Message 174/188
Date: 15-Oct-02 @ 08:03 PM -
RE: Faith
this supposed tension between science and religion really interests me b/c I think it's totally misguided and based on a misunderstanding of what science and religion have to offer.
psy--what's "the new science"? there's nothing "new" about the scientific study of the dali lama's brainstates, though it is interesting and thanks for the link.
I doubt that transcendental meditation will become standard training for scientists in the future. they might try to see if people who meditate score lower on depression inventories or have fewer heart attacks, but I doubt that the *practice* of meditation will in any way affect science education.
not because meditation is uninteresting, but because science is about prediction of external events. eg. "are people who meditate score differently on depression inventories than people who don’t meditate?”
this is a VERY different question than “how can meditatation help me become more happy and satisfied?”
the first is an empirical question. you answer the first by comparing meditators’ scores on a depression measure to those of non-meditators who are as similar as possible to the meditators in every domain except meditation (would be very challenging to do).
The second in a personal question, which is answered, I guess, by trying to learn how to meditate.
I think by "old science" you mean logical positivism/neopositivism which can kinda be summed up the idea that:
"A statement is meaningful if and only if it can be proved true or false...The meaning of a statement is its method of verification; that is we know the meaning of a statement if we know the conditions under which the statement is true or false."
seems like this position is often what people mean by "science" when they say "science says ____". the use of the word "meaning" here has caused all manner of confusion. for "meaning" in this statement, substitute "scientific intelligibility" or something like that, because basically this argument is about what kind of questions *science can answer*, not about the "meaning" in the sense of "making beats is the meaning of my life".
I'm not up for some big epistemology debate but suffice to say that I think there are plenty of meaningful statements that cannot be verified e.g. "through meditiation, I experienced existence in a newly peaceful way". that's not a statement that can be proven true or false, but you'd have to be a real a-hole to dismiss it as meaningless.
similarly, asking “What is the barrier between the finite and the infinite?” is not a scientific question. What would the answer look like? scientists HAVE TO state the answer in advance—“meditiators will score lower or the beck depression inventory” or “meditators will have increased levels of endorphins in their blood”--and then test to see whether their answer/prediction is true or false. I have no idea what form a hypothesis about the “barrier between the finite and the infinite” would take.
again, I’m not saying it’s a dumb question. actually, I don’t think I understand the question. but it’s the kind that’s fun to talk about over some trees.
what I'm saying is that there is no tension between religion and science. and that science will not evolve in such a way that it begins to ask questions about the meaning of life. people may draw upon scienctific theories--physics and psychology esp--when they think about the meaning of life but that's not science.