geo wrote:
a naturalistic worldview, including this naturalistic Buddhism, can in principle, give people a sense that their lives have meaning. Give them moral orientation. Give them consolation in times of sorrow. Give them equanimity as they encounter the turbulence of life. Now, whether that means that you could call this naturalistic version of Buddhism religious depends ultimately on how you are going to define religion.
Hi Geo, thanks very much for sharing this material from Robert Wright. It picks up on some topics that have been much on my mind, especially the relationship between faith and order within natural philosophy. The assertions in the quote above are highly controversial, regarding meaning, morality, consolation and equanimity. Traditionally, people consider nature to be unfeeling and impersonal – as Yeats put it in The Second Coming ‘pitiless as the sun’. The reason for the invention of personal Gods is precisely to assert that a supreme principle of the universe cares about you personally, and has loving and gracious intentions for humanity. This beautiful myth of a personal God within the Abrahamic faiths is rejected by the logical enlightenment of Buddhism and Taoism, although of course those eastern religions also have their mythological traditions about divine entities.
However, I think Wright is correct that we can and must find these ethical values - meaning, morality, consolation and equanimity – within a natural philosophy. The logical point from Buddhism is that these values are necessary for human life, but the versions of them within unnatural philosophy are by definition unnatural, and therefore traditional superstitions about a consoling and comforting God are open to serious doubt regarding their imaginary status. Replacing the supernatural tradition with a rational transcendental imagination in which the consoling power of nature is real as a basis for religion, and yet is not personalised as a supreme entity, is a decisive achievement of the wisdom of the Buddha.
I think that this Buddhist vision of the nature of religion is entirely compatible with Darwinian evolution, in the sense that our planet is uniquely fitted for us to evolve here, and so contains resources and attributes that are able to provide comfort and meaning for human life, in physical, emotional and spiritual terms. From Wright’s agenda of understanding the evolution of God, the present task is to see how God can evolve to be understood as purely natural, as properties of the world which provide purpose for human life within a rational evolutionary philosophy.
geo wrote:
One of the broadest definitions I've seen comes from William James, the great American psychologist who said that the kind of animating essence of religion is the belief that there is an unseen order. And that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.
James is magnificent, and this concept of order is among the deepest of necessary truths. The universe is ordered by the laws of physics, which in fact are omnipotent, omnipresent, consistent, true, beautiful, rational, eternal and infinite, attributes traditionally assigned to God. What we cannot simply say is that the order of the universe is good, although a complex argument can be mounted to defend that idea. Does the universe care if we live or die? An anthropic argument can maintain that human language is where the laws of physics are represented in symbolic form, and that this evolutionary leap provides the basis for human distinctness as being made in the image of God. We are part of the universe and we care if we live or die, so to that extent the universe does care, although that is a slippery claim, although it can be developed in terms of James’ point that our supreme good consists in aligning to cosmic order.
On the point of order, the unseen order of the laws of physics is manifest primarily in the part of the universe that provides the main determinant context for our evolution. I maintain that this part is the solar system, given that the solar system is analogous in size to a dime on a football field, with the closest star in the grandstand. The solar system does indeed have a sublime unseen order, a harmony of the spheres, a cosmic musical identity, which physics has barely begun to comprehend. My work on the Fourier Transform spectral analysis of the wave function of the solar system centre of mass is designed to quantify this music of nature, in terms of what James defines as the hidden order of nature. My mixing of philosophy and science in this way has not as yet obtained traction, although Wright’s idea from James about how this topic is the animating essence of religion opens a path to a conversation about the real relation between faith and reason through their common interest in the unseen order of nature. If reason can define and explain natural order in a way that structures the common interests of human life, it provides a path to answering the old questions posed by religious faith.
geo wrote:
Now, Buddhism does in a sense, say that there is an unseen order that we should adjust ourselves to. Now it's not talking about a kind of cosmic plan. The unseen order that is referred to, is the truth about the way things work. The truth about the structure of reality, the truth about human beings, even the truth about yourself.
The assertion here that Buddhism is not discussing a cosmic plan requires further investigation. “Cosmic plan” is used here by Wright to incorporate elements of supernatural tradition in terms of a personal entity, as distinguished from “the way things work”. My own view is that the cosmos has an inherent direction like a river. You cannot say a river plans to empty its water into the sea, and yet you can say that going with the flow provides an easier path. Once we have a better understanding of the way things work, we can begin to define that understanding as a cosmic plan, in terms of James’ theory of attunement.
geo wrote:
According to Buddhism, these truths often go unseen because the human mind contains certain built-in distortions, illusions. We don't see the world clearly. And Buddhism certainly does assert that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves to this normally hidden truth. And in fact Buddhism lays a path for the harmonious adjustment and it lays out what it considers to be the truth about reality. It tells us what we need to do to bring our lives in line with that reality.
This is the Buddha’s vision of the four noble truths, suffering, attachment, liberation and enlightenment. There is a strong alignment between this Buddhist vision of religion and the deep identity of Christianity. Christianity in fact evolved from Buddhism through the export of the Indian monastic Theraputta movement to establish the Therapeut school in Alexandria where Saint Mark wrote his Gospel. The metaphysical identity here rests in the common concepts of love, grace and fall. Delusion is caused by the fall from grace into corruption, for both Buddhism and Christianity, although each explains the detail of that story differently. Christianity, in its clash between eastern truth and western evil, pits the clash of grace and corruption far more starkly than Buddhism, posing a clash between God and Satan in the passion story of the cross and victory of Christ. By contrast Buddhism seeks wisdom through personal peace, seeing the delusion of the world as unconquerable. Integrating these stories suggests that in our evil world, to live as the Buddha means to suffer the cross of Christ, not to escape into divine contemplation.
geo wrote:
And, the claim, the Buddhist claim is, that we can thereby relieve our suffering, even end our suffering. And in the process, align ourselves with moral truth. At least that's the claim. That is the Buddhist claim. Is it true? Is the Buddhist diagnosis of the human predicament, why there is suffering true? And the prescription for the human predicament powerful and effective? Well that's largely what this course is about.
Buddhism provides a coherent rational foundation for thinking about philosophy and religion, through the concept of an unseen rational order of the universe as the profound object of enlightenment. Suffering is caused by false belief, and is overcome by true knowledge. Enlightenment is grounded in the logic and evidence of the modern scientific method, integrated with philosophical analysis of the real meaning of deep ideas of the good, the true and the beautiful.