Michael Bond reviews Donald S. Lopez Jr.’s Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed:
In the troubled relationship between science and religion, Buddhism represents something of a singularity, in which the usual rules do not apply. Sharing quests for the big truths about the Universe and the human condition, science and Buddhism seem strangely compatible. At a fundamental level they are not quite aligned, as both these books make clear. But they can talk to each other without the whiff of intellectual or spiritual insult that haunts scientific engagement with other faiths.
…Lopez, whose book is more a history of the discourse between Buddhism and science than an examination of how the two inform each other, makes much of the Dalai Lama’s doctrinal flexibility. He suggests that this stems partly from the Tibetan leader’s desire to show that his religion is not the primitive superstition that many nineteenth-century European writers—and modern Chinese communists—have described. Perhaps so, but it must also derive from the Buddhist desire to know reality and not hide behind false assumptions about the world or our own nature.
…As a research exercise, the East–West discourse on consciousness sounds harmonious, but at a deep level, it is anything but. Both Luisi and Lopez identify this as an area of great conceptual divergence. Whereas cognitive science’s best guess is that consciousness is an emergent property of neuronal organization, Buddhists see it at some pure subtle level as not contingent on matter at all, but deriving instead from “a previous continuum of consciousness”—the Dalai Lama’s words—that transcends death and has neither beginning nor end. That is hard to test. Furthermore, it seems impossible for anyone to grasp such Buddhist notions of consciousness without experiencing them, because there is no way yet of quantifying them—and that means years of meditation. As Chu says in Mind and Life: “It’s like a physicist explaining electromagnetic waves to someone who doesn’t know mathematics.”
Read Bond’s full review in Nature.