What does science mean relating to Spirit?

Science, from the ecology of rainforests to the structure of the human brain, from quantum physics to astronomy is a vast, ever-developing body of knowledge and active research and analysis processes. We might usefully think of science relevant to spiritualism as these three approaches or types:

The testing of “psi” phenomena.  (Psi is a useful umbrella term meaning anomalous events, spiritually inspired phenomena not explicable by current materialist or physicalist science).   Psi phenomena that have been and are being tested include: mental and physical mediumship; near-death experiences; spiritual healing; reincarnation cases; spirit/thought effects on electronics; remote-viewing and prediction among others.

 

Proper understanding of the strangeness (or non-intuitive) nature of existence.

This might include Relativity (the famous E=mc²⁾ which states that time is a sort of 4^th dimension with space; quantum physics with its idea that all “matter” and energy is fluctuations in fields – interactions of “information” might be everything. The vast size and age of the Universe, including the nature of black holes; the possible existence of dark matter and dark energy which might make up the bulk of the known Universe; recently discovered gravitational waves. There are hundreds of science explainers on YouTube for example.

The bottom line might be that there is no such thing as “hard matter”, rather everything that exists seems to be made of quantum fields – this is such a strange nature of existence that perhaps the survival of consciousness, perhaps as another sort of field, is not particularly different!?

 

Consciousness as primary to all existence. This is the more speculative, but certainly not unreasonable aspect of some scientific, philosophical and spiritual thinking.   Jeffrey Kripal's short book “The Flip” suggests that traditional scientific models of (nuclear) physics as fundamental, with then chemistry, then biology built from there, with thoughts/consciousness as an “epiphenomenon” (sort of final, eccentric, fluffy unimportant stuff on top) arising finally should be flipped, with consciousness as fundamental to all other fields and so to everything else. This would explain why mental mediumship from spirit comes as thought or consciousness. God/Spirit/the divine/love/fundamental existence is consciousness.

 

For our work, some terms might need explaining:

 

Brainwaves 

Known to science as “neural oscillation” is a recent and complex observation that groups of brain cells (neurons) and whole areas of our brains do fire together in synchronised ways at times. We can measure these electric waves with instruments like EEG detectors. Different types of activity by different groups of neurons reflect, for example, high active concentration or deep sleep. It is suggestive that different areas of our brains show different types of activity when we are meditating or working as mental medium or doing spiritual healing compared to other normal activities. It can be suggested, though not proved (yet) that affecting brain waves might be how spirit contacts the mind of the medium.

Testing mediumship messages   “Blind” (or double or triple etc blind) trials. This is where the medium, for example, doesn't know who the sitter is and it may be that the sitter (who the message is for) scores accuracy of the message and another random message. Surveys of mediumship accuracy and meaning without blinding can still be valuable, particularly when many are analysed together to give large numbers of scores, although each separate assessment by a sitter is subjective, that is known only to them.

 

Control Group

Where we might survey and/or test the results of spiritual healing, one scientific safeguard against experimenter bias is to have a control group, for example people with the same health issue who do not receive spiritual healing along with conventional medical treatment.