It is through our human action, that is, our human instruments, that we build up our human world with its highways, skyscrapers, and knowledge. But the world we build through our instruments which include ideas, physics, chemistry, and mathematics, for example, is not true reality. We are merely substituting our human world for true reality—covering up the latter.
As far as true reality is concerned our human world is false although immensely useful and practical for us. I admit that bridges are doubtlessly useful, including paved roads, air conditioning, the electric light, computers, and so on. Still, we need to be constantly reminded that utility is zero proof of true reality. It is the great sin of science, in fact, that it believes its ideas are connected with true reality, for example, that the universe speaks and understands mathematics as we humans do. Our ideas about the universe are strictly human.
This brings me to what is becoming, as I see it, a growing problem in contemporary Buddhism. It is the encroachment of scientism into the Dharma which is the belief that science is connected more or less with true reality—Buddhism much less. But then nothing science has given us thus far is other than greatly useful fictions which help us to expand and enjoy our human world from building sausage machines to text messaging our friends. No scientist today in their right mind still believes in matter except as a symbol which includes such terms as force, mass, field, etc.
Science is more precisely about maximizing utility as it pertains to our temporal human world. As a caution, science should not pretend to see or claim to be able to approach true reality. Sorry—but this is for mystics only; for those like Gautama who saw ultimate reality; who came to understand how beings continually suffer without conceivable end, and how they might free themselves from such bondage. In fact, the better relationship of science and Buddhism is to let science take care of the practical side of life and let Buddhism take care of connecting with ultimate or true reality. This would be a perfect marriage. On this same track, the greatest evil I can imagine is for science to take the place of Gautama, then insist that Buddhist monks need to take a lot of science courses learning about the big bang, black holes, and other modern day scientific fictions.
Post script. Please understand that all comments are usually and eventually posted except for those written by people hallucinating, writing in a private language, including those suffering from literary Tourette syndrome (LTS), spammers, and small children who somehow managed to get to this blog who want to discuss Bernard Bear (just kidding).
...and the Hubbles, the man himself and the instrument. Not to say that there isn't a problem of the sort described...
Posted by: Bob Morris | May 17, 2011 at 10:10 PM
I forgot Darwin!!!
Posted by: Bob Morris | May 17, 2011 at 12:45 PM
Spoken like a die-hard liberal arts major. Real science, as practiced by Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Bohr, Feynman, and many others is all about unveiling the mysteries of nature based on deep intuition and penetrating analysis. "Maximizing utility" is a by product.
Posted by: Bob Morris | May 17, 2011 at 12:40 PM