#04 - Kardec's Methodology
According to Allan Kardec,
“Spiritism is a science that deals with the nature, origin and destiny of spirits, as well as their relations with the corporeal world.”
Can we assume that his method of formulating spiritist teachings can be considered scientific?
To begin to answer this question, we must first know how a scientific theory is formed and how it evolves over time.
Initiatives to understand and categorize the world around us have been recorded from ancient Egypt, Aristotle's Greece, Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei’s Renaissance, the formulations of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon… among many others.
The area of knowledge called philosophy of science determines whether a theory can be considered scientific or not. Nowadays, the researchers who are the most important representatives of this branch of philosophy are Karl Popper and his disciple Imre Lakatos.
Simply put, a scientific research program must propose a rigid core of theories or hypotheses.
The area of knowledge called philosophy of science determines whether a theory can be considered scientific or not. Nowadays, the researchers who are the most important representatives of this branch of philosophy are Karl Popper and his disciple Imre Lakatos.
Surrounding it will be a belt of auxiliary hypotheses relating to its core. As new facts emerge, they must influence these assumptions in order to confirm or update the core.
When a research program systematically leads to the discovery of new facts, it is called
progressive.
Otherwise, it will be considered
degenerate
and should be changed or even
abandoned.
Allan Kardec, aware of the need for the Spiritist Teachings not to crystallize into dogma and evolve together with human knowledge, organized it into a very similar dynamic.
Spiritism has a rigid core formed by the following principles:
- Existence of God;
- Immortality of the spirit;
- Plurality of existences;
- Communicability between embodied and disembodied;
- Plurality of inhabited worlds.
Such empirical bases gave rise to several accessory theories (the so-called accessory belt):
- Nature of divine attributes;
- Applications / Results of the Law of Cause and Effect;
- Reincarnation mechanics;
- Types of mediumship and psychic phenomena; Among many others.
This layer of hypotheses makes contact with the outside world and has the function of constantly updating itself, thus measuring the validity of the core concepts.
- Kardec validates this dynamic in several points of the Spiritist Teachings, specifically in his book Genesis, Chapter I (item 55):
“Pressing forward with progress, Spiritism will never be surpassed, because if new discoveries were to show it to be in error on one point, it would modify itself on that point. If a new truth is revealed, it accepts it.”
– Allan Kardec
Still in Paragraph 55 of the Chapter of the same work, Kardec states that "relying on facts [the Spiritist Teachings] has to be, and cannot but be, essentially progressive."
What is the interaction between the ordinary sciences and Spiritism?
Mechanical and electrical phenomena, for example, belong to the area of physics; the behavior of molecules is the subject of chemistry; organic phenomena are examined by biology, and so on.
- Although of a scientific nature, as shown, Spiritism is not intended to replace or compete with human science, nor does it seeks to be validated by it. One of its objectives is to advance our knowledge in a field of reality, here called the spiritual world, which is not the object of study of these materialistic sciences.
“Spiritism has, as agents, intelligences that have independence, free will and are not subject to our whims; that’s why they escape our laboratory processes and our calculations, and have since been outside the realm of science itself.”
— Allan Kardec
Still in Paragraph 55 of the Chapter of the same work, Kardec states that "relying on facts [the Spiritist Teachings] has to be, and cannot but be, essentially progressive."