It is a truism to say that men do not welcome doubt. It is much easier to criticize and doubt what you don't care about—having no skin in the game, so to speak. Materialists and secularists can doubt religions including Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Vedanta. But they have already surrendered their souls to nihilism by doing so. Naturally, they have no problem with shattering the altars and shrines of alien philosophies and paths. But has their criticisms and doubts gone too far?
Their attack, if we stop and think about it, is clearly directed to the first-person where, for Zen Buddhism, the path of authentic religion begins. The critics would contend that there is no gateless gate or kensho which allows one to pass through the gate. It is a fiction of one's imagination that cannot be proven by third-person science which lays claim to all knowledge and ultimately the brain where form, it believes, the first-person has its birth and death.
The regrettable bird's eye view of the dispute is that the critics of religion and the defenders are talking past each other. There can be no end to such a dispute unless there is a profound shift in the way we view reality, such as in the past when we learned that the universe did not revolve around the Earth. Somewhat strange, just when the critics of religion were about to claim victory, Max Planck essentially said there is no matter. There is only spirit (Geist) and, moreover, we cannot get behind consciousness which implies consciousness does not come from the brain. He also said that everything that we regard as existing are postulates of consciousness. As earth shattering as this sounds nothing he has said has yet been falsified.
Now the tables are being turned on the critics and the doubters. The sacred ground of material science with its last weapon, mathematics, has received a devastating blow in the form of Quantum Mechanics. There is no matter, there are only, in the words of Donald Hoffman, conscious agents. The world we perceive through our senses and live in, is a construct of these conscious agents akin to our computer's GUI (graphic user interface). In the words of the 19th century English mathematician and philosopher Kingdon Clifford, “The universe, then, consists entirely of mind-stuff."
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