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6. The Religion of Analysis and the Spirit of Modern Science

6. The Religion of Analysis and the Spirit of Modern Science The glory ofthe nineteenth century has been its science. It was my inestimable privilege to have felt as a boy the warmth of the steadily burning enthusiasm ofthe scientific generation of Darwin, most ofthe leaders ofwhich at home I knew intimately, and some very wellin almost every country of Europe. The word science was one often in those men's mouths, and I am quite sure they did not mean by it "systematized knowledge," as former ages had defined it, nor anything set down in a book, but, on the contrary, a mode of life; not knowledge, but the devoted, well-considered life-pursuit ofknowledge; devotion to the truth that the man is not yet able to see but is striving to obtain. The word was thus, from the etymological point ofview, already a misnomer. And so it remains with the scientists of to-day. Charles Sanders Peirce, The Nineteenth Century The great scientific contribution in theoretical physics that has come from Tapan since the last war may be an indication that it is easier to adapt oneself to the quantum-theoretical concept of reality when one has not had to free oneself from the naive materialistic way of thinking that still prevailed in Europe in the first decades of this century. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution of Modern Science The movement of modern science from the fringes of life to the vital center constitutes one of the great transition points in human history, comparable to the transition from precivilization to civilization in the upper reaches of the Fertile Crescent ten 113 114 The Heart of Buddhist Philosophy thousand years ago. The most powerful social process shaping the daily lives of everyone on the planet is scientific research. It is disentangling people from the rigidity and inflexibility that constitute their most intimate bond with death. It is teaching them for the first time to use their minds, not to seek reassurance in the face of life's suffering and anxiety and not to look for some escape from the transitoriness that is one of the fundamental features of existence, but to strengthen and multiply the connective links that establish human life more firmly in its natural habitat, rendering more transparent our relations with one another and with the speechless world's fellow-creatures. It is the life-style, therefore, that now has the highest survival value. This is the condition, never encountered in the past, that confronts all the great civilizations of the modern world. In order to maintain their relative position and power, these civilizations must embrace scientific research as their major industry and new information as their major resource) this information in turn inundates old distinctions and modes of interpretation, along with a vast system of cultural levees and dams. No set of conceptual metaphors, however rich in novel possibilities of construal, can foresee and control the discoveries of science within the parameters of the social structures and value systems already in place. No area of human concern is altogether immune to the germ that is born when a truly deep scientific discovery is made. As Gunnar Myrdal argues, "Taking as given the civilization in which it takes place, the accelerating growth of scientific and technological knowledge becomes a force, speeding up and bending the course of history in a way that is largely outside our contro1." In such conditions, Whitehead writes, "the rule is absolute , the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. Today we maintain ourselves. Tomorrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated."l The major function of modern science, it now seems clear, has been to liberate humankind from the conventional, parochial, custom-bound ways of the traditional culture-worlds in which it has been maturing for four centuries in the West. The British phi- The Religion ofAnalysis and Science 115 losopher of science Sir Karl Popper remarks that "it is part of the greatness and the beauty of science that we can learn that the world is utterly different from what we ever imagined-until our imagination was...