The Spirit(s) of Science: Paradoxical Positivism as Religious Discourse among Spiritualists

Abstract

Language is but the means the spirit employs to give expression to itself [and] as the development of spirit progresses, words have to be laid aside, to give place to those more suitable to the growth of the spirit, as it advances in knowledge and refinement [but] whatever term may be applied to any condition of life, to give it comprehension in our minds, does not change the nature of the object spoken of … In regard to those internal principles of life … that give birth to worlds and creations vast, —the God-power, in other words, pervading immensity … we give today the scientific terms of … magnetism and electricity (Woodruff, 1862, pp. 156–158).

Notes

¹ There are an estimated 200,000 Spiritualists in the United States today.

²Richard and Adato (1980, pp. 187–188) quote one Lily Dale woman whose ideas support this point. As she told them, ‘There is no such thing as a miracle—all things exist and operate in obedience to the laws of nature. A miracle extends reason beyond natural laws … this we cannot and do not accept’.

³In his discussion of parapsychology as ‘deviant science’, McClenon (1984, pp. 186–187) argues that the search for ‘mechanisms’ to explain parapsychological phenomena is a key element in parapsychologists' attempts to present parapsychology as ‘scientifically legitimate’. ‘In the search for mechanisms’, he writes, ‘the assumption is that, through diligent investigation, factors conducive to psi will be uncovered, replicability of experimentation can then be increased, and a valid theory explaining the factors which are psi conducive will emerge … This orientation hypothesizes that psi will eventually either be integrated within mainstream science through this uncovering of its physical mechanisms or else science will be changed by the parapsychological research effort’. Contemporary Spiritualists are not as sophisticated in their attempts to discover the ‘mechanism’ behind mediumistic phenomena as parapsychologists are to find the mechanism behind psi, but the motivating factor—the search for at least the appearance of scientific legitimacy—appears to be the same.

⁴Spiritualists are not naive: alternative explanations for Spiritualist phenomena are always possible, including the possibility of fraud. As Lily Dale medium and healer Joel once told me in reference to the trance mediumship of another medium, ‘I've seen better acting on “The Brady Bunch!”’ a clear indication that seeing is not necessarily believing for Spiritualists. Spiritualists prefer to accept the spiritualistic explanation for phenomena, however, should empirical referents be available. As Hamilton medium Richard told me, ‘Too many weird things have happened to me for me to discount it [the spirit hypothesis]. I've been told too many things that have turned out to be true to ignore what my guides are telling me. I'm not saying there aren't other explanations. But this is the one that makes the most sense to me’.

⁵In this perception, Spiritualists are probably not wrong. Physicist Victor Stenger (1990, p. 304) for example, writes: ‘Not only has revelation proved unproductive as a source of knowledge about the universe, it has served to impede progress in knowledge … still, the belief that knowledge can somehow be obtained by paranormal means persists. I have issued a challenge to New Age channelers or others claiming that they are in contact with spirits or superhuman entities, to prove their claims by asking their sources to provide the answers to certain fundamental questions about the universe. All of these questions should be answered by the normal development of science within the next decade, so this test can provide us with definitive proof of a world beyond …’. Needless to say, Stenger doubts that such ‘proof’ will be forthcoming.

⁶For example, one visiting Lily Dale medium told me that ‘God’ ‘flows through’ the material world ‘like an electrical current’. This idea, he suggested, is not easy for people with a materialistic mind set to accept. He said, ‘accepting that … it's the ultimate leap in faith, a quantum leap, and a person that has the, ah, faith, is the word I'll use … can feel it. It's like an electrical current. That's how I would describe it … It's like electricity that flows through, the current that goes through the whole universe. God, Universal life force, whatever you want to call it … it's, you know, it's out there some place, we know that …’. For this medium and for Richard discussed above, spiritual reality is ‘out there some place’, and cannot be ignored or ‘science’ will remain incomplete.