Buddhism isn’t science---can’t translate normative ideas like the self to the scientific method
CBC 20 (Quoting Evan Thompson, who grew up around renowned Buddhist teachers. At university, he studied Buddhist scripture, philosophy and classical Chinese. And his mentor in graduate school was Francisco Varela, a neuroscientist who was also a serious practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. Buddhism and science: a doomed romance? //shree)
"They turn the tables… and they say, well, Buddhism is actually the scientific religion because we don't believe in a creator God. We don't believe in an immortal, unchanging, essential soul," Thompson tells IDEAS.
"We ground our ethical system on an understanding of cause and effect. We emphasize causality, that things are impermanent, that things are in flux. So they present Buddhism as either not a religion, or as the truly scientific religion."
As it turned out, Buddhist modernism was tailor-made for the modern West's preoccupation with rationality, scientific validity, and independent thought. But as Thompson argues, things have gotten a little out of hand.
Buddhism now enjoys a kind of exceptionalism among religions. It's regarded as a 'science of the mind,' mindfulness meditation is a 'brain-changing,' commodified, individualistic activity, and complex ideas of the self in Buddhist teaching are conflated with scientific contentions that the self doesn't exist because it can't be found in the brain. It's at this point, Thompson argues, that we begin to miss the point.
"One of the problems with this scientific statement that, 'Well, science shows that there is no self and that validates Buddhism,' is it just completely elides or ignores the difference between a scientific description and scientific use of a concept like the self, and the Buddhist one, where the Buddhist one is inherently ethical or normative," says Thompson, a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia.