This post is motivated by a discussion I’ve been having over on Unknowing Mind, which has led into the similarities and differences between science and religion. The long quotation I’m about to present seems to me to present in particularly perspicuous fashion the essential differences between the two activities and their accompanying attitudes, and constitutes a much-needed caution against facile equations of the two. It’s from Winston King’s A Thousand Lives Away: Buddhism in Contemporary Burma. Published in 1964, the book is long out of print, so by reproducing this passage here I hope, among other things, to call attention to King’s work. (Winston King passed away in 2000.)
What about the quality and degree of commitment found in religious experience and scientific experiment? Despite superficial similarities, there seems to be a radical difference.
There is indeed a kind of absolute commitment in science to the proposition that truth is discoverable, which is analogous to the religious faith that truth is experienceable. But with regard to the hypothesis to which a scientist commits himself, the quality of commitment seems quite other than the religious one. His commitment is merely provisional. He may harbour skeptical doubts about its results; and it is usually not a matter of life or death to him as to whether it proves to be true or not. But it is hard to think that one can as lightly commit himself to religious experience as to scientific experiment. This is why the word “experiment” is so seldom used with regard to religion — Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth being an exception. For the cold-blooded, deliberate, it-may-or-may-not-be-true mood of experiment is scarcely likely to succeed . . . . One must first be an earnest seeker after religious truth, which is a matter of life and death, before he can succeed. . . . In religion it is always and only true that “If with all your heart ye truly seek me, ye shall surely find me”.And this leads to a second consideration: The meaning of truth for science and religion; or the class of truth which they respectively seek. Science is in search of particular items not yet known; its curiosity is insatiable. It will, of course, grind up all the particular colourful facts that it collects into the colourless principle or law. But this law will in turn guide it again in the search for more particular facts. Thus science is ever avid for the absolutely new item. But religion’s pursuit of truth is quite other. It assumes that there is some final or absolute truth or experience beyond which one cannot go. . . . The goal of the religious seeker is therefore not to discover some new item of informational knowledge or particular new fact . . . . The essential newness of religious knowledge therefore is that of personal relation to truth; it is the new appropriation of the eternal Truth to oneself; the basic discovery is the way that it is true for me. If this were to be applied to the scientific search for knowledge it would place the centre of interest in the researcher’s discovery of some old truth — say, the second law of thermodynamics — for himself and by his own instruments, rather than in the acquisition of new facts or the addition of new principles of interpretation. These latter, however, not the former, are what clearly interests science.
Or we may put the matter in a related context. Science is interested to discover tangible, objective, public truth. . . . It hopes to make its results fully communicable to others. Indeed, maximum communicability is the hallmark of scientific truth. . . . If one has a strictly private experiment or type of calculation that no one else can be made to understand, then it is suspect scientifically. Science consists in great part in the effort to communicate by means of an impersonal apparatus or medium, such as mathematics, which is fully open to the inspection of any mathematically trained person.
But religious truths are again quite other. They are deeply and radically personal and subjective. . . . One is dealing with attitudes, emotions, and all the intangibles of personal adjustments; and most especially he is dealing with his materials in a context completely meaningless to science — the desire for personal salvation.
. . .
Thus, in the final analysis, it seems that religious experience and scientific experiment move on different levels and are only most superficially to be called equivalent. In terms of basic attitudes, in terms of the type of truth known, and of the materials involved there is a radical divergence. And it is better for both science and religion of whatever tradition to recognize this divergence. For the attempt to equate the two leads only to confusion.
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