[Buddha-l] Re: flat earth?

[Richard Hayes]

On Wednesday 16 May 2007 08:01, curt wrote:

> I cannot help returning to the
> delicious irony of Stephen Batchelor uncritically repeating this bit of
> misinformation whilst demanding that Buddhists (sorry, "Dharma
> practitioners") stop believing things uncritically. 

Batchelor, the last I spoke to him, was not claiming to be omniscient. He is 
not an historian of science and so may not have read the things you have read 
about what various people believed at various times. 

I suppose the test of whether he really means what he says about thinking 
critically is whether, when presented with good evidence, he is willing to 
change what he says. I think you should perhaps take this issue up with him. 
Tell him you have discovered in his book a very trivial mistake about the 
history of science (or an egregious blunder, if that is your assessment) and 
see how he responds. If he says "I don't care what evidence you or anyone 
else can show me, I just know that medieval Christians, and everyone else, 
believed in a flat earth," then I think you can justly claim that he is 
uncritical and a failed agnostic. If, on the other hand, he thanks you for 
providing him with information he did not have at his disposal when he wrote 
his book, then perhaps you could hazard the conjecture that he is not the 
very sort of dogmatist against whom he is trying to protect the dharma. 

It's an empirical question really. So why not do the experiment? His e-mail 
address, according to his website, is batchelor at club-internet.fr . When you 
have contacted him and pointed out his mistake in the history of astronomy, 
please report back to us on how he responds.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico