Atheism, Empirical Attitudes, and Buddhism

when Western atheists want to criticize
Christianity they'll often talk about empirical methods and empiricism becomes something that separate from and opposed to the religious mentality some Christians also square off and accept this and say okay we have a realm that's based on faith revelation magic and the other hand you have a realm of knowledge that's based on things that can be observed things that you can see and hear and ultimately measure or quantify create scientific textbooks of it so some Christians basically accept the opposition that atheists want to engage in when they're criticizing Christianity and some will reject it on one grounds or another the very strange game that's gone on with Buddhism and some other Eastern religions has been to try to argue that Buddhism itself is an empirical religion the Buddhism is beast on science or scientific attitudes can read some really crazy statements that the Buddha himself was a scientist was a medical doctor that his attitudes were 100% rational and scientific with very carefully selected quotations from from here and there in the in the Pali Canon whether or not you sympathize that direction it's worth thinking about what's what's wrong with it and how it relates to that broader question of empiricism men and science modernity the idea of the empirical comes out of a medical concept in ancient Greece that instead of working from theories to select the correct treatment a doctor would work from examples tried in the past trial and error producing remedies that work and we consider what you mean by theory in the ancient world it's things like theories of the humerus duties of the colors theories that you can diagnose someone based on on abstract principles that you know we now know to be false and that sometimes the ancient world really had their organs in in myth um however the relationship between empirical experience and religion has always been complicated by a few factors when people declared it only the public in America today if only the public could have empirical attitudes then we wouldn't have this conflict with religion if only people could have empirical attitudes various social values and virtues would result they think what they hope a bit which um sadly it's not true the attitude is the expectation is if if only you would believe in what you can see then the world would change if only you could believe the evidence before your eyes and be decisive the fact that of course God never shows up that most religious claims have no visible proof behind I think it's only lately that people have felt confident enough to really put this forward while ignoring the fact that if you spend time with people of religious conviction they don't feel any conflict about believing in what they see because they do see what they they believe in things and they see them there are people who believe in ghosts and they have seen ghosts now whether you choose to call that a hallucination or a dream or some other kind of experience from their perspective their empirical perspective that's something they see and they know directly this idea is discussed and debated back in the original definition of the meaning of the word skepticism I wish more people who call themselves skeptics would actually read each in text like like sexist in therapists and and realize where this intellectual tradition comes from but the ancient skeptics were very concerned with the fact that the senses were unreliable what you see and what you hear can't be trusted that isn't a simple source of rational ideas it's quite complicated but not a totally modern critique of empirical experience is the philosopher Karl Popper Karl Popper is a hundred percent pro science anti-religion also anti-communist and against an overly theoretical approach to the world however he was also critical of the ways of which empirical experience can lead us to conclusions that are actually unscientific so you know like everything worth touching the poet it's it's a lot more complicated once you once you start to dig into it how has it been that in the last hundred years and especially since the end of world war two so many Buddhists have been promoting this notion of Buddhism as a religion that doesn't rely on faith as Buddhism as a religion with no supernatural ideas as Buddhism and being the the so-called owl of physics Buddhism as being some kind of exception to the rules about the conflict between what's empirical and what is religious well there are passages in the ancient texts where Buddhists say come on you have to believe what you see with your that's true and the Saint texts from the scene ancient period of time in the Saint Canon and from spoken by the same people will also tell you that they have seen ghosts themselves that they have seen demons that they have seen people be tortured in hell that they have seen dialogues with in nura god of each in India dialogues with the Buddha and Indra various other monks also went up to heaven had a dialogue with Indra and hallucinatory experience is part of the core practice of meditation that is described in the public Canon you have detailed dialogues with the Buddha from monks who are followers of the Buddha some as they will pour very specific things like well you know I'm having these visions of the the Otherworld the heavens and so on but I'm I'm not hearing the sound so you know what why is that the Buddha gives an answer oh yeah okay you've achieved purification of the eye but not purification of the year so you're you're only getting part of the experience when you see these other realms and you have dialogues from the Buddha and monks or followers who complained that they're doing everything right but they're not having this supernatural experience which is also interesting it's interesting that you get some complaints against Buddhist orthodoxy preserved inside the texts that define and describe go to Orthodox that is an interesting difference between Buddhism and other religions however I've got to tell you the movement to frame the Buddha as a rational scientific thinker to frame Buddhism as a skeptical religion has relied on fraud whether it's pious fraud or not is immaterial to me it's been intellectually dishonest and it's rely on quoting a little piece of text here and there and say oh don't read the paragraph before it or after it don't read the read the whole book you know I think that the Buddha did preach and there are different contexts in which he preaches that people should believe in what they see and what they know directly for themselves it also is is abundantly obvious that the Buddha felt confident in a magical world view that embraced demons hell heaven or heavens and many gods it was a very magical universe that he thought he was living in and you know that he encouraged his followers to continue to believe in that magical world he was not teaching them to be skeptical of it or to reject that world although at the same time he was teaching to be skeptical of for example on the caste system to project the justifications for social inequality that weren't engineer there are also texts some of which are quite Americans were he's skeptical of racism and the idea that black people are inferior dark-skinned people within India are inferior there are many many cultural ideas that he was kept loved he's completely skeptical of the authority of the Vedas the ancient texts of Hinduism however as with many important thinkers in history the fact that you have original and innovative ideas in one area does not mean that you reject that he is in another area contrary to popular belief Isaac Newton who was an innovator in science remained steadfastly and profoundly Christian and he led to lecture British Parliament about his views on Christianity and his crazy theories about the history of the world and the descendants of Adam and Eve how they move up the world so many great scientists world religious eccentrics it's very well preserved for history but in the case of the Buddha he's not a scientist he is a religious leader who religious views and I think it's rather shameful for people to try to try to suppress the evidence of what those views were in the name of protecting and promulgating that religious tradition so what is the future of Buddhism if nobody today or fewer and fewer people let's say nobody if nobody is motivated to study these texts because they believe that if they don't they'll go to help what's the what the future of Buddhist philosophy if people aren't motivated to memorize and recite these texts because they think it'll help them go to heaven after they die but they think it'll help them achieve nirvana and this lifetime what is going to motivate a sincere scholarship of these texts I'm going to give you two answers one it is not going to be a fraud claiming that the core of these texts is completely rational completely scientific and completely skeptical in its attitudes that fraud will not take you very far in the last 50 years the game has been played out um - don't compare the situation of Buddhism today to a failure to the religions that have died disappeared let's compare it to something successful compared to Shakespeare nobody is agonizing about the study of Shakespeare disappearing from this world there are thousands of people who are dedicated experts in the scholarship of Shakespeare and there are hundreds of thousands who are not experts but who care enough that they study and have a level of expertise above and beyond the average person and then there are millions of people for whom Shakespeare is is part of their culture it's part of what's meaningful in their life it's part of what's enjoyable and entertain and then there's a limit there are millions more who are not interested Shakespeare I think Shakespeare is boring and that's fine nobody's pulling the hair out over the future of Shakespeare Shakespeare's got movies Shakespeare's gonna book so you cut poems people are kind of read to people or could enjoy them the Shakespeare industry is doing fine guess what nobody is engaged in the cultural production of Shakespeare because they think that if they don't they'll go to hell nobody thinks if they the cheeks here contains the secret to get them in heaven after they die and to my knowledge nobody is obsessed with creating the fraud that Shakespeare had completely modern scientific values secretly that had been concealed by corruptions and later additions to his texts by other authors survived no people with other perspectives trying to somehow censor him and make it into a riddle so you know if the future of Buddhism is going to be meaningful it can't be based on a concealment of evidence it can't be based on a an attitude of censoring what the myths and legends really are and on the other hand if there is if you don't have the confidence that this philosophy is worth reading to the same extent that Shakespeare is that that Buddhism can't be meaningful important in Asian culture the way she experienced meaningful important in European culture then this discussion isn't worth having and for you the future of Buddhism isn't worth fighting