Anonymous, Day of the Last Judgment, late 19th century. From what I can remember of the Islam classes I took, the Last Judgment is a very big deal for Muslims, just as it is for Christians. In this jaunty scene, Mohammed sits on the camel in the upper right. Per tradition, his face is blanked out.
Yes, it’s Advent, and maybe that should be Jesus (not Mo) up there, but this image is cooler than any of the Christian art I found on the subject (except for Bosch, and I’ve used enough of him already). What makes it cool is the big monster down at the bottom, eating all the bad persons. Image source: the Mohammed Image Archive hosted by zombietime
On this, the first week of Advent, our theme here at psnt.net is: End Times. We have already said a thing or two about the religious version. Now it’s science’s up.
And science says: Things appear to be winding down. The Sun is not immortal. It will die in a few billion years, and when it does the Earth will be cooked, its life extinguished and its oceans vaporized. Who knows where we will be by then. It seems unlikely that we will make it that far, because we have a lot more to cope with than ourselves and our toxic combination of violent tendencies and nightmarish weapons. Catastrophic meteorite impacts await us in the next million years, to say nothing of the next billion. Also dramatic climate changes. If we make it through and leave the Solar System behind before the Sun’s final gasp, we will no longer appear human by today’s standard (we may not even be human by today’s standard). The pressures of evolution and biotechnology will see to that.
But even if we make it we won’t make it, because the universe itself is dying. Currently astronomers think it’s headed for the ultimate freezeout, thanks in part to dark energy. In this scenario the entire cosmos will continue in its current expansion into an infinite future, its ambient temperature on a one-way descent toward absolute zero, its dynamism lost in a complete washout of physical structure. There are other possibilities, but all of them lead to a single conclusion: Humanity will not prevail against nature.
That’s the big picture. It’s haunting, yes. It’s terrifying, actually.
Will Jesus return to stop this? Perhaps it’s a bias placed in me by my scientific background, perhaps it’s just my reflexive disregard for discontinuity, but I say: No.
Which is painful for me to say. As a Christian, I don’t believe in detachable souls. That’s strictly for gnostics, and we sidelined them — for good reason — centuries ago. As a friend of mine said to me recently, “I am not a soul in a body: I am a body and I am a soul” (this is how my friends talk). The two are not separable. The old gospel song notwithstanding, we’ll not fly away when we die, by and by.
Put another way, the Incarnation leaves me in a lurch: No souls without bodies, and no bodies without universes, sorry. I know there are all kinds of ideas out there: perfected bodies, etc., but even these require space and time, right? Why else call them bodies? What are we talking about here?
I went to a liberal seminary, okay, and I was taught about all the metaphorical interpretations of Jesus’ second coming, and I dig them plenty. I even believe them. But they do not answer the present problem, which is: How can we have resurrected bodies of any kind within the universe we know and love? We can’t, that’s how.
This may be the closest thing I’ve had in years to a bona fide conflict between science and Christianity.
Maybe Clay Naff was onto something after all.
Maybe alongside the new heaven and new earth, we’ll also get a new universe.
Maybe there’s no heaven. Maybe when the lights go out, that’s it.
And maybe I need to go home, have a chat with my wife, fix the shower door handle, play horsie with my three-year-old, and thank God that the sun doesn’t rise and set on the tiny little collection of things I actually understand.
Barry Moser, Flannery O’Connor (detail). Wood engraving. See the original at moser-pennyroyal.com. Used with permission of the artist
The First Sunday of Advent. That was yesterday. And what a Sunday it was.
Julie’s sermon was taken from Malachi. Malachi! Can you imagine?! I almost fell over when I saw that. The passage (3.1-3) reads,
See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight — indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.
So we eschewed the lectionary but kept to the traditional First-Sunday-of-Advent theme of Christ’s return (which, of course, Malachi was not originally about, but no matter; it’s fun to interpret).
Once I regained control of myself, things got even better: Julie got all apophatic with Flannery O’Connor‘s short story Revelation.
Which is about Ruby Turpin, who is an excellent Christian, and the end of all things.
Mrs. Turpin is a churchgoing woman of good standing in society. She presents herself with decorum, helps the poor, and does good things for everybody she knows. Yet inwardly she is bigoted toward everyone “both poorer than her and not white,” as Julie put it. The reader of Revelation is treated to a guided tour of her bigotry, which is robust and exquisitely cultivated.
But Ruby Turpin and her bigotry both take a lashing one day while our protagonist is sitting in a waiting room (where else?). As she waits she talks about her fine decent Christian life to another fine decent Christian woman. Overhearing the conversation is a pimply-faced girl. After a while, and quite out of the blue, the girl (named Mary Grace) flings a heavy book at Mrs. Turpin, smacking her hard just above the eye, and calls her “a warthog from hell.”
This gives Mrs. Turpin a lot to think about, and, back at home, she works hard figuring out why God would let this happen to a upstanding, witty, virtuous person like herself. At the end of the story, as if by way of answer, she is given a vision of “a vast horde of souls rumbling toward heaven.” She sees all the people she hates entering paradise ahead of her. At once she knows, per Malachi, that one day her well-cultivated bigotry will be burned away like so much dross.
So Julie used this as an image of what needs to happen to each of us: We may not be bigots, but we all cultivate resentments and fears and anger (well, at least I do). And we can cling to these things because they at least locate us in this world (well, at least they locate me). With our resentments, we know who we are (well, at least I know who I am). I am reminded of the last line from Forgiving Our Fathers, a poem by Dick Lourie: “If we forgive our fathers, what is left?”*
For some reason I thought Julie would stop there, and was resigned to letting the sermon end at that point. I didn’t think she’d go to the very end of Revelation. I don’t know why; maybe because it’s so radical. But I should have known better: Julie went there. She told all of us that it was not just the “bad stuff” that will be consumed, but what we think of as our strengths as well: O’Connor writes of the souls rumbling toward heaven, “even their virtues were being burned away.”
Now that is apophatic.
I don’t really understand any end-times notions of classical Christianity. Perhaps I’ve been biased by my scientific background, but the conventional notion of Jesus returning one day strikes me as comical. This universe is running down; entropy climbs every day and just won’t stop.
Or, as the bumper sticker says, Nature bats last.
So eschatology — the theology of last things — leaves me perplexed and a little amused. I’m not even talking about the Rapture or any of that Left Behind nonsense; I’m talking about any scenario in which Jesus bodily returns to this planet.
Well then, there’s a little confessional for you. (Some of my atheist-agnostic and conservative Christian interlocutors may now pronounce me “not a real Christian.” Go on. You know who you are!)
But I understand, to some degree, realized eschatology. Maybe like beginnings and new life, end times and death are ever with us, at every moment. And certainly the here-and-now burning away of everything we cling to is a good thing. How else to live?
So maybe a little O’Connor was just what I needed.
Coming soon: Thoughts on the end times à la science, which can deliver visions of its own. Also: dead malls. You read that correctly, yes.
*This is the poem read at the end of Smoke Signals, a movie you should see if you haven’t, and should see again if you have.
Radial equations from the analysis of convection within pulsating variable stars. You should see the nonradial equations. Stars are pretty, sure. But when you stop to think about them, they get all complicated and stuff. Image source: Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series
A friend of mine told me a story recently, and it made me laugh:
George Buttrick was a famous preacher and professor. Once he was riding on a plane and scribbling a lot of notes. The fellow next to him asked him what he was doing. Buttrick told him, “I’m a preacher, preparing Sunday’s sermon.”
“Ah, religion,” the man replied. “‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ That’s my religion. Nice and simple. That’s how I like it.”
“I see,” said Buttrick. He kept working.
Some time later he turned to his neighbor and asked, “So what do you do for a living?”
“I’m an astrophysicist,” said the man. “I teach astronomy at a university.”
“Ah, astronomy,” Buttrick replied. “I see. ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star.’ That’s how I like my science. Nice and simple.”
Happy Thanksgiving, all!
Tamara Grizjuk, Detachment, 2002. From 29 November – 20 December, Ms. Grizjuk’s work will be on display at the Agora Gallery in Chelsea, NYC. I believe it will be her first show on this side of the Atlantic, so go check it out if you can. Image source: ARTmine. Used with permission of the artist
The neutrinos are back.
The particles, alleged in September to be traveling faster than light, are at it again. In a paper submitted last Thursday to the Journal of High-Energy Physics, physicists say they have officially eliminated one major possible source of error. And the neutrinos are still breaking the speed limit, by exactly the same margin. Einstein’s theory of relativity is at stake, as is much of physics.
In the face of this, the physicists themselves are pretty cool and skeptical. As they should be. They are are right to separate a bit, knowing that detachment is their greatest virtue at times like this. Only from a posture of clear-headed disinterest do they have any hope of hearing what the data are telling them.
Science is open like that. Is religion? Not so much, but it can be.
I’m waiting for the next wave of bloggers to echo what Alom Shaha, enamored with the celebrated openness of science, wrote at the Guardian in response to the first neutrino result:
Unlike religion, science is not dogmatic… science can seem rather weak in comparison to the certainties religion offers. But it is this very ‘weakness,’ this refusal to issue absolute statements of truth, that allows science to progress, and to come up with increasingly better ways of explaining the world.
Reflexively, I object: Religion offers more than mere certainty. And although science is not dogmatic about its conclusions, it is plenty dogmatic about its assumptions.
But Shaha is basically right: On the whole, we religious believers could use a little detachment from religion.
In physics, detachment comes easy: there is nothing but to be detached from neutrinos. They make absolutely fascinating objects of study. They don’t hurt anyone. They don’t challenge anyone’s worldview. They don’t send anyone to hell. So let’s just poke at them a bit and see what happens.
When it comes to God and religion, however, detachment is a little harder to come by. There’s a lot more at stake: being “right,” eternal bliss, maybe even life itself. If my religion is wrong or incomplete or somehow lacking, the thinking seems to be, that leaves me nowhere. And that’s bad.
It’s just not so.
The rewards of detachment from religion are great. I am not talking about permanently giving up one’s faith or religious practice, but about separating from these things long enough to see them for what they are: means to an end. And I am talking about separating from religion long enough to see ourselves for who we are: a frightened and bewildered lot, set down on this lonely planet for no apparent reason.
Like physicists who may soon have to remove themselves from their reliance on relativity, we religious believers may be well-served by removing ourselves — even for a moment — from our reliance on our religious ideas. Only from such a posture do we have the chance to see religion and ourselves — and God — clearly.
Detachment, itself one of the highest goals of religion, should be a virtue for those of us who pursue religious lives, just as it is a virtue for those who pursue lawless neutrinos.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Source: S. Beckwith & the HUDF Working Group/HST/ESA/NASA. Is everything you see here part of a high-tech stab at survival by a mega-species? That’s what Clay Naff has proposed recently.
Click on the image for a nice high-resolution 19-MB version. It may take a minute to load, but once you have it you can have a boatload of fun getting lost among the galaxies
Clay Farris Naff, an acquaintance of mine and fellow science & religion junkie, is to be applauded for putting himself out there.
On Friday a bold article of his was published at Scientific American. In it he expresses his discontent with the usual suspects in the ongoing science-religion fracas. In light of this, he has staked out a new, unexplored corner of the rumpus ring: supernatural-free intentional creation.
I won’t spell out his argument — it is brief and well worth reading — but what it amounts to is: Perhaps there was life before us, in a universe before ours. That universe was doomed to its death (just as ours is) by the inexorable creep of entropy, so our universe was created by the aforementioned super-species in order to preserve life. There you have it: Intentional creation, thoroughly natural, thoroughly secular. Which becomes a secular humanist like Naff.
But how secular is this, really? A mega-species that intentionally designed the universe with life as a goal? Am I wrong to hear some distinctly religious overtones here? I think not.
But there are other frequencies: For me this is resonating strongly with Carl Sagan’s Contact, wherein perfectly boring extraterrestrials — pure minds, really — somehow slake the (IMO) essentially religious thirst of at least one human being (sorry to mix metaphors).
Like Sagan’s, Naff’s proposal strikes me as a truncated religious story, one that makes God big but not infinite and therefore underestimates humanity’s essential spiritual crisis.
Like Sagan’s, Naff’s is perfectly reasonable, perfectly possible, and perfectly unmatched to the deepest needs of human beings as I know them: perpetually and profoundly unsatisfied with everyone and everything they can smell, touch, imbibe, hold, have sex with, taste, control, beget, design, conceptualize, manufacture, wear, create, eat, drive, live in, shoot up, snort, imagine, hear, and see.
My question: How can a super-species, benign as it may be, be anything other than just another damned thing?
This may be unfair; Naff’s point, after all, is precisely that these creators (about which he is agnostic) are things. And perhaps I have overinterpreted him. Perhaps his post is not meant to deal with anything other than the intellectual problem of justifying hope within a closed system. And perhaps even that is asking too much. Perhaps he’s just pointing to a possibility. After all, he’s working alone (so far as I can tell) in some pretty hard soil.
Still, I wonder: Why bother? Naff’s idea is clearly religious in essence, but it lacks the depth that makes full-grown religion worth the trouble. It is an idea that wants to be fully religious but just can’t commit.
And in this essay at least, Naff himself strikes me as not-so-secular. Certainly he perceives this. Any intellectually astute person who admits publicly (in Scientific American, no less) to being “hopeful… that life is a gift, given in trust” cannot but see what I mean.
P.S. Just today, Naff told me that all of the new atheist commenters at Sci Am read his agnosticism toward mega-species as agnosticism toward God. This is clearly an error, and perhaps only points out something I have always said about new atheists: they cannot stop thinking of God as some super-object in the sky. So they easily conflate Naff’s super-objects with God. Isn’t life fun?
Ernst Haeckel, Geneological Tree of Humanity, 1891. I love the way science and art meet in this drawing. Of course, the science is no longer much good, apart from the general impression that Homo sapiens is one among many interrelated species (although we get top-center placement). Haeckel’s evocative rendering of the tree makes a subject forbidding to many — evolution — seem a bit more approachable. The medium makes a difference. Has anyone combined evolution and art in a similar way in the 21st century? With more up-to-date science? If so, I’d love to know about it. Image source: St. Clair Research. Click on the image for a high-resolution version
Tonight I will be teaching a class on evolution at my church. Thing is, I am not a biologist. So although I am definitely “for” evolution, I won’t be able to give in-depth scientific answers to some of the questions I may be asked. In this sense I will share a kind of outsider status with my fellow parishioners.
Turns out this may be a good thing.
A few days ago, cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky published an interesting article at The Conversation. The piece explores the reasons why people reject what science has to say about the world. His basic point, that science often poses threats — commercial, professional, intellectual, personal — is neither new nor surprising.
But right at the end he asks, “Are there ways in which gaps between scientific knowledge and public acceptance can be bridged?” His answer is yes. Three points follow, and I quote:
1. There is much evidence that the framing of information facilitates its acceptance when it no longer threatens people’s worldview.
2. Similarly, the messenger matters.
3. Finally, people are more likely to accept inconvenient evidence after their worldviews have been affirmed.
My summary: It’s not what you say; it’s who you are and how you say it. Context is everything.
So if accepting evolution requires every religious person on the face of the planet to drop their beliefs wholesale and become atheists, as some suggest, evolution will never meet large-scale acceptance. It really is that simple.
But if the acceptance of evolution does not require such a radical jettisoning of religious claims; if it is not an all-or-nothing enterprise; if one can be a Christian (or a Jew, or a Muslim) without being a creationist, as some suggest, evolution has a chance of being accepted. It really is that simple.
As a fellow non-specialist, I will not speak to the class in alienating jargon. As a fellow Christian, I will not come at them with a hostile worldview. As one who many of them know personally, I will not come as a stranger with an agenda. And we will be in a familiar and comfortable setting.
Maybe this is the right formula. It’s not a huge deal, in the bigger picture. It’s just a single one-hour class, taught by a non-expert, at one church on one evening.
But that’s okay. Small steps, right?
Michael König, Time Lapse Views of Earth from ISS, 2011. The music leaves a little to be desired, perhaps, but this is one wonderful video. Full-screen and hi-def it
Here’s a little break from the regularly scheduled program, via the Bad Astronomer.
As a big fan of robotic exploration of the solar system and space telescopes, I don’t usually get too excited about the International Space Station, which does some science, OK, but not much when compared to its overall cost. I guess human space flight has its place; I’m just not sure what it is.
But this makes me grateful that the ISS is up there, orbiting the planet every 90 minutes. What wonderful, thought-provoking views.
I’m a fairly serious map and geography nerd, so watching this is a thrill for me. I see the Gulf of California at 1:20, the boot of Italy at 2:03, the Nile Delta and River at 2:25 (and also later), and my own ATL at the bottom of the screen at 0:39 and 2:57. The second ATL shot is followed by a flyover of Florida, after which a dark Haiti/Dominican Republic and brilliantly-outlined Puerto Rico pass by. What can you find?
And what in blazes is that snake-like thing that shows up at 3:47? It’s not China’s Great Wall; is it some river? Anyone know? It shows up again on the left edge at 4:38.
UPDATE 11/21: It’s the India-Pakistan border! Who knew?
The auroras and lightning throughout are wonderful, are they not? It’s easy to forget that lightning storms never stop discharging our fair planet’s atmosphere. (BTW, speaking of ATL and lightning, I just found this nice picture!)
Anyway, if this is your cup of tea, enjoy. If not, fine, whatever.
Here’s to a brand new week.
Benozzo Gozzoli, The Glory of Saint Thomas Aquinas. 1468-1484. Thomas, nearly as postmodern a chap as Nicholas of Cusa, was keenly aware of the difficulties inherent in all God-talk. He dealt with the problem up front in his Summa Theologica, forging a middle way between apophatic and cataphatic. We like him anyway. Source: Wikimedia Commons. The speech bubble is of 21st-century provenance
Last week I wrote a post at RD about how New Atheism depends on “Enlightenment-style rationalism and an obsession with material evidence,” both hallmarks of modernism. As modernism fades, I wrote, so too will scientifically-motived atheism. Science itself, on the other hand, will stay with us — a good thing — as we learn to properly contextualize it.
Meanwhile, however, those invested in ultra-rationalism don’t like seeing the modernist dream go without it having delivered us Utopia. Therefore many shift into panic mode, giving us, for the moment, a bizarre kind of hypermodernism. So I suggested, echoing Christian Piatt’s recent Huffington Post article.
One aspect of this hypermodernism is a reflexive disregard for ideas that may challenge its view of the world.
Take negative theology, for example. It is as old and as standard a piece of theology as there is, yet it is remarkably unpopular among hypermoderns of all shapes and sizes. Both Al Mohler and Jerry Coyne take an equally dim view of this brand of theology. The first thinks it’s just atheism in disguise, and the second tosses it off as so much intellectual masturbation.
The second opinion seems to be shared by some who have commented on Beatrice Marovich’s recent interview with Catherine Keller, and on my response to it, and on Marovich’s reponse to my response. These RD readers don’t like apophatic theology, not one bit.
As if doing me a personal favor, one commenter even called it postmodern.
“I have never encountered such theological doohickey postmodernist BS as I did when reading that article. It takes a special skill to speak so freely through the fog of cognitive dissonance,” (s)he wrote. Others accused Marovich and me (and, by extension, Keller) of obfuscation, stupidity, and meaninglessness.
This is the Internet, yes. These kinds of comments are to be expected, yes. I have received plenty of them in my time. But these are noteworthy because they illustrate, if only in a teeny tiny way, the point I was trying to make last week: There is a real sense of panic out there. Why else would anyone make personal attacks on people they don’t even know? Over apophatic theology?
On a related note: Criticism of this brand of theology seems to be prominent among those who value scientific skepticism. This is ironic, because apophasis is based in a truly radical skepticism that leaves no idea — none, I assure you — unquestioned. Theologians like Nicholas of Cusa, whose work Keller cites, routinely out-negate even the most plainspoken of our current lot of scientifically-motivated atheists.
Granted, negative theology is not for everybody. But it is very much for the skeptics among us. There is much goodness and even joy to be found in the loss of our God-concepts. It is to this joy that apophasis calls us.
Catherine Keller. Image source: Vancouver School of Theology
A couple of days ago there appeared, at Religion Dispatches, an interview with theologian Catherine Keller. I read some of Keller’s stuff as a seminary student and found her to be extremely challenging. She reads not unlike poetry. Over time, though, I began (I like to think) to understand her language and what she was getting at. And it’s pretty exciting, because often she draws together two of my favorite subjects: science and apophatic theology.
The interview starts off with a short discussion of Nicholas of Cusa, a 15th-century German cardinal and all-out polymath. His theological work concentrated on the infinity of God and all the problems that brings up. As Keller says, “The fundamental contradiction that haunts [Nicholas] throughout all of his work — and attracts him as well — is that we are utterly finite creatures who don’t have the capacity to grasp the infinite, which is God.” He was taken by the contradiction, and made good use of it.
Keller uses Cusanus’ work to point out the omnipresence of contradictions in our lives: “the contradictions between our life calling and a relationship to a loved one, or the contradiction between our ecological awareness and our economic practice.” The question is, What to do with these contradictions?
In good apophatic style she says that, in straining to resolve them, we may approach a limit. In mentioning the uncertainty principle and other quantum oddities, she hints that this may a fundamental limit, that ignorance may be as basic to human nature as knowledge. But this is not a conceptual ignorance, this is not merely an empty spot on the map, this is not “I don’t know how the eye evolved.” It is a fundamental, background kind of ignorance that sits quietly and patiently beneath everything that goes by the name of knowledge.
This ignorance is not self-evident, but may be apprehended by honestly confronting the contradictions of life. It is therefore called learned ignorance by Nicholas. Keller (and maybe Socrates) suggests that its discovery is the best product of learning, and the worst thing is to be unaware of it, because without it all you can ever have is “little bits of knowledge parading as certainty.”
It is ignorance, to be sure. But it is not a problem to be solved. “The problem is not our ignorance. That’s unavoidable. But if we realize the shape of our ignorance, then we can learn a lot more.”
Here’s to a beautiful fall weekend for all Beloved Readers.
Not depressed: HHDL’s call for “Buddhist science” may make sense. Image source: buddhachannel.tv
Several years ago I went on antidepressants. It was one of the most difficult, drawn-out, painful decisions I have ever made. When I finally did, though, there was very little pain and a lot of relief. Several days before my first prescription was filled, one of my most trusted friends asked me if I felt like throwing in the towel. Yes I do, I said, I feel exactly like doing that. After that I just did it.
So last week, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published their newest report on antidepressant use, I took note. The cash-out: Since 1988 there has been a 400% increase in the use of antidepressants. More than one in ten Americans over the age of 12 is currently taking them. There is some concern that depression is overdiagnosed, but there is also evidence that this may not the case.
Whether or not too many people are on antidepressants, though, one thing is clear: A whole lot of people feel really bad.
Before I threw in the towel I did my research. I took several self-assessments, which convinced me that I was in fact suffering from clinical depression. I read about the science of antidepressants, which struck me as vague at best. I read Brave New World, which scared me to death. And I read Dark Night of the Soul, which gave me the strength to do what I did.
One of the things Dark Night taught me is that not everything that feels bad, is bad. There is a distinction to be drawn between depression and John’s dark nights. Dark nights occur when God (in John’s language) draws near and strips a person bare of all illusions about herself, her world, and the divine.
Yet the symptoms of depression and dark nights are hauntingly similar: a persistent “disintegration of feeling and agency, a collapse of personal narrative into meaningless segments of event for which one can have no liking or love,” in the words of Yale theologian Denys Turner.
According to John, what distinguishes a dark night from depression is (what we would call today) the subject’s sense of self upon exiting the struggle. In the case of depression (which John called melancholia, among other things), the subject returns to a state of pre-depression mental health and regains a more-or-less stable sense of self. In the case of a dark night, however, the subject comes to recognize that what he once called his “self” was no more than an illusion of his own making. Once achieved, this loss of self is the most joyful of events. It is a burden released. In fact, a dark night is marked precisely by the hope for the non-recovery of the old self in any form.
Is neurology alone up to the task of making this distinction? I don’t know. I admit to being skeptical, though, and not just because of the God part (although Christian resonances abound — you must die to yourself to live, etc. — even über-atheist Sam Harris admits one does not need to share John’s metaphysics to take this seriously). It seems to me the only way to make the distinction is to listen to what the sufferer says. But is it scientific to speak of self and loss of self? Is it scientific to trust such language?
Again, I don’t know. But at least one person thinks it is.
Last summer I was in India and took part in a private audience with Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. He spoke at length about science and Buddhism. But this is not quite right: he talked about “Buddhist science,” a term that at the time struck me as rather goofy — isn’t the whole point of science its blindness to local cultural vagaries? — but is beginning to sink in.
The context of his remarks was the investigation of the human brain/mind. His point was, standard Western-style scientific research on the brain is well and good and should be done, but not without a parallel kind of experiential investigation, e.g., of the mind of the meditator, by the meditator. Human experience, in other words, can be translated into useful data.
Why not? Perhaps our interior lives are not as subjective as we’d like to think. Perhaps we have more in common with one another than we can easily see.
One need not be a Christian or a Buddhist to take dark nights seriously. For centuries these traditions have systematically cultivated this loss which is no loss, but dark nights can happen to anyone. And for the sake of millions of sad people living out their lives in a happiness-obsessed culture, the difference between dark nights and clinical depression should be made clear.
Even if it takes “Buddhist science” to do it.
