Buddhism and Science

Prof. K. N. Jayatilleke, PhD; Upāsaka Wu Shu (Loo Yung Tsung), Buddhism and Science: Collected Essays, Wheel 003, 1958, Buddhist Publication Society (BPS.lk); Eds., Wisdom Quarterly

I offer not faith but direct wisdom

New theories in physics reveal the following facts:

The simplest part of matter is, at present, supposed to consist of protons and electrons. Around the electrons there are lines of magnetic force.

The influence of these lines is theoretically universal. This may be expressed in another way:

The constituents of the universe interact with one another and are inseparable. Thus, the concept of the individual existence of any single object is an illusion.

Science in the Scientific Revolution

This is the first fact. In “reality" things do not exist in a three-dimensional state, as the majority including some scientists believe. Rather, things exist in a four-dimensional state where to the side of space is introduced time, an important element.

Continuum is a new unit of measurement in reality: Even space and time are interdependent. This is the second fact. From these facts one can see straightaway that the properties of nature and reality are definitely beyond our imagination.

Subatomic particle chart (Wikipedia)

In spite of these facts, scientists and philosophers are still trying to solve the problem of reality with their same old instruments -- the power of imagination and reasoning. It is certain they will be disappointed.

The only success possible to them is the putting of those conceptual properties of reality into mathematical expressions....

"Buddhism and the Scientific Revolution"

How Revolutionary – and how Scientific – was the Scientific Revolution? (colby.edu)

Scientific Revolution: A Captivating Guide to the Emergence of Modern Science During...

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It is a historical fact that the scientific revolution of the 17th century in the West was largely responsible for upsetting the earlier religious conception of the universe.

Not only did science overturn the specific dogmas of Western religion, but it also seemed to have undermined the foundations and fundamental concepts implicit in a religious outlook on life.

The new cosmology of Copernicus, Galileo, and their successors altered the earth-centric picture of the universe, although it was pronounced to be “contrary to the holy scriptures."

The new biology (Wallace and Darwin's theory of evolution) upset the doctrines of the special creation and the fall of humankind.

And the new psychology seemed to show that the human mind like the physical body worked on a pattern of causal law and that however deep one plumbed into its depths there was not discoverable in it an unchanging "soul" which governed its activities entirely.

God the tribal Sumerian/Jewish Creator

But much more serious was the effect of the scientific outlook on the general religious attitude that involved a belief in a personal [or tribal] God, in purpose and in the objectivity of moral values.

Science made its discoveries and progressed quite comfortably on the assumption of universal causation without the necessity for explanations dependent on God or divine intervention.

It dealt with an amoral universe indifferent to the aspirations of humans. As among humans, moral values, like economic values, were subjective since they were dependent on the needs and desires of humans, and an ethical humanism was the best that could be hoped for.

Alfred Wallace + Charles Darwin = Evolution

Even such an ethics need not be universal for, as anthropologists discovered, different societies seem to have followed different moral codes that suited them, and ethical relativism was the scientific truth about the nature of moral values.

Of course, there are those who still cling to the dogmas in the face of science or believe in them in a non-literal sense. But the position remains very much the same although people are no longer optimistic (after two world wars and in the throes of a third) about the ability of science to usher in a Brave New World of peace and plenty.

Buddhism and Science (BPS.lk)

It has also been granted that mechanistic explanations of the universe need not necessarily rule out religious ones. Science, too, has given up the crude materialism of the 18th century.

And scientists no longer attempt to explain the universe on machine models, while some scientists have denied that strict determinism holds in the sphere of the atom. But all this is still a far cry from religion.

What place would Buddhism occupy in such a context? More

• The Great Collection (Buddhist Publication Society)