Tue, 29 Jul 2008
World Views
I seem to have gotten sucked into an argument of E-Sangha and this is the second installment, where I dish out my Po Mo Lite.
What I think we're seeing here is the clash between different world views. What a world view is is a little difficult to explain. The sociologist Gregory Bateson remarked that when he tried to explain the concept of world view to his students, the only ones who understood it were the Catholics and the Marxists. A world view the the framework within which consists not only of all your concepts, but also your rules for evaluating concepts as true or false, important and unimportant, good and bad. Here's an example. A professor was teaching anatomy to first year medical stuents at Johns Hopkins, who were disecting the cadever of a woman. The professor told the students the first thing they should do is cut off her breasts and throw them in the trash, because there was nothing interesting there. Well, obviously not to the professor!
World views are not open to proof or disproof in a simple and unambigous way, because the world views contain the rules and definitions that proofs are based on. Any proof offered with the world view fails because of circular logic. How do you determine what is science within the framework of science? The pot cannot hold itself. And a proof from without fails from subjectivity. If A finds B's world view invalid, and B finds A's invalid, how can we say who is correct, except from the standpoint of another world view C? But usually people are blind to their own world view, viewing it as truth and rationality, and the views of others as irrational.
All this is a long winded prelude to what I want to say. When I hear people contrast science, truth, and rationality with religion, emotion, and faith I hear the expression of a specific world view, one that seems to be popular at our current nexus of time and space. This is not the world view of science versus that of religion. Both concepts exist within the one world view and other world views do not draw the sharp distinction. Like all world views, it is neither true nor false, it's one way of looking at reality. Certainly within the world view facts can be established and statements proven or disproven But since there is no single self-sufficient ground for empirical proof and disproof in logic and philosophy, these are only relative to the world view. Understanding this is what I meant by having an open and fluid attitude versus a fixed and dogmatic one.
Usually people hearing this argument reply that science has given us the jet plane, computer, and atom bomb, as if this establishes the validity of their world view. Tibet had none of these, but had the Arya Dharma instead, and Tibetan lamas feel that they had the better of the bargain. Judgement may be passed on who was correct, but the judgement is relative. Edward Conze makes this point more eloquently in the first chapter of Buddhist Thought in India.
