I'm For Science, Except For When I'm Not

Another religious leader has come out in opposition to the basics of evolution. How many more of these Pat Robertson fundie Christian types is this country going to put up with before we say enough is enough and demand some sort of scientific literacy among this influential group of cultural leaders?

What? What's that you say? This isn't from a right-wing Christian? It's the Dalai Lama?

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.

Huh.

This New York Times review of the Dalai Lama's new book casts a skeptical eye over the Tibetan spiritual leader's attempt to reconcile science with religion. Now, I don't have a problem with the Dalai Lama per se, and he does seem pretty open to scientific thought. But The Times can't resist a little elbow in the ribs of Christian theologians:

"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.

But doesn't the Dalai Lama start from a similar point? It's easy to interpret his statements as implicitly saying: "Given that the soul exists and is reincarnated into new bodies..."

His claim that he would drop tenets of Buddhism if they were shown scientifically to be false is a bit disingenuous, because he has to know that many matters of faith cannot simply be disproven. It is impossible to prove conclusively that there is no God, or soul, or karmic cycle.

Now, I happen to think that there is enough accumulated evidence to demonstrate conclusively that none of those things actually exists, at least not in the sense meant by thousands of years of human spiritual tradition. But if you are still unswayed, if you still feel the tug of faith in your heart, then it's unlikely that any further scientific advance is going to turn you.

I'm not defending Christian apologists here, just pointing out an inconsistency in how The Times handles Christianity versus other religions.