[buddha-l] it's not about belief

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Thu, 2006-01-05 at 15:09 -0500, Curt Steinmetz wrote:

> OK - we are obviously differing on the definition of "science", and I 
> don't want to argue over definitions (but see below).

There is no need to argue over definitions, but there is something to be
said for making it clear how one is defining something. I am still not
sure how you are using the term "science," but I haven't asked. Nor have
I made it clear how I am using the word in my remarks to you and Dr
Ziobro. When I make (and still hold, despite you attempts to dissuade
me) the claim that science was unknown outside of Europe until a few
hundred years ago, I am talking about science as an enterprise that has
the following features (which I borrow, with some modifications, from
Husserl):

* Science is the development of theory for the sake of developing
theories. It is the discovery of truth without any regard whatsoever for
practical consequences. It is a purely intellectual practice.

* Science involves the thinker's cultivating an attitude of being a
disinterested   observer of the world, unaffected by his or her own
personal interests.

* Science involves a self-conscious awareness of the difference between
the way the world is portrayed by various human cultures and the way the
world actually is.

* Science is a search for truth that is universal, that is, valid in all
places at all times for all people and this is not culturally
conditioned.

* Science involves the enterprise of disseminating, through education,
what has  already been discovered and establishing institutions that
will perpetually engage in the never-ending task of discovering new
truths.

This is clearly an idealized notion of science, one that few people
fully embody in all their work. Newton is a good example of someone who
was hardly ever scientific in his orientation, and yet managed to say
things that were of use to later people who were scientists.

I am not aware of any religious traditions anywhere in the world that
meet the criteria of science as set out above. Indeed, every religious
tradition I have ever studied (and I have studied most of them) are
actively hostile to several of those principles.

Of some interest to this whole topic is the recent scandal in Korea of
Professor Huang's fraudulent claim to have developed stem cells from
non-embryonic sources. One of my students, a Korean, tells me that Huang
is very famous in his country as a kind an aggressive proselytizer of
Buddhism. He has made many pronouncements about how Buddhism is superior
to Christianity, because Buddhism does not impede the progress of
science. He has made many a public claim about the limitations imposed
on stem-cell research by fanatical Christians. Ironically, his eagerness
to prove that Buddhists were not anti-scientific (augmented by an
arguably non-Buddhist appetite for international fame and fortune) led
him into highly non-scientific practices, such as faking data. The whole
story is quite pathetic, but it shows well how religious motivations and
sectarian propensities can completely undermine the scientific method.
Unhappily, when this sort of thing occurs, it provides anti-scientific
religious propagandists with plenty of material with which to criticize
science and to label it not only as amoral (which all good science must
be) but as immoral.

Herr Steinmetz, you dramatically overstate the case when you try to
portray Christianity as almost having a monopoly on irrationality and
anti-scientific proclivities. You may need to do this to bolster your
own faith in Korean Buddhism, which is psychologically understandable.
But it does lead to rather shoddy thinking and scholarship, which
undermines both good science and good Buddhist practice.

-- 
Richard Hayes <rhayes at unm.edu>
*** 
"If you want the truth, rather than merely something to say,
you will have a good deal less to say." -- Thomas Nagel