is it true that today the community of science is trying to connect science with spiritualism?

Question

people who love science please answer,you may not be astudent of science.

Answer 1

No, they are not trying to connect the two. They just keep bumping into it. Each area of study expands as more knowledge is accumulated. There is bound to be an overlap somewhere.

Answer 2

No. There is only an accidental connection between the real physical world and the imagined world of the spiritualists and mystics and this has been demonstrated time after time. While some scientists may respect the Templeton Foundation, others regard it with contempt. It is true that a good deal of quantum mechanics is mysterious, but it is a different mystery from those proposed by whatever mystic happens to the the flavour of the month.

Until about 1700, almost all chemistry was a mystery. There was a great lot of work done by alchemists, who basically got nowhere because they didn't measure anything accurately and were hung up on the "quality" of their productions. They worked from books containing fact mixed with mystic speculations and lies put in by the supposed ancient authorities to cover the fact that they did not know as much as they claimed to. A lot of it was mixed up with astrology and other forms of magic. In spite of these disabilities some managed to make worthwhile of discoveries and inventions.

But from about 1690 two German chemists/alchemists tried to put combustion, one of the most common chemical transformations on a rational basis. To do this they supposed a sort of spiritual fluid which they called phlogiston. It was supposed to escape into the air when things were burnt, and was supposed to enter metal ores when they were smelted to produce metals like copper, iron etc. The trouble with phlogiston was that you could not capture it, it passed through hot metals and glass, and actually had negative weight.

Despite this the theory made a kind of sense and led to big advances over the next 90 years. But it was almost exactly wrong. After oxygen was discovered and chemists began to weigh things accurately that they found they could replace the "spiritual" phlogiston with a real substance that could be weighed and felt. Chemistry has never looked back since. Look up Becher, Stahl, phlogiston, Scheele, Priestley, Joseph Black and Antoine Lavoisier if you want to find out more.

Some "Christians" blather on about archaeologists finding that some of the material recorded in the Old Testament of the Bible is based on facts. There is no surprise in this, a lot of the Old Testament is history, particularly the later books. But almost none of the large events recorded in the books with the exception of the Babylonian captivity can be independently confirmed. However some archaeologists doubt that the dates that can be worked out from the Bible
are accurate, and many of the events that can be more or less confirmed were hundreds to thousands of years more recent than once supposed.

There is NO evidence of a world wide flood within the past few hundred million years, there is NO evidence that Moses led tens or hundreds of thousands of people out of Egypt. However that does not mean that large but local floods did not happen in the Tigris-Euphrates flood plains or that someone like Moses did not leave Egypt with a band of followers. They might even have been kicked out, which is something the ancient Egyptians did to "Asiatics" from time to time.

Answer 3

those who say science isn't looking for parallels with religion aren't paying attention:

"For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory...[we must turn] to those kinds of epistemological problems with which thinkers like the Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence." -Niels Bohr

"the great scientific contribution in theoretical physics that has come from Japan since the last war may be an indication of a certain relationship between philosophical ideas in the tradition of the Far East and the philosphical substance of quantum theory." - Werner Heisenberg

by the way - "What the Bleep do we know?" - (the movie?) is silly crap - did you see the old broad channeling, as an expert, the 5000 year old teacher spirit? don't attempt to "educate" yourself by watching this drivel

Answer 4

Being a research scientist.... You shouldn't mix-up those who read about science and don't necessarily understand it, and those that practice it daily.... There really is a big difference. None of the scientists I deal with see what they do as anything other than black & white logical science.... BUT when you try to describe what you are doing to those that don't fully understand they automatically look for a way to understand by using another way of looking at the topic that has no defined boundaries.

Answer 5

As far as my knowledge goes no community of science is consciously trying to connect science with spiritualism. However, some Spiritualists are trying to prove what science has discovered had already been discovered by Ancient 'seers', though they have used different terminology

Answer 6

I would say to a degree yes.... There was a recent program on CNN 360 about "belief" and science.... according to this program about 40% of scientist are Christians.... maybe they are feeling much more comfortable talking about their beliefs. These scientist don't feel that either is exclusively and distinctly separate. I feel that in many ways science validates spirituality.... and often scientific means can be used to answer and sometimes not answer spiritual questions.

Answer 7

There are indeed a fairly small number of scientists who are trying to answer questions about the boundaries of science and the relationship of science and religion. The Templeton Foundation is funding some of this work.

The large majority of scientists are atheist or agnostic and have no interest in religion.

You mention spiritualism, but I think you mean spirituality. "Spiritualism" usually refers to the fake mediums and seances held in the late 19th and early 20th century.

By the way, the so-called "scientific studies" of the effect of prayer are junk science and rejected by anyone who reads them carefully.

Answer 8

That depeds on the discipline. Astronomy, has been practiced by intensly religious people in most of it's history around the world.
The first book to mention the revolution of the Sun around the Earth is the Old Testament and Genesis in a much less mathematically and quantitatively rigorous way describes creation of our Universe resembing the Modern and most accepted Big Bang theory.
So, I think so. Especially, Newton & Einstein who definately needed a creator in the Universe. It's not just today that the scientific community is trying to connect spirituilism with scientific discoveries. This has been the case throughout human history. Even before the Bible was written.
The Egyptian engineers-architects and Pharohs were religous and superstisious. Otherwise they wouldn't necessairly build such large caskets, since the practical aspects of a pyramid are not revealed to us by the ancient Egyptians. Sure, the shape is earthquake and flood proof. But, most city buildings and sky scrapers aren't pyramids.
As for many Chemists and biologists. They're not all religous. Mendeleyev rejected spirituilism altogether. During the Communist regime in Russia. Religion was not tollerated by the Scientific and Political systems. Still,they were the first to launch an orbiting sattelite,first space walk etc. So,religion is not necessary for achieving breakthroughs as is desire,ability and curiosity.

Answer 9

There may be some scientists who are trying to find connections with spiritualism. That is an indvidual undertaking, not something "the community of science" could undertake.

Answer 10

This is absolutely untrue. There are, however, a few individuals who are members of the scientific community who recognise that there are valid questions to be asked that relate to the boundry between science and spiritualism. In some respects, quantum mechanics is more spiritualistic than scientific. Perhaps the best book on this topic is the recent work by Paul Davies, God and the New Physics. (hope I got that title correct. The book is in my office, not here at home...)