Posted on 07/17/2013 11:40:53 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
SCIENCE has always fascinated me. As a child in Tibet, I was keenly curious about how things worked. When I got a toy I would play with it a bit, then take it apart to see how it was put together. As I became older, I applied the same scrutiny to a movie projector and an antique automobile.
At one point I became particularly intrigued by an old telescope, with which I would study the heavens. One night while looking at the moon I realized that there were shadows on its surface. I corralled my two main tutors to show them, because this was contrary to the ancient version of cosmology I had been taught, which held that the moon was a heavenly body that emitted its own light.
But through my telescope the moon was clearly just a barren rock, pocked with craters. If the author of that fourth-century treatise were writing today, I'm sure he would write the chapter on cosmology differently.
If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.
For many years now, on my own and through the Mind and Life Institute, which I helped found, I have had the opportunity to meet with scientists to discuss their work. World-class scientists have generously coached me in subatomic physics, cosmology, psychology, biology.
It is our discussions of neuroscience, however, that have proved particularly important. From these exchanges a vigorous research initiative has emerged, a collaboration between monks and neuroscientists, to explore how meditation might alter brain function.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The reference I posted stated that the Chinese impediment was their ancestor worship. They couldn’t develop “new” things because their ancestors were to be revered as if they knew everything possible. Now that I think about it, this is the total OPPOSITE of modern day humanism!
And as for the Muslims, “doing science” meant that you inherently expected consistency in creation, which would be “chaining Allah”, a blasphemy.
And there is one News Story that crowns all the rest.
The hyperbolic descriptions of the creatures could be a matter of perspective. Men who did not have sufficiently advanced technology (Job is believed to be the most anciently written book of the canon) wouldn’t be able to cope well with either a crocodile or a hippopotamus, and perhaps not even an elephant. Job himself and his family seemed to be agrarian and agrarians wouldn’t normally need to deal with elephants/hippos and crocodiles.
Yeah, and that reminds me of something else burke said: That the chinese believed that everything had a sort of “spirit” and if you built a model of a thing, it didn’t have the “spirit” of the thing and therefore was not the thing, so modeling was not comprenensible.
I’ve also heard that the language you speak can change the way you think about highly technical things. And this is why a person that spoke a language that allowed one to communicate both internally and externally, via words, about complex ideas and problems was more likely to come up with complex and elegant solutions.
Language has to contain the capacity to abstract and analogize concepts or
ur gettin’ nowhere.
Job himself and his family seemed to be agrarian and agrarians wouldn’t normally need to deal with elephants/hippos and crocodiles.
I don’t buy it. Modern man’s arrogance causes us to sell those guys way short.
I found it fascinating in jr high math class that someone had to “discover” zero and negative numbers for discovery in mathematics to really explode.
Think of the brain capacity of the first man created before corruption entered creation.
Couple that with a 900 year lifespan, and you’ve got some incredible potential.
Again, I would posit that without an imperative, no need would be seen to deal with such animals. So when they are encountered they would be seen as more fearsome than they need to be. The capability may have been there, but the imperative to exercise it, not yet there.
Think of the brain capacity of the first man created before corruption entered creation.
Couple that with a 900 year lifespan, and you’ve got some incredible potential.
Those are concepts.
My 6 & 8 yr old understand negative numbers because of an analogy to something they’re familiar with.
I used legos. Stack legos 1,2,3,4 high... Now, envision digging a hole in the floor that requires you to put 2 legos in to get to floor level. That’s -2.
We’re losing information in our genome.
We weren’t meant to, as a species, last forever.
There is a beginning and an end to HIStory.
The capability may have been there, but the imperative to exercise it, not yet there.
Basically, it may be we who have the mistaken arrogance that such conquest is naturally built into men, when it’s the “joy of the Lord” that brings it forth. And Job’s generation didn’t even have the Jewish revelation let alone the Christian one.
Maybe something related to a crocodile, though, which is now extinct. We would not know about dodos today were it not for history. Fossils show us only a very tiny peep hole into biological natural history. Anyhow I got to get back to my programming.... have a blessed day
You know what hardly ever gets mentioned in the whole Galileo flap?
Geocentrism was a idea introduced promulgated and defended by scientists, not churchmen. Just look at the names: Aristotle, Ptolemy. By the time of Copernicus it was just considered settled science—and it performed excellently at describing observed planetary motion. It was so settled, in fact, that a whole theology grew up around it.
The lesson I take away from Galileo is exactly the opposite of what most people take away from it—the Church should be very careful about getting too cozy with any scientific theory, lest when it fall, she fall with it.
Those are concepts.
I remember when I was in my very early years, I was fascinated by the trombone because the slide seemed to magically get longer. I was mesmerized and calculated in my mind all the ways it could be possible for such a devise. I never could come up with a plausible answer. Once someone showed me one. I saw how a smaller slide fit into a slightly larger one, giving the impression to a four year old that a single slide was magically lengthening. And then I felt dumb for not seeing it from the beginning.
I was not even looking for part of the slide to be slightly smaller than the other part.
And there are lots of things, I believe, that mankind STILL does not see because we are not looking for the right thing. And once someont finds it, it becomes obvious. Virtually all of mans discoveries and inventions become obvious and easy to understand by anyone with an average IQ, yet many took thousands of years to come to be a part of our concept of the physical world, just like the slide within a slide.
There’s a book the First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor, which looks at the ways ancient people discovered and described fossils.
It’s really turned my thinking around. I mean, you get a person in 1000 B.C. or whatever finding a mastodon skeleton or dinosaur bones, what is he gonna think?
He’s gonna think this thing was a giant animal that was alive once, and he I’m sure he has eaten and picked apart enough of them to tell the difference between a reptile and a bird or mammal, etc
I’m convinced that fossil finds have reinforced and perhaps given rise to legends of mythical beasts. Humanity universally believed that the earth was once full of monsters....and you know what, it sure as heck was! Maybe they didn’t call it a pterodon, but a dragon, but that’s just semantics. The idea’s the same.
LOL Your samsara must be doing better than mine! ;^)
I agree.
I’ll add that the creatures are described in Job as living contemporaniously with his generation.
That being said, as I suggested in a previous post, Job reads like a long parable in a single book. I tend to think he never really existed but, rather, the book is wisdom from God used to instruct mankind as to the nature of the man/God relationship. Frankly, I think the whole history of Israel before Jesus was just such an exercise by God.
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