Category Archives: Comparative Thought

Natural Selection as a Variation on a Theme by the Buddha

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Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

The Buddha’s concept of paticca-samuppada, or “dependent origination”, expresses an idea that everything in the world around us comes into being with a concurrence of causes and conditions. Involving, as it does, a concurrence of causes and conditions, anything that exists does so only as a composite entity in the context of a specific configuration of causes and conditions. Or to put it another way, nothing in the world around us exists by itself, which is the Buddha’s conception of sunyata, or “emptiness”. As such, “dependent origination” can be construed as summarily expressing the Buddha’s view of the evolutionary process of change and transformation for all composite entities, which he calls sankharas: “It is by a process of evolution that sankharas come to be.”1 Moreover, as the products of a dynamic, evolutionary process, sankharas are subject to anicca, or “impermanence”: “All compound things are transitory: they grow and they decay.”2

As the life of all composite entities is subject to the cycle of birth and death in the Buddha’s view of the world, it comes as no surprise that the existence of all life involves “struggle” of one kind or another. Thus, the Buddha states, “Struggle must be, for all life is a struggle of some kind.”3 In this statement, though it was expressed in the context of his warning against those of us who struggle in clinging to our non-existent self, we can see how close the Buddha comes to expressing an idea that evolution is a process that involves the struggle for existence for all living beings—an idea that would be translated into the theory of “natural selection” by Charles Darwin (1809-1882).

The theory of natural selection developed by Darwin—and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913)—is a theory about the mechanism by which a new species emerges in the natural world. Darwin realized that a phenomenon such as the emergence of a species could not be explained by following the Cartesian mode of acquiring knowledge of the world around us, which involves partitioning and segmentation of the world into non-interacting parts. Thus, Darwin states, in Introduction to his Origin of Species, an event such as the origin of species can be made comprehensible to us only “by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could have any bearing on it.”4

“All sorts of facts which could have any bearing on it” literally include all sorts of factors that are behind evolution—biological, chemical, geological, cosmological. In other words, “all sorts of facts” that Darwin talks about are nothing but the whole collections of “causes and conditions” that are behind the appearance and disappearance of composite entities in the world around us, a biological species being one example of such composite entities. In this sense, Darwin’s theory of natural selection can be regarded as an application of the Buddha’s idea of “dependent origination” to a specific class of phenomena, namely, the phenomenon of the emergence of a new species in the natural environment, or the world of “name and form”, as the Buddha put it.

While Darwin himself acknowledges the influence of the idea of the disparity between population growth and food production developed by Robert Malthus (1766-1834), neither he nor his biographers tell us about the possible influence of the Buddha’s idea on the formation of his theory of natural selection. Considering, however, how nicely this theory fits into the idea of “dependent origination”, we may perhaps be justified to designate Darwin’s theory of natural selection as a variation on a theme composed by the Buddha, namely, the theme of paticca-samuppada.

Designating Darwin’s theory of natural selection as a variation on a theme by the Buddha does not, in any way, diminish the importance of Darwin’s original contribution to the body of our knowledge of the world around us. It is a remarkable theory in that it explains the emergence of man as a species following the same mechanism of natural selection as all the other species without any need for an intelligent designer. It is a culminating achievement of the power of science, as Richard Dawkins (1941- ) explains: “Natural selection not only explains the whole of life; it also raises consciousness to the power of science to explain how organized complexity can emerge from simple beginnings without any deliberate action.”5 In a way, it is ironic that Darwin was the one who appealed to that power of science in explaining the emergence of species, for he was headed for the clergyman’s career when he decided to enter the Divinity School at Cambridge at the suggestion of his father. What prompted Darwin to pursue the career of a naturalist were his encounters with such people as John Henslow (1796-1861) and Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873) at Cambridge who roused his interest in botany and geology, two scientific disciplines that played crucial roles in formulating his theory of natural selection.

It must be said to have been a courageous act on the part of Darwin to suggest the idea of natural selection in the cultural environment of Christianity, for it presented a direct challenge to the Biblical account of the origin of species, which grants man a special status in the natural world. Darwin’s theory, in contrast, says that there is nothing special about man, being just one species in the natural world teemed with all sorts of living organisms. Is this not the same as saying that man is just a sankhara, destined to follow the same cycle of birth and death as all the other sankharas, though we are prone to delude ourselves into thinking that we are somehow special, clinging to our illusionary self?

To add a final note—no pun intended—just as we can detect what is definitely Brahms’ sound in his “Variations on a Theme by Haydn” or “Variation and Fugue on a Theme of Handel”, we can detect what is definitely Darwin’s science in his theory of natural selection. For, what Darwin does in his Origin of Species is to carefully and cautiously develop his theory against the background of patiently accumulated empirical evidence, while expanding on a theme by the Buddha.

  1. Carus, Paul, Gospel of the Buddha, Oxford: Oneworld, 1994, p.158.
  2. Ibid, p.158.
  3. Ibid, p.148.
  4. Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species, New York: Hill and Wang, 1979, p.46.
  5. Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008, Chapter 4.

The God Delusion, the Science Delusion, and the Middle Path between Spirituality and Science

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Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

“Delusion”, according to The New Oxford American Dictionary, is “an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument”. Delusion, despite—or perhaps because of—its negative implications, seems to be a popular subject, judging from a plethora of books that contain the word “delusion” in their titles. Even a cursory search on the Internet yields such titles as: The Atheist Delusion, The Biofuel Delusion, The Brand Delusion, The Capitalism Delusion, The Debt Delusion, The Democracy Delusion, The Disease Delusion, The End-of-the-World Delusion, The Green Revolution Delusion, The Food Delusion, The Free Will Delusion, The Hypnotism Delusion, The Infinity Delusion, The Job Delusion, The Leadership Delusion, The Love Delusion, The Mother Nature Delusion, The Net Delusion, The Self Help Delusion, The Two-State Delusion, and The Witchcraft Delusion. The diversity of subjects dealt with in these books suggests that almost anything can become the object of a delusion. To this large list of books whose titles contain the word “delusion” must be added two other recent books: The God Delusion and The Science Delusion.

There are actually several books with title of The God Delusion. By far the best known and most controversial among them has to be Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, originally published in 2006.1 As an evolutionary biologist known as the author of such popular books as The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Blind Watchmaker (1987), Richard Dawkins considers the “God hypothesis”, namely, the idea that “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us”, a delusion because “creative intelligence, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it”. “Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design”, the subtitle of The Blind Watchmaker, succinctly shows why Dawkins considers the God hypothesis a delusion, an idiosyncratic belief, for it is contradicted by the accumulated evidence of evolution uncovered by biologists, cosmologists, and other scientists.

Considering that science relies on the rational argument of hypothesis building and empirical testing in discovering the laws of nature in the world around us, we would hardly expect science to be a delusion that shares the same kind of irrationalities with other idiosyncratic beliefs. In other words, the very expression, “the science delusion”, appears to combine two words that are mutually incompatible. But here again, there are several books with the title of The Science Delusion, some written by proponents of the God hypothesis in response to Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and his reliance on the rational argument of science to expose an idiosyncratic belief in God.

Of the books bearing the title of The Science Delusion, the one by Rupert Sheldrake is noteworthy in that it is written by someone who is well known for his original contribution to science, including his innovative hypothesis of “morphic resonance” in evolution.2 Science, according to Sheldrake, is a delusion in the sense the prevailing dogma in science today considers the universe as purposeless, following the fixed laws that can be explained in terms solely of material causes. In fact, the idea that matter is the only reality in the universe, including our consciousness, instead of being treated as a paradigm, has been turned into an ideology, a belief system, which Curtis White calls “scientism” in his book also with the title of The Science Delusion.3 As a belief system, scientism has its own trappings of conformity, peer pressure, and prestige among scientists. So confident are scientists in the answers they have derived through their rational inquiry that they are trapped in what Sheldrake calls the biggest scientific delusion: “The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details need working out but, in principle, the fundamental questions are settled.”

That both religion and science can become delusions should not trouble us much as long as they constitute “non-overlapping magisteria”, as Stephen Jay Gould characterizes them, addressing to separate issues and employing different methods with different goals.4 The problem is that religion and science do overlap and concern themselves with the same sort of questions such as how the universe came about, how it works, and how life came into being. And it is because religion and science overlap in their endeavors to answer these fundamental questions that we witness the kinds of heated debates and vicious exchanges between religionists and scientists as illustrated by the appearance of books with titles like The Atheist Delusion, The Christian Delusion, and The Dawkins Delusion: Atheism vs. God.

What should our attitude be regarding delusions for the rest of us, who also seek answers to these questions, but do not want to be caught up in heated debates and vicious exchanges? Delusion, to be sure, is something to be avoided. Buddhists, for example, are well aware of the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion. As the Buddha reminds us, “a person who is greedy, hating, and deluded, overpowered by greed, hatred, and delusion, his thoughts controlled by them, will destroy life, take what is not given, engage in sexual misconduct, and tell lies; he will also prompt others to do likewise.”5

The Buddhist notion of “impermanence” seems to serve as a useful guide for us in dealing with delusions, in overcoming idiosyncratic beliefs. This is so because what is today regarded as a delusion may have once been treated as a reality, as an undeniable truth, and what is today regarded as a reality, as an undeniable truth, may turn out one day to be a delusion. What we need to do is, then, to treat every idea, whether in religion or in science, as a tentative proposition whose relevance and validity are defined only in a specific context of the world evolving around us, in which our consciousness is intimately involved.

What we need to avoid is to develop an attachment to a particular idea or view, whether in religion or in science, for attachment sooner or later turns into fundamentalism. To be sure, science has emerged as the most reliable method of obtaining knowledge of the world around us ever since the idea that the Sun goes around the Earth was shown to be a delusion. But science that treats consciousness as a mere epiphenomenon of brain activity does not show us the path we need to follow in order to accomplish spiritual maturation, or enlightenment, for it alienates us from our own experience in our relationship to the world around us. Spirituality does have a place in our life as evidenced, for example, by the effect of prayer in maintaining health and that of meditation in cultivating compassion. As the God delusion represents one extreme and the science delusion the other extreme, what we need to do is to follow the middle path, in this case, between spirituality and science.

  1. Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
  2. Sheldrake, Rupert, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, London: Coronet, 2012.
  3. White, Curtis, The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers, New York: Melville House, 2013.
  4. Gould, Stephen J., Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, New York: Ballantine, 1999.
  5. Anguttara Nikaya, 3:65.