When
religion and science collide.
Stephen
Jay Gould suggested that science and religion should occupy separate or
non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA), with science leaving religion alone and vice
versa. However, many critics have pointed out that this won't work as long as
religion makes 'truth' claims which are contradicted by scientific evidence, such as the
age of the earth being 6000 years, species being created as separate entities by God, and
all humans being descended from Adam and Eve, who have 'fallen' due to the activities of a
talking snake.
By some
process unknown to geneticists, this 'fall' has transmitted 'original sin' to all Adam and
Eve's descendants. Consequently all the people on earth are now sinners and have
incurred both God's holy wrath and their own shame and guilt (even without doing
anything!). All are therefore in utter need
of redemption by the One True Religion.
So the belief in Creationism, Adam and Eve, original sin etc goes way beyond just
upholding a primitive creation myth. The entire theology of most Abrahamic sects is
based on the truth of Genesis
Those of us familiar with the Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) have
grown up expecting religion to be in conflict with science, as it has been since the time
of Galileo. The conflict is getting worse, with Christian groups trying
to censor evolution and promote Creationism in the classroom (in England, Korea and America), and Muslim groups issuing death fatwas for people who teach evolution. Part of the reason
for the conflict is that scientists and religious people have very different criteria for
the truth, with faith being more important than reason for religious believers.
Scientific vs Religious Truth
The
truths of science are open, verifiable and repeatable. Details of scientific
experiments are published in sufficient detail to allow them to be checked, confirmed and
repeated by persons other than the experimenter.
In contrast, the 'truths' of the Abrahamic religions are closed, unverifiable and
unrepeatable. They were revealed to one or a few 'prophets', once only, a long time
ago, and no-one has had a similar experience since (or if they have, they've been burned
as heretics).
Fortunately, Buddhism is more like science than the Abrahamic religions, in that it claims
that Buddha's mental experiments can be repeated by anyone who follows the correct
meditational procedures, from early 'realisations', all the way up to a total escape from
the limitations that our biological existence has placed on our minds.
Buddha didn't expect his students to believe what he said just on his authority, but advised them to test his teachings for themselves.
Also,
Buddhism doesn't have any creation myth to defend. Consequently the conflicts between
science and Buddhism are conflicts of interpretation rather than fact. Indeed,
it could be said that there is no conflict between Buddhism and science as such, but only
between Buddhism and one particular view of science, the view that is known as
'Scientism'.
How Buddhism views the world.
The
Buddhist view of the world differs from our 'commonsense' and conventional view, and also from that of classical
(pre 20th century) science. It does however have close similarities with modern
science, especially with fundamental
physics, evolutionary biology and information science. Buddhist philosophy is based on the Madhyamaka ('Middle Way') view, as developed by Nagarjuna who lived
around 150 - 250 AD.
The characteristics of the middle way view are:
(1) All things exist and can be known only in terms of their causes, effects
and interactions with other things. Nothing is self-defined, or a 'thing-in-itself' existing either 'from its own
side' or as an instantiation of an inherently existent universal ideal form.
These concepts can be difficult to grasp in our ordinary experience, but become more
obvious as we study quantum physics (to negate inherent existence - the view
that things exist from their own side) and evolutionary biology (to negate essentialism - the belief that things exist as
instantiations of ideal forms).
(2) All functioning things are both composite (composed of parts), and impermanent (subject to continual change).
Even fundamental particles such as electrons aren't unitary points, but are composed of infinite numbers of probabilistic parts. And
even empty space is impermanent, a seething mass of energy fluctuations and virtual
particles popping into and out of existence, and causing
perpetual fluctuations in all the particles that occupy space.
(3) Since they do not exist inherently, or by reference to 'inherently existing
other' (ideal forms), all phenomena exist in terms of three factors: (i) Their causes (ii)
Their composition (iii) Their categorization by the mind of an observer (however the
categories to which things are assigned exist in the mind, and only in the mind)
(4) Because phenomena are interrelated and impermanent, Buddhism views the
world as a system of interconnected processes rather than isolated things.
Relationships take precedence over things-in-themselves, long lasting things endure rather
than exist, and becoming is more important than being. In western terminology the
Madhyamaka would be classed as a process philosophy.
How science views the world: then and now, classical versus modern science.
Up until
about the middle of the nineteenth century, essentialism and inherent existence were
dominant in science, but since then both have been refuted and replaced by conceptualism and interdependence.
Chemistry
Chemistry
provided a bastion for essentialism up to the late nineteenth century. All substances were
composed of atoms of about 80 (then) known elements. Every atom of a particular element
was identical with another atom of the same element, and derived its properties from the
essential nature of that element. The atom was fundamental and unchangeable.
The first hint of atomic substructures came from the work of Mendeleev, who published his
periodic table in 1869. He left gaps in his table for as yet undiscovered elements and was
able to predict their properties.
Work on radioactivity in the early 20th century demonstrated that atoms were not
fundamental but were composed of elementary particles - electrons, protons and neutrons.
But these elementary particles did not act like classical 'things'. They were only
knowable by interactions with other particles, and the mere act of observation changed
their properties in an indeterminate way.
Radioactivity also demonstrated the phenomenon of subtle impermanence, where the seething
impermanence of the quantum vacuum interacted with unstable nuclei to force them to disintegrate
in a probabilistic rather than deterministic manner.
Evolution and Genesis
'The
Origin of the Species' was the first major blow against essentialism in the West. In
'Darwin's Dangerous Idea' Daniel Dennett says ' Even today Darwin's overthrow of essentialism
has not been completely assimilated .... the Darwinian mutation, which at first seemed to
be just a new way of thinking about kinds in biology, can spread to other phenomena and
other disciplines, as we shall see. There are persistent problems both inside and outside
biology that readily dissolve once we adopt the Darwinian perspective on what makes a
thing the sort of thing it is, but the tradition-bound resistance to this idea persists.'
Quantum physics
The
worldview of quantum physics differs radically from that of classical physics. Classical
physics regards the universe as being composed of clearly-defined building blocks
('things') which are specified by their own internal properties. Quantum physics sees the
universe as an ever-changing set of relationships between entities which can be defined
only in terms of those relationships. The nature of these entities
changes radically according to how they are observed. If you set up your experiment to
observe them as particles, then they behaved as particles. If you set it up to observe
them as waves, then they behaved as waves.
From Wiki
"For example, the particle and wave aspects of
physical objects are such complementary phenomena. Both concepts are borrowed from
classical mechanics, and measurements (e.g., the double-slit experiment) can demonstrate
one or the other, but not both, phenomena at a particular moment. The principle of
complementarity explains this as being due to the very nature of the measuring devices
used. A measuring device may be designed to demonstrate either the particle or wave
aspects, but the demonstration of one necessarily precludes the possibility of
simultaneously demonstrating the other, because the object being measured is unavoidably
affected by the measurement. It is impossible to design a measuring device that
demonstrates both phenomena simultaneously not because of lack of creativity on the part
of the experimenter, but simply because such a device is literally inconceivable.
Moreover, Bohr implies that it is not possible to regard objects governed by quantum
mechanics as having intrinsic properties independent of determination with a measuring
device."
Scientism and physicalism
Although
Buddhist philosophy is in close agreement with the facts of science, it does disagree with
one particular interpretation of science, known as scientism (or more accurately as physicalism)
Scientism is the belief that the methods of natural science, or the categories and things
recognized in natural science, form the only proper elements in any philosophical or other
enquiry, or that science, and only science, describes the world as it is in itself,
independent of perspective with a concomitant elimination of the psychological dimensions
of experience.
Physicalism is a
philosophical position holding that everything which exists is no more extensive than its
physical properties; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical
things:
"According
to physicalism, the language of physics is the universal language of science and,
consequently, any knowledge can be brought back to the statements on the physical
objects."
In contemporary philosophy, physicalism is most frequently associated with the mind-body
problem in philosophy of mind, regarding which physicalism holds that all that has been
ascribed to "mind" is more correctly ascribed to "brain" or the
activity of the brain. Physicalism is also called "materialism", but the term
"physicalism" is preferable because it has evolved with the physical sciences to
incorporate far more sophisticated notions of physicality than matter, for example
wave/particle relationships and non-material forces produced by
particles.
So both scientism and physicalism assert that the mind and all its products and processes
can be reduced to the laws of physics operating on physical structures (ie biochemical
reactions and physiological processes within the neurones of the brain).
Buddhist philosophy disagrees with this, and asserts that physical causality and physical
processes are in themselves incapable of producing mind. Buddhism
regards mind as an axiomatic feature of the universe, which cannot be reduced to physical
mechanisms.
Physical versus non-physical mind
Fortunately we have a precise definition of what is physical, and consequently what is
non-physical, due to the work of the great Buddhist philosopher, mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing.
Turing showed that any system which has a physical basis can be modelled and explained in
terms of algorithms and data structures. For practical purposes this means that any
physical system can be modelled and explained by reduction to computer procedures acting
on inputs, outputs and database tables.
Algorithms are of vital importance in modern science, and the usefulness of any scientific
model can be judged by its algorithmic compression, which means how much simpler the simulation,
or explanation is, than the phenomena that it describes.
Following on from Turing's work, Buddhist and other non-physicalist philosophers have
sought to refute scientism and physicalism by producing examples of phenomena that cannot
in principle be reduced to algorithms and datastructures, but which can be processed by
the human mind.
Examples are discussed in the following articles:
Mental
Designation and the Mother of all Algorithms
The Internal Contradictions of
Reductionism
Minds, Machines and Meaning
Objections to Computationalism
and Arguments Against Machine Intelligence
Non-algorithmic phenomena
Buddhism, Quantum Physics and Mind
Qualia - Objective versus Subjective Experience
Consciousness and mind are
not emergent phenomena of matter