[Buddha-l] Taking a stand against....something

[Richard Hayes]

On Aug 12, 2012, at 4:32 AM, David Living <aryacitta at hotmail.com> wrote:

> As for the big bang - that's just a metaphor.

It has to be. A bang is a sound. And as John Locke rightly observed, a sound is the reception and interpretation by a sentient being of vibrations in the air. If no sentient beings are present to interpret vibrations, there is no sound. Not only were there no sentient beings present to interpret the vibrations in the air caused by the misnamed big bang, but there was no air yet and no vibrations. And since there were no idealists, solipsists, phenomenalists, phenomenologists or naive realists on hand to determine whether the big bang occurred inside or outside consciousness, I think we can safely conclude nothing happened.