Science and Religion

A "religion" is a certain way of experiencing the world - always a shared experience. As such, it is always a way of experiencing others in the world, giving special attention to those who share or seem to share your experience of the world. Understandably, we feel discomfort around those who don't share our experience - those who threaten us by undermining our very being in the world.

As with "religion", it takes a certain amount of prolonged experience to get the feel of what "science" is. It's not merely the body of human knowledge (which is what Science more or less means). It is a way of experiencing the world - specifically about sharing experience - according to a shared standard of "truth". Science is based on observation - observations that, at least in principle, can be made by anyone. Scientific "knowledge" is a structure of predictions and observations that "hang together" in a consistent, logical way. Contradiction, as in logic, is acid to any Scientific theory. You need to be consistent. Scientific progress routinely consists of placing apparent inconsistencies under the microscope. Science thrives on disagreement (not agreement) about what is going on "behind the scenes".  Since Scientists always admit that they cannot do more than offer observations and theories about observations, they recognize the limitations of Science to reveal the ultimate truth about reality. In particular, Quantum Mechanics has revealed some rock-bottom contradictions that appear to be paradoxical only when they are seen as paradoxical behavior in reality itself. The paradoxes are inherent in the most ancient and basic forms of human logic - a humbling observation indeed.

This realization can be spun to support arguments that there is no underlying reality. That anything can be true, no matter how crazy. I view this as a veiled attempt to promote religion through the back door by denying the nature of Scientific knowledge and the criterion it uses for "truth" which is, after all, completely practical, defensible and serviceable. There is no corresponding religious "truth". Religion is all about shared experience and fanciful interpretation that has no need for consistency or independent verification.

Science is not a religion, nor is it the opposite of religion. They are two very different ways of interpreting experience.

Science vs Religion

The modern fashion is to claim not to have a religion. "Obviously", those who do have one are submitting to authority. Not thinking for themselves. "Obviously", if they did think clearly, they would agree with us and see the world the way we see it.

This overlooks the principle of assimilation - how the mind of the individual is created by his culture and the world around him. A person without a culture is a hypothetical construct - useful in thought experiments that attempt to "explain" how we came to be what we are. It's a lot like the philosophical zombie - the creature that looks and acts like he has a mind but doesn't. Such creatures are not to be found in nature.

I recognized this in my first major blog, which I called "The Skeptical Christain". That acknowledged the fact that I was born "Christian" culture. I can't help parsing the world using Christian concepts. On the other hand, I was born into a world that claimed to be "scientific" and "rational". This set me up for a life-long struggle between these two influences. If I was influenced by "authority", there are dozens of "authorities" who are personal "saints" on both sides.

I recognized that we don't think for ourselves. We can't. We have evolved a survival strategy that involves dealing with the world - experiencing the world - in groups. That's the insight behind the concept of "Supermind".

So, with that in mind, let me say something about my "experience in the world", how it is still a bit "Christian", still "Skeptical" yet what I came to refer to as "Zen".

For one thing, "Christianity" is not a "thing". There are all kinds of people who claim to be "Christian" with bizarre experiences of the world that other "Christians" find utterly unrecognizable. Hitler was a Christian. Jim Jones was a Christian.

Zen

Zen is a shotgun marriage between Buddhism and Taoism, both of which grew up in their own very different contexts - contexts that a modern North American would find strange and unrecognizable. So, for example, one man will see Zen as a (respectable) philosophy. The other will earnestly believe in Zen "authorities" and rituals. Neither will admit that Zen is a "religion", which is simply a special case of the way that every religion distances itself from all other "religions" - it's self-defense.

So my Zen will fit into my experience of the world which, as I said, has been conditioned by Skepticism and Christianity. A "real" follower of Zen, say a Zen "master" would find my version to be strange - not "real" Zen at all. A modern skeptic will regard my Zen as a philosophy which, by definition, is utterly debatable, personal and - in the grand scheme of things - irrelevant.

Having said that, let me chase down two of the fundamental roots of "my Zen".

Taoism

The Tao Te Ching is the "Bible" of Taoism. Objectively speaking, it bears almost no relationship to "real" Taoism, in exactly the same way that the Bible bears no relationship to "actual" Christianity. Nonetheless, just as with the Bible, a person can plunge in "cold" and gain some powerful insight. In the case of the Tao Te Ching, this is the way it opens:

Tao (The Way) that can be spoken of is not the Constant Tao’
The name that can be named is not a Constant Name.
Nameless, is the origin of Heaven and Earth;
The named is the Mother of all things.
Thus, the constant void enables one to observe the true essence.
The constant being enables one to see the outward manifestations.
These two come paired from the same origin.
But when the essence is manifested,
It has a different name.
This same origin is called “The Profound Mystery.”
As profound the mystery as It can be,
It is the Gate to the essence of all life. 

Steeped as I am in modern skeptical and Scientific thinking, I read (or read into) this passage a parallel with Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. Our "Science" (just another world for ideas about the world) is based on observations. Observations are not the same thing as the thing being observed. The "thing" observed is reality itself - the "constant thing".

Chinese is a language of pictograms - little pictures. This means that all "translations" of Chinese are interpretations of pictures, which means that Chinese "philosophy" opens the door to interpretation in the way that our language does not. In particular, "Tao" can mean both "Mother Nature" and "The Way of Nature". I have a dozen Engish translations of the above passage. They are all quite different. You are left to form your own image of what's being talked about, which is kinda the point. Your ideas are not the same as what you are being told by your "observations".

Somebody else will undoubtedly draw a different lesson and will perhaps divert the discussion into whether or not the writer even existed and/or whether I regard the writer as some kind of authority, thereby pleading guilty to "religion". Of course, Taoism is not "scientific", so my interpretation of the above passage can't be seen as a claim that Taoism is some kind of proto-Science.

Christianity

While we are at it, perhaps I should quote the text that started me down the road to "hardcore" Christianity (as opposed to the one based solely on the culture I was born into):

These are the hidden words that the living Jesus spoke. And Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them down.
(1) And he said: “Whoever finds the meaning of these words will not taste death.”
(2) Jesus says:
(1) “The one who seeks should not cease seeking until he finds.
(2) And when he finds, he will be dismayed.
(3) And when he is dismayed, he will be astonished.
(4) And he will be king over the All.”
(3) Jesus says:
(1) “If those who lead you say to you: ‘Look, the kingdom is in the sky!’ then the birds of the sky will precede you.
(2) If they say to you: ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fishes will precede you.
(3) Rather, the kingdom is inside of you and outside of you.”
(4) “When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the children of the living Father.
(5) But if you do not come to know yourselves, then you exist in poverty, and you are poverty.”

Sound familiar? No? This is from the "Gospel of Thomas", which did not make it into the Bible, mainly for political reasons. If it did, the ideas presented would not be "heretical". But, as a young man reading these words on the eve of my wedding, this was Christianity. It inspired me to go out and buy a Bible and attempt to read it from cover to cover. As you may know, this is impossible. Yet the impact remained and I eventually wound up in the seminary at Queen's Theological School, learning about the Bible, where it came from and what it meant over three thousand years of human history. That's the "skeptic" working in me.

Buddhism

I remember my first contact with Buddhism: where I was and what I was doing. It was in High School and for some reason, the idea that attachment is the cause of suffering struck me. It held on to me from that point on. That was my "bumper sticker" version of Buddhism. It percolated in the back of my mind for decades until I encountered it "full strength" in the teachings of Dr. Ronald Seigel in "The Science of Mindfulness" - a video course from "Great Courses" at a time when people actually paid for video courses. Of course, this amounted to my "take" on Seigel's "take" on mindfulness, which, in his mind, was pretty much Buddhism for the masses.

Seigel borrows freely from Buddhist teachings and ties them into experimental results (possibly cherry-picked). He leaves out all the crazy ideas at the core of Buddhism (such as Karma and reincarnation). That makes the pill go down much easier.

So for me, Zen is about Buddhism minus the "spooky stuff": The part of Buddhism that "makes sense" to a skeptic.

Crazy Zen

Another strong but temporary influence on me was a guy named Osho, who had something to say about everything. His fame and popularity landed him the middle of a huge scandal. Of course, the movie is about the scandal and has nothing whatever to say about the teachings of Osho - the reason he had so many enthusiastic followers. It's also noteworthy that Osho's opponents had nothing to say about Osho's teachings - just the shocking difference in lifestyle as compared to the "normal" standards of rural Oregon.

The way to understand Osho is to step into the lives of his followers and share their experience of the world. Of course, that's not my experience, so I'm prone to "reading in" some relevance to my own life. To my mind, Osho is about as "Zen" as it gets.

Even more "Crazy Zen" is "The Teaching of Buddha". Although it officially began in China, it was in Japan that Zen came to full fruition. The Japanese version of Buddhism has more than a whiff of what we smell when we hear claims that the Book of Mormon is a continuation of the Bible Story. The whiff of bullshit.

Japanese Buddhism tips the hat to Buddha but then loses itself in Nationalistic mythology. Japan is the promised land, where all spirits stop off on the way to Nirvana.  Whatever you may call it, Japanese Zen is a religion for Japanese which makes no claim whatever to be "scientific" and only a weak claim to be "Buddhist".

The point is that, for better or worse, all religions are like that. The reason I am willing to adopt and proclaim "my" Zen is that Zen itself allows this. If "your" Zen is not like "my" Zen, there is ample room to discuss and share our experience of life. There is no "orthodox" Zen. Agreeing on the importance of experience and agreeing to disagree on our theories is, for me at least, the very core of Zen.

Such an idea can profitably be applied to all discussions, whether religious, scientific or political. It's best to discuss our shared experience of life rather than our theories about it, which are bound to be 50% bullshit. But we never know which 50%.