Reconciling Science & Religion

There is an ages-old philosophical problem which has fevered the meditations of theologians for millennia. The general form of the problem is how to reconcile secular authority and religious authority. Since the dawn of the Scientific Revolution the form of the problem has been how to reconcile science and religion. My friend Gerry Downey, who is a somewhat Buddhist, wrote a compelling essay on the problem, in the form of an attempt to reconcile Buddhism and science. His basic thesis was that science is about the natural world and Buddhism (and all religions) are about ethics. And so they are not in conflict since they are fishing in different ponds. I think this is a clever move, but not altogether satisfying. This then is my take on this ages-old conundrum--with a few swipes at my friend along the way.

Naive Views-

There are some commonplace and exceedingly naive views here. Let us agree to dismiss them as the first order of business.

Many scientists see religion as irrational and befuddled, asserting all sorts of pernicious nonsense that cannot be objectively checked, and hence, as being hopelessly unscientific. Such persons reject religion and spiritual pursuits and thus miss, in my view, the core business of human life.

Many spiritual seekers see science as a threat to their beliefs and hence as a virtual handmaiden of the devil. "Secular humanist" is for these seekers an epithet rather than a compliment. Such people are forced to adopt absurd theories, such as biological creationism, in order to retain their theological presumptions.

These two naive views are naive. We join in parting company from both camps.

The Boundary Problem-

The problem of reconciling religion and science is not new, or even as recent as the scientific revolution. Religion has always faced the problem of reconciling spiritual and temporal authority. Prior to the scientific revolution, the relevant temporal authority was political, now it is scientific. Long before the Catholic Church imprisoned Galileo for his scientific impieties, it fought for centuries with emperors and heads of state over the proper domain of authority for the church. This is the boundary problem. The question has always been: what is the domain over which the church has authority and what is the domain over which the state or secular authorities hold sway. The Bible's resolution of the matter was simple in principle, if not dispositive in detail: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's." The problem, of course, is how to tell which is which.

After Constantine made the world safe for Christianity by adopting it as an official state-protected religion, his son and successor Constantius made clear who was the patron and who the patronized. Constantius said simply: "Whatever I will, shall be regarded as canon..." Nearly a thousand years later the issue was still fresh and at the height of papal power Innocent III turned the matter on its head by declaring that the church had full power over the affairs of state. So much so, that when an election was held for the king of Germany, Innocent overturned the results by declaring that while one candidate may have had the majority of the votes, Innocent's preferred candidate had the "saner" votes.

Science as Shaper of Our Contemporary World-View-

What has changed in the last 500 years is that science is now the source of the secular world view for most of the developed world. Previously, the state and the church jointly shaped society's world view and thus there was always a struggle over who had authority for which corner of the metaphysical model. "The divine right of kings" and similar ideas were the state's attempt to guarantee its dominion through the propagation of metaphysical principles. And of course the church was in the business of spinning elaborate metaphysical systems to explain the universe and the place of God and man in it.

Since the scientific revolution it has been science and religion that jockey for this control, and the boundary conflict is now between these two. Galileo ran into trouble not because of any conflict between rationalism and irrationalism, but because astronomy had up until that time been seen by the church as part of the proper domain of religion (i.e., this was the study of the "heavens" which was the domain of God and hence of religion). Over the succeeding centuries, the church has pretty much conceded most of the wished for domain of science to science. It is now only in certain marginal issues that conflict still arises (as in creationism versus evolution).

But the church has not been the only culprit in creating confusion about the boundary between science and religion. Consider this sequence of events: In the 17th century Irish archbishop James Ussher decided it was his duty to determine when the earth was formed, which he computed, based on biblical sources, to have been in the evening of October 22nd, 4004 B.C. In order not to let science be one upped in this way, the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius announced that according to his scientific calculations the earth was in fact created on October 24th, 3936 BC at 6:00 p.m. Even the scientific giant Isaac Newton could not resist the competition so he "corrected" both men by reporting that the earth was created in 3500 BC, although he declined to give a day and time. The state has not been entirely quiescent in the boundary dispute either. In 1897 a bill was introduced in the Indiana state legislative to change the value of pi to be an even 3, so that Indiana's schoolchildren might have an easier time with their mathematics.

The Downey Boundary-

Your solution to the boundary problem is to say that science is about "the organized whole of structured information with Physics at its heart, mathematics as its formulae and logic as its method" and religion is about "moral truth." This is your core error. You persistent in the view that spirituality and ethics are interchangeable terms for the same pursuit. I persistent in the view that you are wrong. Ethics is sort of the entry-fee into the realm of spiritual seeking. In the Eightfold Path the yamas and niyamas are qualifying practices that show the seeker has sufficient merit to proceed to right contemplation, and it is out of right contemplation that enlightenment emerges. To equate ethics with spiritual realization is to get off the bus somewhere before Step 8. This surely cannot be what the Buddha taught.

Now I admit that the Buddha appears to have been reticent in the matter of metaphysics. Some take this as a sign of insight and wisdom. I take it as a sign of spiritual laziness. I think the Buddha looked at all the endless disputations around metaphysics and saw that it often distracted people from the real task which was the work of becoming enlightened. So he thought it better to wave off questions about metaphysics. Not as a matter of principle but as a matter of tactics. So my view is that the Buddha had a metaphysics but he kept it to himself for fear it would become an object of idol worship and the urgent business of working away at the stone of the ego would be lost. But if we could have pinned him down and forced him to answer the question, what IS enlightenment, I think he would have answered along the lines I do. And not that enlightenment is only about "moral truth," as you assert. (But I admit that my view of Buddhism is very non-standard. And in any case it is not essential to my argument. If the Buddha did not have a covert metaphysics as I believe, then I would just say the Buddha was wrong. No problem.)

The proper relationship between ethics and realization is that ethics is, in addition to a qualifying practice, sometimes evidence of a state of attainment. That is to say, we can expect that enlightened people behave ethically, and that if we see someone who claims enlightenment behaving unethically, we are entitled to take their behavior as evidence against their claim. All of which is NOT to say that ethical behavior and enlightenment are one and the same thing, any more than it would be correct to say that O.J.'s DNA samples committed the murders.

Now I admit that one cardinal virtue of your position is that it makes the boundary between science and religion fairly clear. So if one is obsessed with drawing such a boundary then you have a clear line of demarcation. But why even try to find such a line? Isn't the real boundary of interest the line between truth and falsehood? Isn't this what we are really after? And why should we care about the color of the jerseys on the people who manage to grab hold of a bit of truth here and there?

Of course, if you think that religion is not about truth but only about ethics, then matters are considerably simplified for you, but, in my view, at the cost of rendering religion to be of little interest. I would say it this way: an enlightenment that only concerns right conduct is not an enlightenment worth having. If enlightenment is not also the herald of the Truth, then enlightenment is not my pursuit. I am, I like to think, a seeker of the truth, wherever I find it. I call this the quest for enlightenment. You may call it something else if you wish. But is not this what we are ultimately about?

There is No Boundary-

The radical thesis that I suggest here is that there has never been and never will be a clear demarcation between the secular and religious domains, as regards the pursuit of truth, and that to pursue such a separation is a fool's errand. Fashions change over the centuries as to how to draw the boundaries, but all such attempts are mere fads, reflecting nothing more profound than the prejudices and presumptions of the age. (We can of course draw conventional boundaries between physics and biology or mathematics and yoga or between Buddhism and Hinduism, etc. These can be useful distinctions for some limited purposes, but they have nothing to do with who is in pursuit of the truth about the nature of the universe. All parties aspire to this, or should, in my view.)

Science and religion are both attempts to discern truth. They differ somewhat in their approach and their presumptions, but both aspire to account for the nature of existence. Both are profoundly metaphysical enterprises. The problem with either comes when they adopt poor methodology or presumptive metaphysics rather than taking a thoroughgoing empirical approach to things. Religion errs, usually, because it refuses to subject its metaphysical conjectures to some relevant form of consensual validation. Science errs, routinely, because it rules out of bounds any metaphysical posits not immediately consistent with its currently received views of acceptable metaphysics.

To take an example: I think there are subtle energy flows in and around the human body and that these are objective realities. This claim is subject to consensual validation and if I turn out to be the only one in the world who can discern the reality of these forces then I would conclude that I am wrong. Some people, who might or might not wear jerseys saying NEW AGE INNERNAUTS, might or might not claim that these phenomena are "beyond science and beyond the intellect and cannot be questioned by the methods of science." I think this would be an error. On the other hand, almost all scientists automatically rule out such phenomena on the grounds that there are no phenomena of this sort countenanced in physics, i.e., it is inconsistent with their current metaphysics. This too is wrong. The matter is an empirical one which makes a claim about objective reality and it is confirmable or falsifiable in whatever ways any claims about objective reality are treated. We also know enough about the real history of science, thanks to Mr. Kuhn, to know that scientists almost never make an intellectually honest attempt to test theories that lie outside their metaphysical presumptions, so the fact that science currently does not countenance the theory of subtle energy flows just shows how pedestrian science can be. As seekers of truth, our concern ought always to be to follow the action. Whoever is on the leading edge of inquiry is where I want to be, and in my assessment, some spiritual seekers are much farther out there than most scientists.

The real boundary question is not the boundary between science and religion but the boundary between truth and untruth. The "solution" is that there is no clear definitional boundary between truth and untruth, in the way that one could produce a definitional boundary between science and religion, as you have done. The harsh truth is that the effort to grasp the truth, in any domain of inquiry, is always a struggle and a challenge and definitional fiats are of little use in any important inquiry. Almost all matters are empirical. We have to use the methods of empirical inquiry to discern truth at all levels, from the most mundane to the most sublime.

Saving the Buddha-

To make religion not be about the business of trying to discern the truth in the same way that science is in the business of trying to discern the truth results in a pyrrhic victory. You have saved the Buddha from the threat that he might hold false views by the tactic of saying that his views have nothing to do with truth so he's okay. You say, in effect, the Buddha doesn't do physics so he is immune from developments in physics. And the Buddha doesn't do mathematics, and the Buddha doesn't do biology and the Buddha doesn't do this or that. He only does ethics. And since you apparently have an unstated premise that the truths of ethics are eternal, the Buddha cannot get into too much trouble due to later theoretical developments. How safe. How vapid. You have saved the Buddha by cutting off his balls. I think the Buddha would not welcome your help.

The Buddha was about not just right conduct, but also about right understanding, by which I think he meant having right theories about the nature of the universe, at some fundamental level. How then do we avoid the dilemma of our theories improving over time and how is this consistent with the idea that the Buddha's enlightenment is perfect? There are a couple of ways to proceed. One is to draw the boundary line at a different place than you do.

I think a perfectly respectable approach is to admit that the Buddha was doing metaphysics but that it was at a higher level than that undertaken by most of what we currently take to be science. So while science might now know that the earth once was populated by dinosaurs, we would not expect that the Buddha knew this or could have known this or was engaged in any kind of inquiry this "mundane." Instead, Buddha was after the fundamental operating principles of the universe. What might these principles be? Well, they might be things like the view that all material creation dissolves into an energy matrix and that this matrix is a colossal web of interconnections whereby all beings and all things are part of an organic whole whose fundamental nature is blissful, aware energy. This is a metaphysical claim, not an ethical one. Indeed, I suspect that it is out of metaphysical experiences of this sort that ethical conduct arises. That is, one is moved to right conduct because one perceives that fundamentally all beings and all things are part of an interconnected whole, and this metaphysical truth is the reason that right conduct works. Indeed, I would go so far as to assert that ethics too is an empirical inquiry and that the principles of ethics were developed over the millennia by individuals who had some metaphysical experiences of this sort and were moved by them to articulate sets of principles which we now see as eternal truths about human conduct.

In any case, the Buddha could be seen as making metaphysical claims about the nature of the universe that are at such a level that they are not routinely reached by the ordinary march of intellectual progress. Under this view, we would say that enlightenment means accurately perceiving the fundamental structure and operating dynamics of the universe. And we would presume that these fundamental principles are eternal and hence no later development would call into question the Buddha's basic view. (We would still probably need to make room for evolution of the various metaphors of language we use to point to these principles and allow that talking about them in, for example, the language of contemporary systems dynamics as Swamiji does, would not mean that anyone who was ignorant of this language was, ipso facto, unenlightened.)

Of course this approach is not clean and simple since I cannot specify which assertions might be properly "fundamental" and which not. I cannot easily define fundamental principles but I think I can recognize them when I see them. But then, at one time people thought that the "ether" was a fundamental principle. Which just goes to show you that the pursuit of truth is not easy nor neat and requires ongoing vigilance.

The second way out of the dilemma is even messier, but might still have some merit. We could say that the Buddha, upon attaining enlightenment, would not be expected to have a perfect knowledge of any subject of which he had not made a specific inquiry, and we would not expect his knowledge to be perfect beyond that moment in time.

So, for example, we would not expect the Buddha to know about dinosaurs unless he had been on archeological digs, or unless this knowledge came to the Buddha's attention in some other way. We would be entitled to think, however, that when an enlightened being was presented with information about some new domain of inquiry, he would respond appropriately. So, to take another example, I don't know what the Buddha thought about whether the earth is round or flat, but we would be entitled to expect that if shown a photograph of the earth from space the Buddha would correctly adopt the belief that the earth was round. If, after being presented with the appropriate information, the Buddha thought the earth was flat because that's how it looks to him, then we would be entitled to say the Buddha's enlightenment is not perfect. But if he had no opinion about the geometry of the earth, or if he thought it was flat but had no particular information to the contrary, then this alone would not call his enlightenment into question.

The other part of the problem is that what we would be legitimately entitled to demand of the Buddha is only that he adopt a right understanding based on the best available information at the time. So if we were sitting on a hillside with the Great Master outside of Seville in the spring of 1490 then we would not expect his enlightenment to encompass a knowledge of the New World. But if the same conversation were taking place a few years later, he should know something about the Americas. And this change would not mean his enlightenment was "imperfect."

So what makes a Buddha different than just some reasonably well-informed and open-minded citizen of the day? What is enlightenment beyond what is available to the average person? As I have repeatedly repeated, enlightenment is a whole-body condition in which the person is in a profoundly altered state of being such that they are in full contact with the fundamental forces and principles of the universe. Their heart is open, their mind is spacious, their perception is unclouded. Their experience ranges freely from the ordinary to the sublime. They are in fairly constant contact with that blissful matrix of energy that is the divine. They enjoy sat, chit, ananda. All of this is part of what it is to be enlightened. None of it has all that much to do with the billion-fold details of life on planet earth. The enlightened being need not know what was recorded on the 18 minute gap, but they should know what was in the heart of Richard Nixon if they encountered him in the flesh. This is the best I can do with drawing the lines. Any more precise lines are probably too precise to have any truth to them.

Now there is a third way of understanding what the Buddha was about, and it may in fact be the way the Buddha himself understood his enterprise. We may both be asserting non-standard views of enlightenment. You think it is about moral knowledge and I think it is about deep metaphysics. The Buddha might say we are both wrong. He might say that enlightenment is about liberation and nothing more. The Buddha's only concern is a thoroughgoing inquiry as to the nature of the predicament causing human suffering and the techniques that are effective in relieving it. The Buddha would thus say, under this interpretation, enlightenment is whatever works to end human suffering. The fact that right conduct is part of the corpus of enlightened views is a mere empirical finding. In principle, it could have turned out that selfish conduct relieved suffering and if this were true then we would have expected the Buddha to have arisen from the Bodhi Tree to return to his self-satisfied life as a prince. That he did not is a contingent truth and not a necessary one, in this view. The slogan is: enlightenment is salvation. (I take it that your slogan is: enlightenment is right conduct.)

I reject this view. If this is Buddhism, then Buddhism is too superficial. My view is that the fact that right conduct and the other precepts work as techniques to relieve suffering is because the deep metaphysical structure of the universe is such that these precepts put us in harmony with this deep metaphysical structure and it is because of the state of being produced by this deep harmony that we enjoy peace and bliss and love and devotion and compassion. It is this deep state of being that is enlightenment. The precepts are expressions of this deep state of being. Right conduct and moral certitude are expressions of this deep state of being. It is this deep state of being that is liberating. It is religious and sacred because this deep metaphysical nature is divine, is permeated with God. The very universe is the flesh of the Divine Mother and to dwell in contact with this deep metaphysical core is to know the realization that all beings innately strive for, and it is in the satisfaction of this striving that liberation is found and enlightenment can be said to dawn. The slogan: enlightenment is possible because God exists. This is my view. I commend it to you.