The Dalai Lama:Science, Religion and Ethics

Lawrence M. Hinman, Ph.D.Professor of PhilosophyUniversity of San Diego

EthicsMatters.netLarry@EthicsMatters.net

University of the Third AgeJanuary 20, 2012

2© Lawrence M. Hinman, Ph.D.January 20, 2012

Overview

• Brief Historical Overview of the Dalai Lama

• Buddhism, Christianity, and types of religion

• Science and religion

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A Few Facts

• Fourteenth Dalai Lama

• Born on July 6, 1935 in Tibet

• His religious name isTenzin Gyatso, shortened from Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, born Lhamo Dondrub.

• Chosen as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama when he was two years old, choice officially confirmed when he was fifteen.

• Fled to India in 1959 as a refuge

• Nobel Peace Prize, 1989

• In 2011, resigned as head of the Tibetan government in exile and urged a freely-chosen political leader

QuickTime™ and aJVT/AVC Coding decompressorare needed to see this picture.

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The Dalai Lama and Science

• Tends to be friendly to science

• Loved playing with telescopes and scientific instruments as a boy

• Considers the Buddha to have been a scientist, studying the nature of suffering and compassion

• Particular interest in neuroscience and meditation

• Gave a talk at the annual Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, in 2005, at the invitation of Richard Davidson, who studied the effect of meditation on Buddhist monks.

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The Four Noble Truths

• The Four Noble Truths deal with–The inevitability of

suffering–The sources of

suffering–The elimination of

suffering–The paths to the

elimination of suffering

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Two Ways of Reducing Suffering

Suffering arises from a discrepancy between desire and actuality

–change the actual world--Western technology–change the desire, extinguish the individual self--

Buddhism

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What Issues Does Science Pose to Religion?

• Science seems to challenge religion

• Galileo and the view of the universe

• Darwin and Evolution

• The Four Horsemen of the “New” Atheism

• Religion seems to challenge science

• Miracles challenge natural laws

• Religious explanations challenge naturalistic ones

• The story of Adam and Eve

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Compassion and Suffering

• Advances in the neurosciences have a profound implication for our understanding of what it means to be human.

• Mirror neurons: the neuroscientific basis of empathy and compassion.

• In the early 1990s, Giancomo Rizzolatti and others at the University of Parma, Italy discovered that certain neurons fired in the brain not only when a monkey picked up a piece of food, but also when it saw a human being pick up a piece of food.

• V.S Ramachandran at UC San Diego argues that mirror neurons--what he calls “Gandhi neurons”--provide the foundation of compassion and empathy.

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Reincarnation• Personal self moves through the

wheel of existence like a flame being passed from one candle to another.

• Karma: each individual action helps to set free or bind us to the personal self.

• Moral commandments are generated by demands of karma.

• In Buddhism, we may be reincarnated in other forms, not just as humans.

• This blurs the line between humans and animals.

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Religions:Monotheistic, Polytheistic, and Non-

theistic

• Monotheistic

• Christianity

• Judaism

• Islam

• Polytheistic

• Native American

• Ancient Greek

• Hinduism

• Non-theistic

• Jainism

• Buddhism

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The Manipulation of Suffering

• Science not only enables us to understand better the mechanisms of suffering, it also allows us to manipulate suffering.

• We already have numerous ways in which science reduces suffering. Take one easy example: anesthesia, which allows us to undergo such things as surgery without the intense suffering that would usually accompany it.

• Yet matters become more complex when we consider the ways in which we can now erase or at least dampen painful memories, removing their painful (and sometimes tragic) sting.

• Surgery example

• PTSD

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How Religion Can Help Science

• Instead of seeing religion and science as enemies constantly contesting each other’s territory, we might imagine ways in which religion could be helpful to science.

• Consider the question of erasing or dampening painful memories.

• It is a scientific question how we can manipulate such memories;

• It is an extra-scientific question--perhaps a religious one--to ask whether and when we should manipulate such memories.

• Notice that this question is particularly relevant to Buddhism, which sees suffering as the central fact of human existence.

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The Manipulation of Compassion

• As we gain greater understanding of the neuroscientific foundations of compassion, we will then be increasingly able to manipulate a person’s capacity for compassion.

• The sociopath seems to be a person who lacks the ability to experience the pain of others, to feel that pain as his own pain.

• The severely depressed person is sometimes the individual who experiences the pain of others all too acutely, who feels overburdened, overwhelmed by the pain of others.

• What if we can manipulate the individual’s sensitivity to the suffering of others? Would this be a good thing? How would we use this ability wisely?

• Once again, we encounter a question whose answer is not purely scientific. Science cannot tell us if we should manipulate the sensitivity of others to suffering, it can only tell us how we can do so.

• Perhaps here too religion can help us to answer the questions raised by science but left unanswered.

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This Presentation will be on the Web

This Presentation will be available at:

http://ethics.sandiego.edu/presentations/usd/dalailama/u3a/