Anyway, here's something to more that should fuck with people's heads on here a bit. It's an extract from a book by Steve Hagen.
We’ ve Got It All Backward
Many people put religion and science in separate, hermetically sealed boxes. Most of us, however, don’t realize that many aspects of religion and science were conjoined for many centuries before we put them into these boxes. In fact, at one time, before science really came into its own, science and religion were one and the same. This isn’t really so strange when we note that their common origin lies in our deep desire to know, to realize Truth. Consider, for example, what religion is actually about. The word religion came from religio, which meant “to bind back or very strongly to Truth.” Thus the heart of religion is about seeing or experiencing Truth—not about holding a set of beliefs. Religio comes out of our deeply felt desire to get back to Truth. We don’t want to be deceived.
Like religion, science is also about getting to Truth. The term science comes from the Latin scire, “to know.” Science, as I’ve often heard it said by scientists themselves, is about knowing, not about believing. But the place we tend not to look—the place we really get it backward, the place we really go wrong—is this area of belief. Indeed, as we commonly think of science and religion, each claims an attribute that more naturally (and properly) belongs to the other. While religion is commonly thought to be about belief, its natural concern is actually with Knowledge, with knowing. And while science is thought to be about actual Knowledge, and fancies itself to be independent of belief, it is in fact inherently quite dependent upon it.
An article appeared not too long ago in the New York Times entitled “Crossing Flaming Swords over God and Physics.” It was about a debate between Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate in physics, and John Polkinghorne, a knighted physicist and Anglican priest. It was presented as a match between the “believer” (Polkinghorne) and the “nonbeliever” (Weinberg). But, in fact, that’s not what it was at all. Their interaction, as described in the article, almost “deteriorate[d] into a physical fight.” If Dr. Weinberg had been genuinely a nonbeliever, there would have been no problem. In fact, this event was not a debate between a nonbeliever and a believer but a confrontation between two ardent believers. It was a standoff between two men who believed two very different views. The real issue is not science versus religion or even belief versus nonbelief. The most angry and virulent debates in the world (and the worst violent clashes) are inevitably between one believer and another. Once two headstrong believers spar off, the odds of coming to any amicable resolution are nil.
The fact is that science needs belief. It can’t function without it. Science requires that we construct conceptualized versions of the world. It needs us to break the world apart so that we can examine it. This isn’t wrong; indeed, there’s great value in it. In this sense, then, science makes greater use of belief and is more dependent upon it than is religion. In contrast, for religion to function properly—that is, for it to help us open our eyes to Truth—it shouldn’t require belief. After all, religion is fundamentally about direct Knowledge of Truth. Thus, all religion needs to require of people is an earnest desire to know, to see, to wake up. This is enough. Unfortunately, in practice, religion makes wide use of beliefs—beliefs about how we got here, what our purpose is, where we ’re going, and so forth—all in a desperate attempt to make sense of the world and our experience in it. As Joseph Campbell put it, religion short-circuits the religious experience by putting it into concepts. But for religion to continue to function at its best, it would do well to get out of this business of belief entirely, to stop forming inevitably inaccurate conceptual models of Reality. This has become more properly the territory of science, not religion. In short, science is well positioned to properly handle belief. Religion is not.
Science goes to great lengths to test its beliefs (which it calls hypotheses), to verify or disprove their validity. Science tests its hypotheses, and if they’re in error they’re thrown out or reformulated and tested again. Tests must then be replicated many times by others. It’s an impeccable method for arriving at truth—that is, relative, practical, everyday truth. Science, however, can reveal to us nothing at all about ultimate Truth. This is, instead, the legitimate province—and responsibility—of religion. Using the scientific method, we can clear up a lot of misconceptions about the nature of the relative world—the world of this and that—and about how things function and interact. But there ’s nothing about this method that finally brings us to understand, directly and immediately, what’s actually going on. This belongs to religion—but only so long as religion doesn’t wallow in belief. Religion is not equipped to test and verify hypotheses. Nor should it be. It doesn’t need the scientific method because it needn’t and shouldn’t make use of hypotheses or rely on beliefs of any kind. Unfortunately, because all religions, including Buddhism, do indulge in beliefs, everyone goes running off in different directions, carrying their separate banners of belief, signifying nothing but human delusion and folly. As a result, we have religions fighting each other and religions fighting science. As my teacher, Jikai Dainin Katagiri, used to say, “Under the beautiful flag of religion, we fight.”
But it’s not religion that creates this situation. It’s the fact that we’re constantly reaching for something we can grab hold of. We want to say, “Ah, this is it. This is how it is. This is the Truth; believe it!” But to the extent that we do this, we do not (and cannot) arrive at Truth because Truth—ultimate Reality—is not something we can believe. That is, it isn’t something we can formulate in a concept of any kind.
At some point we have to settle into realizing what the deep need of the human heart really is: we want to get back to Truth. This feeling is often innocently yet eloquently expressed in religion. It’s pure heart and mind, yet with no specific point or agenda. And when we quiet our busy minds, this purity of heart and mind can be immediately felt. But, instead, we habitually look to something outside ourselves, something “out there” in the world—or even “out there” beyond the world—that will save us, something that will serve as a go-between. This all comes out of our confusion and out of the fear that we’re somehow removed from Truth, that there’s some innate separation in the first place. But there isn’t. And what we most need to do as human beings—and what religion, in its purest form, can help us do— is quiet down and realize this. ...
Shunryu Suzuki wrote in his first book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, I have discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, we have to believe in something which has no form and no color—something which exists before all forms and colors appear. This is a very important point. Or, as the ninth-century Chinese Zen teacher Huang Po put it, “The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see.” Instead of putting faith in what we believe, think, explain, justify, or otherwise construct in our minds, we can learn to put our trust and confidence in immediate, direct experience, before all forms and colours appear. Religion, in its most essential expression, can help us do this. This is faith in its purest form: trust in actual experience before we make anything of it—before beliefs, thoughts, signs, explanations, justifications, and other constructions of our minds take form. This is the great sanity, the great compassion, the great wisdom that religion holds for us. This sanity, compassion, and wisdom all come out of simply learning to trust that Truth is right at hand. There’s no go-between. You don’t get it from a teacher, from an institution, or from a belief system of any sort. You don’t get it from a book, either. Indeed, you can’t.
