This was a fitting description of the science that I saw in the labs of Cambridge. Science had lost its sense of humility. Egotistical opinion prevailed over the impartial search for Truth. My favourite aphorism from that time was: "The eminence of a great scientist, is measured by the length of time that they OBSTRUCT PROGRESS in their field"!

To understand real science, one can go back to one of its founding fathers, the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561 - 1628). He established the framework on which science was to progress, namely "the greater force of the negative instance".

When a flaw appears in the theory, only then does science advance. A new discovery has been made enabling the theory to be adjusted and refined. This fundamental and original methodology of science understood that it is impossible to prove anything with absolute certainty. One can only disprove with absolute certainty.

For example, how can one prove the basic law of gravity that "what goes up comes down, eventually"? One may throw objects up one million times and see them fall one million times. But that still does not prove "what goes up comes down".

For NASA might then 'throw' a Saturn rocket up into space to explore Mars, and that never comes down to earth again. One negative instance is enough to disprove the theory with absolute certainty.

Some misguided scientists maintain the theory that there is no rebirth, that this stream of consciousness is incapable of returning to a successive human existence. All one needs to disprove this theory, according to science, is to find one instance of rebirth, just one!

Professor Ian Stevenson, as some of you would know, has already demonstrated many instances of rebirth. The theory of no rebirth has been disproved. Rebirth is now a scientific fact!

Modern science gives a low priority to any efforts to disprove its pet theories. There is too much vested interest in power, prestige and research grants. A courageous commitment to truth takes too many scientists out of their comfort zone.

Scientists are, for the most part, brainwashed by their education and their in-group conferences to see the world in a very narrow, microscopic, way. The very worst scientists are those who behave like eccentric evangelists, claiming that they alone have the whole truth, and then demanding the right to impose their views on everyone else.

Ordinary people know so little about science that they can hardly even understand the jargon.

Yet, if they read in a newspaper or magazine "a scientist says that?", then they automatically take it to be true. Compare this to our reaction when we read in the same journal "a politician says that?"! Why do scientists have such unchallenged credibility?

Perhaps it is because the language and ritual of science has become so far removed from the common people, that scientists have become today's revered and mystical priesthood.

Dressed in their ceremonial white lab coats, chanting incomprehensible mumbo jumbo about multi-dimensional fractal parallel universes, and performing magical rituals that transubstantiate metal and plastic into TVs and computers, these modern day alchemists are so awesome we'll believe anything they say. Elitist science, as once was the Pope, is now infallible.

Some know better. Much of what I learnt 30 years ago has now been proved wrong. There are, fortunately, many scientists with integrity and humility who affirm that science is, at best, a work still in progress.

They know that science can only suggest a truth, but can never claim a truth. I was once told by a Buddhist G.P. that, on his first day at a medical school in Sydney, the famous Professor, head of the Medical School, began his welcoming address by stating "Half of what we are going to teach you in the next few years is wrong. Our problem is that we do not know which half it is!" Those were the words of a real scientist.

Some evangelical scientists would do well to reflect on the (amended) old saying "Scientists rush in where angels fear to tread" and stop pontificating about the nature of the mind, happiness and even Nirvana. Neurologists are especially prone to such neuroses (Neurosis: an undue adherence to unrealistic ideas of things).

They are claiming that the mind, awareness and will, is now adequately explained by activity in the brain. This theory was disproved over 20 years ago by Prof. Lorber's discovery of the student at Sheffield University with an IQ of 126, a First Class degree in mathematics, but with virtually no brain (Science, Vol. 210, 12 Dec 1980)!

More recently, it was disproved by Prof. Pim Van Lommel, who demonstrated the existence of consciousness activity after clinical death, i.e. when all brain activity has ceased (Lancet, Vol. 358, 15 December 2001, p 2039).

Although there may be correlation between a measurable activity in part of the brain and a mental impression, such co-occurrence doesn't always imply that one is the cause of the other. For instance, some years ago, research showed a clear correlation between cigarette smoking and the non-occurrence of Alzheimer's disease.

It was not that smoking cigarettes somehow caused immunity from Alzheimer's, as much as the tobacco companies might have wished, it was only that many smokers did not live long enough to get Alzheimer's disease!

Thus a co-incidence of two phenomena, even when repeated, does not mean that one phenomenon is the cause of the other. To claim that activity in the brain causes awareness, or mind, is plainly unscientific.

Buddhism is more scientific than modern science. Like science, Buddhism is based on verifiable cause-and-effect relationships. But unlike science, Buddhism challenges with thoroughness every belief.

The famous Kalama Sutta of Buddhism states that one cannot believe fully in "what one is taught, tradition, hearsay, scripture, logic, inference, appearance, agreement with established opinion, the seeming competence of a teacher, or even in one's own teacher".

How many scientists are as rigorous in their thinking as this? Buddhism challenges everything, including logic.

It is worth noting that Quantum Theory appeared quite illogical, even to such great scientists as Einstein, when it was first proposed. It is yet to be disproved. Logic is only as reliable as the assumptions on which it is based. Buddhism trusts only clear and objective experience.

Clear experience occurs when one's measuring instruments, one's senses, are bright and undisturbed. In Buddhism, this happens when the hindrances of sloth-and-torpor and restlessness-and-remorse are both overcome. Objective experience is that which is free from all bias.

In Buddhism, the three types of bias are desire, ill will and sceptical doubt. Desire makes one see only what one wants to see, it bends the truth to fit one's preferences. Ill will makes one blind to whatever is disturbing or disconcerting to one's views and it distorts the truth by denial.

Sceptical doubt stubbornly refuses to accept those truths, like rebirth, that are plainly valid but which fall outside of one's comforting worldview.

In summary, clear and objective experience only happens when the Buddhist 'Five Hindrances' have been overcome. Only then can one trust the data arriving through one's senses.

Because scientists are not free of these five hindrances, they are rarely clear and objective. It is common, for example, for scientists to ignore annoying data, which do not fit their cherished theories, or else confine such evidence to oblivion by filing it away as an 'anomaly'.

Even most Buddhists aren't clear and objective. One has to have recent experience of Jhana to effectively put aside these five hindrances (according to the Nalakapana Sutta , Majjhima No. 68). So only accomplished meditators can claim to be real scientists, that is, clear and objective.

Science claims to rely not only on clear and objective observation, but also on measurement. But what is measurement in science? To measure something, according to the pure science of Quantum Theory, is to collapse the Schroedinger Wave Equation through an act of observation.

Moreover, the "un-collapsed" form of the Schroedinger Wave Equation, that is before any measurement is made, is, perhaps, science's most perfect description of the world.

That description is weird! Reality, according to pure science, does not consist of well-ordered matter with precise massed, energies and positions in space, all just waiting to be measured. Reality is the broadest of smudges of all possibilities, only some being more probable than others.

Even basic 'measurable' qualities as 'alive' or 'dead' have been demonstrated by science to be invalid sometimes. In the notorious 'Schroedinger's Cat' thought experiment, Prof. Schroedinger's cat was ingeniously placed in a real situation where it was neither dead nor alive, where such measurements became meaningless. Reality, according to Quantum Theory, is beyond measurements. Measuring disturbs reality, it never describes it perfectly.

It was Heisenberg's famous 'Uncertainty Principle' that showed the inevitable error between the real Quantum world and the measured world of pseudo-science.

Anyway, how can anyone measure the measurer, the mind? At a recent seminar on Science and Religion, at which I was a speaker, a Catholic in the audience bravely announced that whenever she looks through a telescope at the stars, she feels uncomfortable because her religion is threatened.

I commented that whenever a scientist looks the other way round through a telescope, to observe the one who is watching, then they feel uncomfortable because their science is threatened by what is doing the seeing! So what is doing the seeing, what is this mind that eludes modern science?

A Grade-One teacher once asked her class "What is the biggest thing in the world?" One little girl answered "My daddy". A little boy said "An elephant", since he'd recently been to the zoo. Another girl suggested "A mountain".

The six-year-old daughter of a close friend of mine replied, "My eye is the biggest thing in the world"! The class stopped. Even the teacher didn't understand her answer. So the little philosopher explained "Well, my eye can see her daddy, an elephant, and a mountain too. It can also see so much else. If all of that can fit into my eye, then my eye must be the biggest thing in the world." Brilliant!

However, she was not quite right. The mind can see everything that one's eye can see, and it can also imagine so much more. It can also hear, smell, taste and touch, as well as think. In fact, everything that can be known can fit into the mind. Therefore, the mind must be the biggest thing in the world. Science's mistake is obvious now. The mind is not in the brain, nor in the body. The brain, the body and the rest of the world, are in the mind!

Mind is the sixth sense in Buddhism, it is that which encompasses the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, and transcends them with its own domain. It corresponds loosely to Aristotle's "common sense" that is distinct from the five senses.

Indeed, ancient Greek philosophy, from where science is said to have its origins, taught six senses just like Buddhism. Somewhere along the historical journey of European thinking, they lost their mind! Or, as Aristotle would put it, they somehow discarded their "common sense"! And thus we got science. We got materialism without any heart. One can accurately say that Buddhism is science that has kept its heart, and which hasn't lost its mind!

Thus Buddhism is not a belief system. It is a science founded on objective observation, i.e. meditation, ever careful not to disturb the reality through imposing artificial measurements, and it is evidently repeatable.

People have been re-creating the experimental conditions, known as establishing the factors of the Noble Eightfold Path, for over twenty-six centuries now, much longer than science. And those renowned Professors of Meditation, the male and female Arahants, have all arrived at the same conclusion as the Buddha.

They verified the timeless Law of Dhamma, otherwise known as Buddhism. So Buddhism is the only real science, and I'm happy to say that I'm still a scientist at heart, only a much better scientist than I ever could have been at Cambridge.

Courtesy: Buddhist Society of Western Australia.

He starts with stating that 'I used to be a scientist'. A scientist is a person with expert knowledge of a scientific discipline. Therefore, one cannot be 'retired' from being a scientist unless the person somehow loses that expert knowledge.

It's not as simple as saying 'I used to play college basketball' once you have finished playing for your college team! This is simply because the knowledge you gained stays with you for life unless you have a major loss of memory.
No valua

His mention of hanging out in the same building as the eminent Professor Stephen Hawking at Cambridge does not add any value when Ven. Brahmavanso categorically states that science is dogmatic and scientists are brainwashed, evangelical and, egotistic.

When I read between the lines of his first 10 or so paragraphs, I cannot help but notice some vengeful attacks on all scientists in general. This is very uncharacteristic for such an eminent Buddhist scholar.

First, science cannot be dogmatic by its very definition. As he correctly quotes from the dictionary, a dogma is an arrogant declaration of an opinion.

How can a scientist declare an arrogant opinion and hope it to be accepted while he or she has to prove the declaration by objective evidence and peer-review? With great respect, I must enlighten the mind of the Mahathera, that Science is pragmatic by its very nature, by its very definition. I ask every reader, for a moment, to close their eyes and try to imagine where humanity would be today if not for science (but not for science alone).

Sure, there were chemical and nuclear weapons, ozone depletion, global warming etc. But, how about communication, transportation, disease fighting etc. Just think about how much credit should go to science for the increase of life expectancy from just 44 years in 1900 to almost 80 years in 2000?
Law of gravitation

Contrary to what Ajahn states in quoting a 16th century philosopher, modern science does not insist on 'negative instance'. Science works its miracles on a philosophy based on continual improvement, objective evaluation and intellectual rationalisation.

For example, a theory proposed to explain a natural phenomenon gets tested vigorously using the knowledge and technology available at the time and that theory is either accepted or rejected by the greater scientific community. Everyone wins! An accepted theory may be proven wrong many years down the road and a totally new and far superior knowledge emerges. That is science, that is progress, that is not sticking to a dogma!

Mahathera's use of simplistic language to state the law of gravity by saying 'what goes up must come down' does not do any justice. The law of gravitation does not say so and attempting to twist the words and confuse the non-scientific community (at least 80 per cent of the general population in my opinion) is rather appalling.

Mahathera's frustration about science seems to stem from the fact that many scientists do not believe in rebirth (paragraph 8). He states that 'some misguided scientists maintain that there is no rebirth'. He writes, 'only one instance of proven rebirth is enough to confirm the existence of rebirth'.

That may be his argument, but, many scientists would argue otherwise. A scientific theory, under the conditions stipulated in the theory, is applicable to everything, everywhere, always!

He also states that 'scientists for the most part are brainwashed' and are 'eccentric evangelists'. Wow! I let the reader pass judgment on this one. Of course, I have met my share of eccentric scientists ( I may be one too!), and some are my very close friends.

But, none are evangelical! For the most part, the largest number of eccentric scientists that I have met are in the fields of Theoretical Physics, Physical Chemistry and Mathematics. I have read several articles which had described Albert Einstein as eccentric. So, what?
Aware of issues

Another complaint of Ajahn is that 'ordinary people know so little about science that they can hardly even understand the jargon'. Is it the fault of science that ordinary people do not know it? I am sure you agree with me that a lot more ordinary people know more science or, at least aware of issues related to science, than any time in the history. Also, he complains that that the language of science is different from common language.

This is due to the very nature of the subjects that science has to deal with. It was never the agenda of the scientists to use jargon so that common people are kept out of it.

To state another point, I have seen my fair share of 'uncommon' words in Buddhism which I diligently clarify with my teachers such as Ajahn. Simply calling it jargon and running away is not the solution.

The problem lies in Ajahn's attempt to argue that Buddhism should be able to replace Science in society. He states, 'Buddhism is more scientific than science'. This statement is an absolute oxymoron. Nothing can be more scientific than science. It is like saying a glass of water in your hand is not a glass of water.

That is not to say that Buddhism is not scientific either. Of course, one can argue that at least certain aspects of Buddhism is very scientific. Just read the Agganna Sutta and the Big Bang Theory and compare the two.

Most definitely, Buddhism is the most scientific religion that exists today. In fact Buddhist Cosmology is in full agreement for the most part with the modern scientific thought on the origin and the fate of the Universe.

All the other major religions are primarily based on their cosmology. If one does not believe in how and by whom the 'world' was created, that person cannot in principle be an adherent of that religion. This is not so in Buddhism.

It is stunning to note that only the Buddha got it right even though it is not of critical importance for one's salvation according to Buddhism. In fact, the Buddha in several occasions has discouraged his disciples, particularly Ven. Ananda, form enquiring about the issues regarding the Universe. Buddha's advice was that the answers to those questions would not deliver one to Nibbana.
Comparision

It is clearly evident that Ven. Brahmavanso has fallen in the same trap which many others have previously fallen into. That is, simply stated, trying to compare apples and oranges. Buddhism is a philosophy (a religion in a broader sense) and it deals with the un-satisfactoriness of existence and how to overcome it.

Science on the other hand is the systematic and formulated knowledge, the result of relentless pursuit of the truth about anything and everything that a scientist can probe with his mind and/or tools. Although these two are not entirely mutually exclusive, they only overlap briefly. Cosmology is one of them.

Buddhism has tremendous value for anyone looking for relief from suffering due to attachment. It has no value for anyone trying to calculate the rate at which the Universe is expanding. However, both Buddhism and Science converge on the answer to the question, when and how will it all end. And, what happens next.

The lesson to learn here is not to go to the barber for dental work. Do not go to the dentist looking for a good haircut either. Late Prof. J.K.P. Ariyaratne of University of Kelaniya, one of my mentors, was a highly regarded scientist who has written extensively and published several scientific articles on the synergy of Buddhism and Science.

He was careful enough to probe where it should be probed. Only where the overlap of Buddhism and Science occurred.

To do that, one must have a commanding knowledge of both subjects. If Scientists take care of the science and the Buddhist clergy take care of the religion, there will be less confusion. So, lets take oranges for oranges and not for apples.

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The writer is President, Alberta Buddhist Vihara Association, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

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