[Mb-hair] Shalom, Dalai

[Jim Burns]

'Caching up on my science reading, again....
________
 
'The Universe in a Single Atom': Reason and Faith 

Review, By GEORGE JOHNSON 

It's been a brutal season in the culture wars with both the White House
and a prominent Catholic cardinal speaking out in favor of creationist
superstition, while public schools and even natural history museums shy
away from teaching evolutionary science. When I picked up the Dalai
Lama's new book, "The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of
Science and Spirituality," I feared that His Holiness, the leader of
Tibetan Buddhism, was adding to the confusion between reason and faith. 

It was his subtitle that bothered me. Spirituality is about the
ineffable and unprovable, science about the physical world of
demonstrable fact. Faced with two such contradictory enterprises,
divergence would be a better goal. The last thing anyone needs is
another attempt to contort biology to fit a particular religion or to
use cosmology to prove the existence of God. 

But this book offers something wiser: a compassionate and clearheaded
account by a religious leader who not only respects science but, for the
most part, embraces it. "If scientific analysis were conclusively to
demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept
the findings of science and abandon those claims," he writes. No one who
wants to understand the world "can ignore the basic insights of theories
as key as evolution, relativity and quantum mechanics." That is an
extraordinary concession compared with the Christian apologias that
dominate conferences devoted to reconciling science and religion. The
"dialogues" implicitly begin with nonnegotiables - "Given that Jesus
died on the cross and was bodily resurrected into heaven. . ." - then
seek scientific justification for what is already assumed to be true. 

The story of how someone so open-minded became the Tibetan Buddhist
equivalent of the pope reads like a fairy tale. When the 13th Dalai Lama
died in 1933 he was facing northeast, so a spiritual search team was
sent in that direction to find his reincarnation. The quest narrowed
further when a lama had a vision pointing to a certain house with
unusual gutters. Inside a boy called out to the visitors, who showed him
some toys and relics that would have belonged to him in his previous
life. "It is mine!" he exclaimed, like any acquisitive 2-year-old, and
so his reign began. 

Once installed in Lhasa, the new Dalai Lama happened upon another of his
forerunner's possessions, a collapsible brass telescope. 
When he focused it one evening on what Tibetans call "the rabbit on the
moon," he saw that it consisted of shadows cast by craters. 

Although he knew nothing yet about astronomy, he inferred that the moon,
like the earth, must be lighted by the sun. He had experienced the
thrill of discovery. Before long he was dismantling and repairing clocks
and watches and tinkering with car engines and an old movie projector.
As he grew older and traveled the world, he was as keen to meet with
scientists and philosophers - David Bohm, Carl von Weizsäcker, Karl
Popper - as with religious and political leaders. More recently his
"Mind and Life" conferences have brought physicists, cosmologists,
biologists and psychologists to Dharamsala, India, where he now lives in
exile from the Chinese occupation of Tibet. He and his guests discuss
things like the neuroscientific basis of Buddhist meditation and the
similarities between Eastern concepts like the "philosophy of emptiness"
and modern field theory. In "The Universe in a Single Atom" he tells how
he walked the mountains around his home trying to persuade hermits to
contribute to scientific understanding by meditating with electrodes on
their heads. 

But when it comes to questions about life and its origins, this would-be
man of science begins to waver. Though he professes to accept
evolutionary theory, he recoils at one of its most basic tenets: that
the mutations that provide the raw material for natural selection occur
at random. Look deeply enough, he suggests, and the randomness will turn
out to be complexity in disguise - "hidden causality," the Buddha's
smile. There you have it, Eastern religion's version of intelligent
design. He also opposes physical explanations for consciousness,
invoking instead the existence of some kind of irreducible mind stuff,
an idea rejected long ago by mainstream science. Some members of the
Society for Neuroscience are understandably uneasy that he has been
invited to give a lecture at their annual meeting this November. 

In a petition, they protested that his topic, the science of meditation,
is known for "hyperbolic claims, limited research and compromised
scientific rigor." 

There may be a political subtext to the controversy. According to an
article in Nature, many of the petitioners are Chinese. But however
mixed their motivation, they make a basic philosophical point. All
religion is rooted in a belief in the supernatural. Inviting a holy man
to address a scientific conference may be leaving the back door ajar for
ghosts. 
______

THE UNIVERSE IN A SINGLE ATOM 
The Convergence of Science and Spirituality. By the Dalai Lama. 
216 pp. Morgan Road Books. $24.95. 


Review, Published September 18, 2005

George Johnson, the author of "Miss Leavitt's Stars," was a recipient
this year of a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and
Religion. 

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company