Arden Chatfield
Posts: 6657
Joined: Jan. 2006
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| Quote (Glen Davidson @ Oct. 01 2007,21:42) | | Quote (Altabin @ Oct. 01 2007,21:02) | This, from DOL's eerily unpatronized blog, made me fnork:
| Quote | | The [Dalai] Lama rejects Darwinism as an explanation for the history of life on earth, as most Canadian Christians do |
That's got to be the first time that Tibetan Buddhists and Canadian Christians have shared a sentence... |
Unless Densye has some new information, which it appears she doesn't, her claims regarding the Dalai Lama outpace the evidence, as per the usual. Here's another report with an honest quote (well, I trust Shermer to give an honest quote):
| Quote |
I do not fault the Dalai Lama for challenging this view of science, which does make it difficult to explain such phenomena as the origins of the universe, life, sentience, and consciousness (each of which receive individual chapter treatments in his book), and is held by a great many people, both within and outside of the scientific community. Yet the solution to these and other problems, in my opinion, is through the new sciences of complexity, emergence, and self-organization. The Dalai Lama does not go this route, instead turning to certain Buddhist principles, such as karma.
Karma, he explains, is easily misunderstood by Westerners. It has to do with causal action, but "it is erroneous to think of karma as some transcendental unitary entity that acts like a god in a theistic system or a determinist law by which a person's life is fated." In fact, from a scientific perspective, karma is just a metaphysical assumption, but "no more so than the assumption that all of life is material and originated out of pure chance." Although he admits that the Darwinian theory of evolution "gives us a fairly coherent account of the evolution of human life on earth," the Dalai Lama also believes "that karma can have a central role in understanding the origination of what Buddhism calls 'sentience,' through the media of energy and consciousness."
How? In Buddhism, the most fundamental unit of matter is prana,a vital energy indistinguishable from consciousness. So matter, energy, and consciousness are the same. Since not only sentience, but the origins of life, consciousness, and morality are inadequately explained by science, it is useful to employ the notion of karma.
Here I am afraid the Dalai Lama proffers the same empty explanations as the creationists and Intelligent Design theorists in what we call the "God of the Gaps." Wherever there is a gap in scientific explanation - the origins of life, sentience, consciousness, morality - this is where God, or karma, intervened. But what happens to God/karma when science fills in the gap? Are you going to abandon God/karma from your worldview?
[emphasis added] |
http://www.nysun.com/article/19969?page_no=3&access=278096
The fact is that the Dalai Lama appears to be open to MET in a way that anti-science individuals like Densye are not, with an unsurprising and unscientific gap concept which he intends to fill with the usual "spiritual" gibberish (I'm not saying that the "spiritual" is gibberish, only that when religions bring it up it almost invariably is).
I know that I haven't gone to the source, but judging from this a few other blurbs, essentially the Dalai is not denying MET in any observable sense at all. He grants the account, but has to believe in the "non-material" mind and morality. A lot of Xian theistic evolutionists would say essentially the same things, which may well be faulted for being unscientific in essence and utterly devoid of evidence, yet which are not at all opposed to regular biological research (they may be unfriendly to evo psyche, though).
Densye is correct that there is nonsense somewhat akin to her own rantings about the mind in the Dalai's approach, then. But she is certainly not telling us the full story when she implies that the Dalai is actively anti-science like she and her fellow medievalists are. The Dalai's mere admission that the "Darwinian theory of evolution 'gives us a fairly coherent account of the evolution of human life on earth,'" puts him far ahead of Densye's troglodyte nonsense in supporting science, however much we might lament his preference for unsupported beliefs wherever he can fit them in.
Glen D |
Also, Denyse is so damn dumb about any religion not based in the Vatican that she seems unaware that the Dalai Lama does not speak for all Buddhists. While the Dalai Lama is respected among all types of Buddhists, he only really speaks for followers of Tibetan Buddhism. Not for Theravada or Mahayana Buddhists in countries like Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Laos, Vietnam, China (other than Tibet), Taiwan, Korea, or Japan. Theravada Buddhists especially would have a very different take from the Dalai Lama's on this matter.
| Quote | | How many public apologies does one person have to make before they start thinking first and acting second the next time they get the impulse to attack someone and/or make outrageous accusations about them publicly? |
As my wife the school teacher would say, "Dembski has poor impulse control".
Yeesh. I wonder how this hurt his family? Ouch. 
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"Rich is just mad because he thought all titties had fur on them until last week when a shorn transvestite ruined his childhood dreams by jumping out of a spider man cake and man boobing him in the face lips." - Erasmus
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