What is Buddhism's stance on paper vs plastic bags? Mixing Religion And Other Concerns

The Watercooler
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I was thinking about this the other day, as it happens. I remember reading The Selfish Gene and it was awesome, it had so many insights (for an amateur like me) that prompted me to see the organic world in new ways.

I wonder about how this happens. Dawkins is far from the only example. I suspect that part of it is to do with how education teaches rationality in very domain-specific ways. People learn to apply reason when working with a spreadsheet, or arguing a case, or theorizing about the implications of Darwin. Having a degree of expertise there, they assume the knowledge can be applied across domains.

Part of the issue is personal, it’s about humility and narcissism. And part is political; facts bend before power. But I wonder if part of it is also the nature of education; whether perhaps a broader education in non-specific philosophical reasoning might help?

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BlockquoteThe personal convictions of “scientists” might vary, but the term “scientist” is often used to describe those who work in natural science, not formal or social sciences.

The survey was of natural scientists.

BlockquoteNatural science, by definition, is defined through negating the supernatural and human subjectivity.

That’s not accurate. Natural science is, by definition, empirical, and empiricism concerns itself with what can be known through the five conventional senses. The supernatural and the subjective are unknowable through empiricism, but that doesn’t mean they are intrinsically unknowable or nonexistent. I think you are equating natural science with scientism.

BlockquoteWhen people take “a way” of perceiving the world to be “the way” to perceive the world, science becomes another dogma.

I agree. But science can’t be separated from scientists, and the majority of scientists are not dogmatists. Empiricism doesn’t necessitate dogmatism; people enact it.

You’re characterizing Humanism as atheistic and that’s neither fair nor accurate.

BlockquoteThis works through emphasizing the laws of nature as a reference point which has to be known empirically. A reference point is a way of perceiving.

Agreed. Again, Humanism and empiricism do not negate other references points. Fifty years ago, it was a fairer statement to say that they did (if still denotatively inaccurate). But that was then. In our era, metaphysical truth claims and closed belief systems of any sort are treated with extreme skepticism by academics, and that includes militant atheism and scientism.

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I think education would help a great deal, and there are currently curricula that do inculcate an appreciation of domains other than any individual students preferred domain of eventual expertise, and instill an understanding of the limits of that domain – you come to know what you don’t know. In the US, this is referred to as a liberal or liberal arts education.

It used to be the standard in American higher education, but it’s gradually falling out of favor because it takes time away from education in domains that generate a lot of income as soon as possible (i.e. not philosophy). The best way to quickly get on with making that money is to be very domain-specific as well as extremely competitive so that you stand out to potential employers. As a result, you might not know what you don’t know… but you might think you do.

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Studies show, unfortunately, that they don’t. :pensive: Teaching people philosophy and even ethics tends to give people only more sophisticated tools for their post-hoc rationalizations. :roll_eyes:

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I think it depends on the individual. You would want to ask which (plastic or paper) would lead to greater freedom from remorse.

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Do you have any citations?

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Blah, I was afraid you’d ask! :joy: It was something a philosopher said in passing in an interview as if it were a well-established fact…

Looking up their citations, it seems that they were relying on the work of Eric Schwitzgebel who has found, among other things, that ethics books are stolen from university libraries at a higher rate, that there’s no evidence that ethics courses improve behavior and that ethics professors behave as ethically as anyone else, using rationalization to explain the disconnect. His findings are not unique. A software code of conduct, for example, did nothing to influence ethical decisions among software engineers even when they were explicitly instructed to do so!

However, there is other work out there.

So while, again, business students who took an ethics class were no less likely to cheat, that study and others have found that spirituality can be an effective driver of ethical conduct.

And it seems that targeted, practical interventions can have some effect. A recent study, for example, showed that you can (slightly) reduce student meat consumption by exposing them to the ethical consensus on the subject.

So all hope is not lost. We just have to be careful what kind of education we’re talking about.

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This is an inaccurate interpretation of my input on humanism. According to google, humanism is defined as:

a rationalist outlook or system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters.

From the link you shared on scientism:

Descartes and Bacon used particularly strong rhetoric to carve out space for their new methods. They claimed that by learning how the physical world worked, we could become “masters and possessors of nature.”(4) In doing so, humans could overcome hunger through innovations in agriculture, eliminate disease through medical research, and dramatically improve overall quality of life through technology and industry. Ultimately, science would save humans from unnecessary suffering and their self-destructive tendencies. And it promised to achieve these goals in this world, not the afterlife. It was a bold, prophetic vision.

So, the shift took the shape of a new emphasis on agency. The agency of god was replaced with the agency of humans. The following is from wikipedia:

Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively. The meaning of the term humanism has fluctuated according to the successive intellectual movements which have identified with it.[1] Generally, however, humanism refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of human freedom and progress. It views humans as solely responsible for the promotion and development of individuals and emphasizes a concern for humans in relation to the world.[2]

That does not make humanism necessarily atheist. This was my input about humanism:

Humanism inclusive of religion is based on portraying religion as a human phenomena. In this mindset, believing in god is a conscious choice lacking evidence, but valued as an aspect of the human psyche.

In modern political discourse in the west, the relationship between science, religion and politics is becoming an increasingly divisive issue. When we follow the news, we see people encountering difficult questions on the role of science in public life, policy and on what to believe. A recent example was coronavirus where the validity of science and the integrity of scientists have become under an increasing scrutiny, or at times, a blind belief.

More generally, the attempt to use science to justify dogma precedes the internet and Richard Dawkins. The genocides during WW2 is a good example. Using the term scientism is a step forward in my opinion, but i would go a further and deal with the term “scientists” with extreme caution. Probably, citation better include names of individuals and their professions rather than the vague term “scientist”.

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The following input by Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo about worldly knowledge might be relevant:

I’m going to talk about knowledge — the highest level of knowledge, not ordinary knowledge. Ordinary knowledge is adulterated with a lot of defilements and mental fermentations, and so it’s called hethima-vijja, lower knowledge. Lower knowledge is something everyone has, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike: the various branches of worldly knowledge that people study from textbooks so as to run their societies and administer their nations. And then there are the special branches of knowledge, the scientific ways of thinking that people use to invent all sorts of amazing contraptions for the human race — things like clairvoyance (television), clairaudience (telephones), and powers of levitation (airplanes). They’ve gotten to the point where these contraptions can work in place of people. During the last war, for instance, I heard that they were able to drop bombs on other countries without sending people along with them. With a push of a button they could tell the missile where to go, what to do, and when it had finished the job to their satisfaction, have it come back home. This is what’s called progress in worldly knowledge — or lokiya vijja. This kind of knowledge is common all over the world, and falls into the two sorts that I’ve mentioned: the sort that comes from studying books (sutamaya-pañña), and the sort that comes from thinking things through, or cintamaya-pañña.

This second kind of knowledge arises within the mind itself. People with a lot of education in the theoretical sciences work with their thinking. They think to the point where an idea appears as a picture in the mind, like an uggaha-nimitta (spontaneous image). When the picture appears in the mind, they may sketch it down on paper, and then experiment with physical objects to see if it works. If it doesn’t work, they make adjustments, creating a new idea from their old idea — adjusting it a bit here, expanding it a bit there — keeping at it until they find what works in line with their aims.

If we think about this on a shallow level, it’s really amazing. But if we think a little bit deeper, it’s not so amazing at all. They take their starting point with something really simple: for example, how to make a small person large, or a large person small — something really, really simple. Then they take a mirror and bend it in, so that a tall person will turn into a small person. They bend it out, so that a small person will become tall. That’s all to begin with. Then they keep thinking along these lines until they can take a faraway object and make it appear up close. The people who get these things started tend to be military strategists. They’re the ones who usually get these ideas first. Another important branch of science is medicine. People in both these branches have to think deeper than people in general.

For example, people in ships out at sea got it into their heads that they’d like to see the ships approaching them from a distance. “How can we see them? How can we get their image to appear in our ship?” They worked on this idea until they succeeded. First they started out really simple-minded, just like us. Simple-minded in what way? They thought like a mirror, that’s all, nothing special. They put a mirror up high on a mast and then had a series of mirrors pick up the image in the first mirror and send it on down into the ship. They didn’t have to look in the first mirror. They could look at a little tiny mirror down in the ship and see ships approaching from far away. That’s all they used in the beginning. After a while they made a single mirror in waves. When an image hit the top wave, the next wave picked it up and sent it on down the waves of the mirror into the ship. They kept thinking about this until now, no more: They have radar, a tiny little box that doesn’t use a series of mirrors, and doesn’t use a mirror in waves, but can still pull the image of a faraway ship and make it appear in your ship. This is how knowledge develops to a high level in the sciences.

As for medicine, doctors these days are researching into how they can keep people from dying. Lots of people are doing the research, but no one has found the solution. No matter how much research they do, people are still dying. They haven’t succeeded in making people live longer than their ordinary span. This is another branch of knowledge that comes from thinking, and not from textbooks.

And there’s still another branch that’s moving even further out, but how far they’ll get is hard to say. These are the people who want to go and live on Mars. It must be really nice up there. But the chances of their succeeding are small. Why are they small? Because the people aren’t really sincere. And why aren’t they sincere? Because they’re still unsure and uncertain. The idea isn’t really clear in their heads. This uncertainty is what gets in the way of success.

So this is the second level of worldly knowledge, the level that comes from thinking and ideas, or cintamaya-pañña.

But in the final analysis, neither of these two levels of knowledge can take us beyond suffering and stress. They’re the type of knowledge that creates bad kamma about 70 percent of the time. Only 30 percent of the time do they actually benefit the human race. Why only 30 percent? If another war gets started: total disaster. The kinds of knowledge that are really useful, that give convenience to human transportation and communication, are few and far between. For the most part, worldly knowledge is aimed at massive killing, at amassing power and influence. That’s why it doesn’t lead beyond suffering and stress, doesn’t lead beyond birth, aging, illness, and death.

Take, for instance, the countries at present that are clever in building all kinds of weapons. They sell their weapons to other countries, and sometimes those other countries use the weapons to kill people in the countries that built them. There are countries that can’t build their own weapons, yet they declare war on the countries who gave them military aid. That’s about as far as the results of worldly knowledge can take you.

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/thai/lee/knowledge.html#shades

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I apologize for any mischaracterizations I may have made, but it seems like we are getting into quibbling over definitions. Scrolling back up to the start of the thread, I think we may have a little trouble agreeing on what “facts” are! In brief… I define Humanism as Humanists define it (see the Amsterdam Declaration, not wikipedia), and I believe that the “scientific establishment” is a factual thing that exists in the world and can be talked about reasonably, and by and large it is neither dogmatic and nor the enemy of religion. Perhaps these are articles of faith? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I suspect our views are more aligned than not, and it has been a pleasure talking to you. I certainly agree that “science” can and has been weaponized to rationalize injustice and evil, and I certainly agree that political discourse in the US is divisive. An anti-science sentiment has taken root in a large segment of the public, and has grown terrifyingly consequential in our ability to collectively address not just COVID and global warming, but pandemics and environmental health generally.

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When i referred to the Amsterdam Deceleration, this is what i found :wink:

Humanism is rational .It seeks to use science creatively, not destructively.
Humanists believe that the solutions to the world’s problems lie in human thought and action rather than divine intervention. Humanism advocates the application of the methods of science and free inquiry to the problems of human welfare. But Humanists also believe that the application of science and technology must be tempered by human values. Science gives us the means but human values must propose the ends.

:dizzy_face:

I suspect our views are more aligned than not, and it has been a pleasure talking to you.

Like wise :hearts:

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I’m familiar with studies of that sort. They’re interesting for sure, and darkly amusing in some ways, but it points to a deeper issue in psychology and motivation that’s dealt with elsewhere.

Generally, it’s been long observed and amply demonstrated that teaching people sets of rules leads to them finding work-arounds in pursuit of their desired ends when they are in conflict. Whether that’s violating them and avoiding detection, violating them and rationalizing the violation, or hewing to the letter but not the spirit of the rule. It just seems to be how people are, and you see the pattern everywhere you have people and rules together. Policing people or making them feel policed generally isn’t the answer, at least in an individualistic society. It can be counter-productive in some situations by sparking a reactionary mindset.

But I think that misses the point. We aren’t talking about anyone breaking rules, we are talking about experts in one domain convincing themselves (and others) that they are experts in other domains as well. This isn’t an ethical or moral mistake, it’s an intellectual one, so ethics classes aren’t the intervention. Dawkins isn’t naughty, he’s ignorant and vain.

There will always be Dawkinses who use their status and rhetorical skills to push their uninformed views on a less-informed public (to the chagrin of their lower-status, less grandiose but better informed colleagues), but, imo, there might be fewer Dawkinses if hyper-specialization in education wasn’t the norm. But it is increasingly the norm because it is so richly rewarded.

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I totally see where you are coming from, and I think our disagreement is over some pretty fine distinctions that really don’t bear much on what we hold in common. Have a great day, or night, wherever you are!

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Ken Ham, potentially, or anyone related to the American-British-Australian axis of “creation sciences.” This is really the context of these bitter arguments over science vs religion. Dawkins in light of this can be viewed as a symptom of the push-back due to Abrahamic (Protestant really, tbh) religious ideologies trying to push science (evolution, astronomy, geology, etc.) out of things like children’s education. These are the very same communities that disparage institutions of post-secondary higher learning as liberal brainwashing projects, etc., because grads of such institutions often abandon ideological stances concerning “creationism,” etc., and often abandon extreme ideologies related to the Christian religious far right, like those concerning sex and gender minorities, the role of women in the workplace, etc.

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Indeed, that’s a good point. Although the manner of argumentation still has an ethical dimension. When experts, especially those from prestigious fields, speak in other fields, people listen to them, so they should be careful because their words carry weight.

Indeed. And one problem is that it is hard to quantify. Thanks for getting the citations for me, it is interesting stuff, and always good to be reminded of the gulf between making rules about things and people’s behavior; but I’m really hard to convince with this kind of psychological study these days!

I suspect that underlying this is a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. We have to understand why it is that people feel the need to express themselves in these ways. There must be a perceived inadequacy in public discourse that they want to fill.

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Yes, he is a rabid anti-creationist, which stands to reason as he is an evolutionary geneticist and creationists tread on his turf. But I think 9/11 played a role in his decision to write the book, which turned him into the face of “New Atheism,” which in turn became a dogma of a lot of angry young men on the internet. Anyway, he seems to have concluded that religion should be stamped out so as to stamp out religious extremism and atavism.

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I think that’s right. There is considerable appetite in the reading public for discourse on how to square (or not) science with spirituality, religion and ideology, and that’s completely understandable. As a society, we are far from settled on these matters so the marketplace of ideas is quite lively.

For better or worse, the academy no longer tackles these issues so the discourse necessarily happens outside it.