Question

Question: 200-250 word paragraph on “Buddhism and science”

Answer 1

• Early Buddhists might have understood the physical world based on the "science" of their time. But "believing in" the Four Great Elements is never the point, and knowledge of modern earth science or physics would conflict with the teachings. Most of us in our own heads automatically interpret and "update" the ancient texts to match our knowledge of earth science. The nature of what we are trying to understand does not depend on believing in Four Great Elements rather than atoms and molecules.
• Indeed, if there is an article of faith among many present-day Buddhists, it's that the more science discovers, the better scientific knowledge harmonizes with Buddhism. For example, it appears that teachings on evolution and ecology -- that nothing is immutable; that life forms exist, adapt and change because they are conditioned by environment and other life forms -- fits nicely with the Buddha's teaching on Dependent Origination.
• Everything is interconnected. Everything affects everything else. Everything that is, is because other things are. What is happening now is part of what happened before, and is part of what will happen next. This is the teaching of Dependent Origination
  
• Buddhism, could be hailed as religion whose founder was neither a god nor a prophet of
  God, but a man. This man, through his own efforts and his own investigations, discovered the
  nature of the universe, and then compassionately taught it to others.
• Buddha described a universe that was not created by God but that functioned according to laws of cause and effect.These laws was not limited to the material world, but extended also to the moral realm, where virtue leads eventually to happiness and sin to suffering, not through the whims of a capricious God, but through the natural law of karma.
• Buddha understood the mechanisms of the mind in precise detail, explaining how,desire, hatred, and ignorance motivate actions that eventually result in all manner of physical and mental pain, and he set forth techniques for bringing the chattering mind and the unruly emotions under control in order to reach a state of serenity.
• Beyond this, he analyzed the myriad constituents that together are called the person, finding among them nothing that lasts longer than an instant. Thus, he discovered, through his analysis, that there is no self, that there is no soul, that what we call the person is but a psychophysical process, and that the realization of this fundamental truth results in a certain liberation.
• This Buddha’s discoveries were not limited to psychological truths and philosophical insights. He described multiple universes, each with its own sun, universes that arose out of nothingness and returned to nothingness over the course of vast cosmic phases of creation, abiding, and disintegration, measured in massive units of time called “countless aeons.”
• And he explained how countless beings are born in these universes across these aeons, each moving, through a process of spiritual evolution, to a state of perfect wisdom.
• For Europeans and Americans seeking an alternative to theistic religions, who sought to preserve religion, or at least a religion, in the light of science, this was a Buddha to whom all manner of scientific insights could be ascribed, from the mechanisms of the universe to the structure of the atom, from a natural law of morality to the deepest workings of the mind. His was a religion, if it was a religion at all, that required no dogma, no faith, no divinely inspired scriptures, no ritual, no worship of images, no God.
• Over the century and a half of its association with Buddhism, “science” has also meant many things. At times, science has meant a method of sober and rational investigation, with the claim that the Buddha made use of such a method to arrive at the knowledge of deep truths about inner and outer worlds.
• At other times, science refers to a specific theory: the mechanistic  universe, the theory of evolution, the theory of relativity, the Big Bang, whose antecedents are to be found in Buddhist doctrine.
• At other times, science has referred to a specific technology—the microscope, the telescope, the spectrometer—that has been used to discover what the Buddha knew without the aid of such instruments; as more precise instruments have been developed over the past century, the claims of the Buddha’s knowledge have remained constant.
• And at still other times, science has referred to the manipulation of matter, with dire consequences for humanity unless paired with the compassionate vision of the Buddha. The referent of “Buddhism” and the referent of “science” have thus changed radically over the course of more than a century, yet the claim for the compatibility of Buddhism and Science has continued to be made, with a remarkable rhetorical consistency.