Recently I participated in a panel on science and religion in the Netaji Subhash Institute of Technology. The students who were brought up indoctrinated with Western stories of the conflict between science and religion were dumbfounded when I asked the following question. If science and religion were at war, why then did the church bring science to India? For the manifest fact, contrary to the story of a conflict between science and church, is that the best science colleges in India are still mostly church institutions. The students appreciated it, though it is hard for them to get out of the mental frame imposed by the story. Hopefully, it will set some of them thinking about the use of scientific authority to impose church dogmas.
There was little time to explain it during the panel, but Buddhism accepts only the two principles of pramana (proof): namely, pratyaksa (empirically manifest) and anumana (inference). Those two means of proof are also the basis of (real) science. Specifically, Buddhism rejects authority-based proofs, such as the authority of editors of Western scientific journals, based on secretive refereeing, and their ranking system. Buddhists point out that authority must either be manifest or based on inference. Therefore, what possible source of conflict can there be between Buddhism and (real) science?
Clearly, the only source of conflict is similar to that between science in theory, and science as practised, for science in practice relies heavily on authority, such as editorial authority. It also relies on secrecy (such as secretive refereeing) to preserve authorised knowledge in the manner of the church. Finally, most people cannot judge the validity of science on their own and rely on stories about who can be trusted, and who not. Naturally, they get taken for a ride.
There are other differences. Thus, for example, ethics is an important aspect of Buddhism. (Those interested in seeing how Buddhist ethics relate to present day science may like to see my paper on “Harmony Principle”, in Philosophy East and West and elsewhere.) Practising scientists, however, often disregard ethics. A whole lot of Nobel prizes were given to people who participated in the Manhattan project and then coolly washed their hands off the blood of millions affected by the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The same thing can be said of medical practitioners today who are almost totally sold out to the pharmaceutical companies, and care little for patients. Thus, practising scientists are required to be loyal to their masters, the state or capital, and suppress ethical objections.
Though there is no conflict between Buddhism and real science, there can be a conflict between Buddhism and science as it exists, because of intrusion of church dogmas in the content of present-day science and mathematics. I have commented on this intrusion of dogma into science in the context of Stephen Hawking, in the my paper on Science and Islam, and in the public debate with a Christian evangelist with a PhD from Cambridge, intent on turning the classroom into a pulpit. In all cases, the attempt was to use the authority of science to impose dogmas of Christian theology, as in claims about eternal laws of nature, or “causality” (meaning mechanistic causality), or Hawking’s singularities interpreted to suit creationism. The above paper on the harmony principle also briefly indicates why the correct scientific position is not mechanistic causality but very similar to conditioned coorigination (that the future co-originates, conditioned by the past, but not decided by it). That is also the central Buddhist principle of paticca samuppada.
Lastly there is the question of zeroism very similar to the philosophy of sunyavada, as used in my philosophy of mathematics. The aim is to replace present-day formalism. (A quick exposition of the advantages of zeroism over formalism is in my paper on “Probability in Ancient India”, in the Elsevier Handbook of Philosophy of Statistics (2011) which also takes up the question of the relation of Buddhist logic of catuskoti to quantum logic.) Zeroism is far superior to formalism based on wretched Crusading myths like that of Euclid, or superstitions about the universality of reason. Once again, in a blatant attempt to equate science with blind imitation of the West, church dogma in present-day math and science are not even discussed. Basically, Western philosophers are clueless, and have no answer, to my critique, and their theologians allowed nothing non-Western within the domain of science or even philosophy. The usual channel to absorb practical value from non-Western sources is through scientific plagiarists like Copernicus who abound in the West, and who will recast that practical value in a theologically-correct way.
Unfortunately, even most Buddhists don’t understand all this. Indeed, there is nothing exclusively Buddhist about the above beliefs. For example, the Islamic belief in continuous creation is very similar to the belief in paticca samuppada, and this (mundane time) is something we observe everyday, contrary to the claim that the future is determined by eternal laws. The point is to be truly scientific we must believe in our experience and not “authorised knowledge” of science or church theology of free will. Likewise, Buddhist scholars once acknowledged that there is only an alpa truti (minor error) in Advaita Vedanta as originally understood. Dara Shukoh the Mohgul prince, pointed out the similarity between Upanishads and sufi beliefs. However, all these are contrary to church dogma in math and science. Those dogma originates in the church politics of domination by instilling superstitions through indoctrination, not in any serious science or religious belief. The cure is to eliminate those dogmas from science. One should remember that Ambedkar, a deep scholar, unlike Rammohun Roy, hence converted to Buddhism, not Christianity.
However, one searches in vain for some leaders who will arise to take this forward.