attempting to answer all the questions. They are arranged in the following order:

These findings suggest that man is hard-wired for a scientific manner of acquiring knowledge irrespective of what he chooses to study. The mental process that happens in the mind between intentional perception and the consequent knowledge involves scientific process.