Tag Archives: Science

The Riches of Agnosticism

Posted by on January 11, 2012 2 comments

I was considering this after writing my recent post on my views about God. I remember that in his book “The God Delusion”, Richard Dawkins has a chapter on “The Poverty of Agnosticism”. He takes aim at Agnosticism and tries to demolish it as a valid position, I think he goes too far and that we need to look again.

Agnosticism is more than a simple “I don’t know”, when come at from the point of Buddhism that “I don’t know” gains a vitality and an urgency that is easy to miss. It’s not a wishy washy form of indecision, but a potent statement of humility acknowledging honestly our uncertainty in a world of constantly changing phenomena and events. When everything we try to grasp is constantly shifting and changing, how can we stand on a firm bed of knowledge? When we draw on the Dharma, we rediscover our Agnosticism from the knowledge that all the things we know are just mental constructs of a changing reality, not reality itself. They’re imperfect maps to a shifting and impermanent territory.

It’s easy to say that things are proven and settled, but consider the discovery of Continental Drift. The discoverer, Alfred Wegener, had to overcome the disbelief of his peers; in part due to the fact that some of their supporting theories were plain wrong and also because he wasn’t a Geologist. In fact, even though it was discovered in 1912, it wasn’t accepted until the 1960s. [1] They thought they knew, they were unable to see that they might be wrong, that’s part of my point

In the realm of belief and faith, things are always being interpreted differently by different people and groups. This isn’t limited to one faith, it has caused some fairly awful rows in the past and has even caused sub-sects and new faiths to bud off from existing religions. The differences can extend to every area of doctrine, from the nature of the divine through to . Now, this stuff was being argued over when the Buddha walked the Earth 2600 years ago. It’s not been resolved since then, to be honest, my feeling is that it’s not going to be. This looks like another area where people are refusing to admit that they just don’t know.

The solutions, I feel, is based on an honest acknowledgement of our limitations. The idea that some things may be beyond the ability of the Human mind to grasp is anathema to many, but it may well be more truthful than we’d like to admit. As the Masai wisdom says “One head cannot contain all knowledge”. In the light of all of this, how can our position be anything other then to step away from this constant bickering and engage with the mysteries of the world with an honest “I don’t know”?

[1] The Science of Discworld, page 128-129.

The Presence of God

Posted by on December 5, 2011 No comments

I had a conversation in the car tonight, it got me to thinking and and I have had this at the back of my mind for a while.  It actually ties in, in a way to my punch / counterpunch posts back in April and I’d like to extend the theme of those posts as I write tonight.  I said in April that we are too quick to assume a little knowledge, and then let that knowledge think itself the entire world, when this isn’t often the case.  To push this point a little more I want to directly consider the existence of God, which I’ve always tried to avoid commenting on before.

The existence of God is something that has been debated for thousands of years.  They were debating it when the Buddha walked the Earth, and frankly it’s not been solved since then.  This tells me that we’re talking about something that, let’s face it is likely unanswerable by mankind.  Now, this is going to be something that a lot of people on both sides of the religious fence are going to shout loudly about.  But the point stands, we just don’t know.

It’s said that you can’t prove a negative, this is true.  If I state that there is no God, then I am saying that I have examined every inch of the universe and found no God.  This is impossible; so, the thinking goes, we must look at probabilities.  But this in itself exposes a flaw, all of our judgements about the existence of a creator are based on our arrogant assumption that we understand the nature of that creator!  How exactly are we so sure of this?  I’ve criticised holy books at length before and will refer the reader to my articles and archive for that, but this also extends to Science; what makes you think that a divine presence in the universe would even be something we could comprehend?  Whether we choose to admit it or not, we are limited, flawed creatures.  Who is to say we would even recognise God if we saw it?

This is where I think Taoism has it right, the Dao is beyond our understanding and has no plan, design or preference.  We cannot grasp it with our intellect as we are limited and it, by it’s nature, encompasses the things that are both within our grasp and outside our grasp.  Whenever we try for a God or Gods, we just wind up with ourselves, writ large.  But if there is something out there, then my money is on it being something like the Dao, and not just being out there, but in here as well.

Science and Buddhism

Posted by on May 15, 2008 No comments

Now here’s an interesting piece. “The Neural Buddhists” is an opinion piece in the New York Times, which caught my attention and I have to say I find myself in agreement with the author.

I’ve long felt that hardcore materialism doesn’t have all the answers, but at the same time neither does hardcore bible thumping theism. My focus has always been in the direction of a flexible positive spirituality, not restrictive guilt mongering or the complete denial of our spiritual side, neither fear nor denial seem particularly useful to me.

We have had scientific evidence backing the positive effect of meditation, and after reading the NYT piece above, I’ve got a definite feeling that this is going to get very interesting!