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 Buddhism and the Natural Sciences
Posted: Saturday July 10, 2004 10:33 PM EST
John B. Cobb, Jr., Ph.D. is Professor of Theology Emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, California, and Co-Director of the Center for Process Studies there. His many books currently in print include: Reclaiming the Church (1997); with Herman Daly, For the Common Good; Becoming a Thinking Christian (1993); Sustainability (1992); Can Christ Become Good News Again? (1991); ed. with Christopher Ives, The Emptying God: a Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation (1990); with Charles Birch, The Liberation of Life; and with David Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (1977). He is a retired minister in the United Methodist Church.
Let me begin my saying that I am poorly informed with respect to the history of the relation of Buddhism and the natural sciences as these developed in India, China, Korea, and Japan. This is not because I question the importance of these sciences. I have no doubt, for example, that people in these countries learned much about the human body that Westerners are only now beginning to appropriate. What role Buddhism played in these and other studies in either India or China is a question that interests me, but not one that I can answer. Simply because of the limits of my knowledge, I am speaking only of the relation of Buddhism to natural sciences as they developed in the West. This may be the most important question today, because these sciences, for good or ill, have overwhelmed most of the South and East Asian sciences. These Western sciences are the ones that are taught in universities in India, China, Korea, and Japan. I. The Christian History with Science Clearly the interaction of religious tradition with Western science has been quite different for Buddhism and for Western Christianity. For Buddhism the encounter with this science was an encounter with a foreign system of thought. In the West Christianity and science developed together, sometimes supporting one another, and sometimes in enmity. Current Christianity is a product of centuries of such interaction. In the East, although science as a foreign import, it has generally been viewed as simply different from Buddhism. The struggle that has left deep scars in Christianity has not been part of this history. My own judgment is that Buddhists have adopted too easily one of the positions to which Christian theology has had recourse—that of different spheres for the spiritual and natural worlds. To explain this judgment, I will speak briefly of how this resolution came about in the West and my objections to it. I will then elaborate my reasons for hoping for a more serious and critical engagement of Buddhism with the natural sciences. It was a Christian culture that gave rise to modern Western science. Furthermore, most of the founders of modern science explained their reasons for engaging in scientific work in Christian terms. Although later scientists, who detached themselves entirely from Christianity, preferred a history of science that ignored this explanation, a serious historian of ideas should pay close attention. The question is why one should devote oneself to long-term, careful observation of nature? Why should one then seek mathematical formulae explaining what one observes? Some science was, no doubt, motivated by the desire to make advantageous changes in the world. The origin of chemistry in alchemy was of this kind. But in fact modern science did not arise in alchemy. Much more important was astronomy, where no one dreamed of manipulation. It is also important to note that, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Western Europe was not the world center of education, of culture or of wealth. To suppose that the scientific study of nature is a natural by-product of a certain stage of cultural development simply does not fit the facts of world history. The direction of intellectual efforts is typically the result of the particular character of the culture in which these occur. In Western Europe the culture judged that knowledge of nature was a great good, and the reason that this knowledge was so important was that it was knowledge of God’s working. Furthermore, the conviction that God was rational underlay the confidence that behind the apparently chaotic movements of things there lay a rational harmony that could be mathematically described. In other words, the deep-seated assumption that the universe is the product of an intelligent Creator lay behind the rise of modern science. The theology that supported this view was a synthesis of Aristotle’s philosophy and the Bible. Something very much like this synthesis had been developed by Muslim thinkers and imported into Christian Europe. Islam made its own contribution to the natural sciences, and if history had favored its cultures more, it might well have been the primary context for their development. We will never know. On the other hand, Eastern Europe, although for a thousand years it had had a higher culture than the West, might never have developed modern science. So I am saying neither that there is something inherent in Christianity as such that gives birth to science nor that no other tradition provides the necessary context. I am only saying that the form that Christianity took in Western Europe after the assimilation of Islamic philosophy in the thirteenth century was uniquely favorable. The fact that Western Christianity gave birth to science did not mean that the relation was always harmonious. The most famous case of conflict was over Galileo’s discovery of the imperfection of the heavenly bodies. He learned this simply by looking at the moon through a more powerful telescope. Actually there is no conflict between this discovery and the Bible. What led to conflict was that the church had embraced Aristotelian science, which speculated that there was a profound difference between earthly bodies and celestial ones. The latter were supposed to be perfect. The Pope relied on the leading astronomers of the day, and they opposed the new science of Galileo. Misleadingly, many scientists and historians have emphasized this incident as indicative of the general relationship of the new science and Christianity. The facts are quite otherwise. What is remarkable is that, during a period in which the church persecuted Christian heretics in large numbers and Christian fought one another in terrible wars over theological differences, no scientists lost their lives for overturning the established worldview of Christendom. Many of the leading scientists were deeply religious, some, clergymen. In the eighteenth century, the founder of my own denomination, John Wesley, continued the teaching that natural science provided a second way to the knowledge of God alongside the Bible. In this, he was quite typical of his time. Indeed, the great majority of thoughtful Christians, at least in the Protestant world, adopted what they understood to be the worldview of science and adapted Christian teaching to that. The main issue in the eighteenth century was whether the creation was so perfect that God never intervened in it, or there were occasions in which God worked miracles. But this was an argument about how to adapt Christian belief to science, not between science and faith. Even in Wesley’s time there were scientists and philosophers who questioned the positive connection between science and faith. But it was only in the latter part of the nineteenth century that science and theology came into a conflict of socially serious importance. This was over the doctrine of evolution. Heretofore, most people, including most scientists, supposed that the world came into being in more or less its present form. The more complexities science discovered in the world, the more one marveled at the wisdom and power of the Creator. But evolutionary theory proposed that there was an explanation for all this complexity that did not involve any creative act. The present astonishing order was the outgrowth of natural, purposeless processes. Obviously, this was in sharp conflict with a literal reading of the Bible, and this was in itself disturbing. But the church had dealt with that kind of conflict before. From ancient times, the literal reading was often subordinated to others. Protestantism recovered an emphasis on the literal reading, but not in the sense of contemporary Fundamentalism. That movement arose in reaction to more liberal Christian responses to evolutionary theory in the early part of the twentieth century. The deeper problem was that the worldview that society and culture had accepted as scientific was mechanistic. Hence it was thought that science required that the natural world be understood as nothing more than matter in motion. From this world, human beings had, understandably, exempted themselves. The worldview that resulted from this stratagem was probably the most dualistic in all of history. Its advantage was that it secured to human beings freedom and responsibility and value. It undergirded the development of the doctrine of individual rights. Evolutionary theory destroyed this dualistic solution to the problem brought about by the scientific worldview. Now science was invading this privileged sanctuary. It was claiming, in principle, that human beings are part of the mechanical world system, that they can be explained like everything else in terms of matter in motion. My point here is that evolutionary theory, developed in the context of a mechanistic worldview, was a real threat to faith. We should not regard those who rejected it as simply ignorant and benighted. To this day the acceptance of the standard form of evolutionary theory has profoundly negative consequences. One response was Fundamentalism. The authority of the Bible, read quite straightforwardly, supersedes the authority of empirical evidence and scientific theory. The theory of evolution is simply wrong. Most Christians could not follow that route. A second response was to develop a different worldview in which Christians could both affirm the empirical evidence for evolution and deny that it has the reductionistic implications given it by the mechanistic worldview. Evolution can then be understood as calling forth a new, nonmaterialistic naturalism. It can also be understood as showing us the way God creates, so that the emphasis could shift from the one creative act in the past to the continuing creativity of God in the present. This sort of view played a considerable role in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The process theology that I represent is one form of this response. The most famous recent proponent was Teilhard de Chardin. From my point of view, it is unfortunate that a third response, which followed the lead of Immanuel Kant, became the most widespread. Kant was responding to the earlier challenge of David Hume, who showed that the underlying assumptions of both science and theology were not supportable empirically. The focus here was causality. A mechanistic view of nature presupposed causes as necessary relations. Event A causes event B to happen. The idea of creation asserts that God is the cause of the world. Hume showed that sense experience gives us no access to causes of this kind. Kant argued that empirical experience in itself tells us nothing about the world, even the phenomenal world. We know this only as it is organized by the human mind. The mind imposes causal, as well as spatio-temporal relations upon it. But when we come to understanding the human mind and human behavior, we apply wholly different categories. Kantian dualism of the phenomena, on the one side, and Geist, on the other, superseded the Cartesian dualism of matter and mind for most German intellectual work. It was quite influential in the English-speaking world as well. It lent itself to the solution of the crisis introduced by evolutionary theory. One could assert that for science mechanistic evolutionary theory is true, and that human beings are fully part of the evolved world. But for the humanities, including theology, this understanding is irrelevant. These proceed as if human existence is of an entirely different order. We have now the great divide within the university between the sciences and the humanities and a profoundly split consciousness throughout Western culture. In the twentieth century, scientists discovered many things that did not fit the mechanistic worldview. Einstein’s relativity theory broke with it in important ways. The whole idea of matter gave way progressively to that of energy. Quantum theory was driven into extreme paradoxes when it tried to explain itself in mechanistic terms. The public has been fascinated by these breaks with traditional Western science and has responded enthusiastically to the writings of those scientists who have come up with new views. Unfortunately, however, the vast majority of scientists have accepted the Kantian dualism, although their work is not now, as Kant thought, to interpret nature in mechanistic terms. They have given up the effort to understand. Their task is to develop mathematical formulae that enable them to predict the results of experiments. On the other side, humanists develop hermeneutical methods for the interpretation of documents with no regard for scientific thought. Philosophers, analogously, have given up the synthetic task that was theirs so long. They are now satisfied with analysis, phenomenological description, or deconstruction. The work of rethinking the world as inclusive of both nature and human beings in the light of the best information available is largely excluded from the universities. Source: http://www.religion-online.org/
Reproduced with permission from Religion Online.
©2004 Religion Online. All Rights Reserved. |
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