Singularity, Scientism, Secularism, and Spooky Action
For every atom belonging to me as good Belongs to you. Remember? --From the poem Singularity by Marie Howe
Out of respect for Marie Howe’s copyright, I won’t present the rest of her poem Singularity here, but you can read it by clicking on this hyperlink. Howe, currently poet-in-residence at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, eloquently expresses how everything that we know—everything that is—began from “only a tiny tiny dot.”
Every atom, every subatomic particle, that I might think of as part of me comes from that dot and has been recycled so many times over 14 billion years that it may have been part of everything I think of as not me, including the air I breathe but cannot see.
We’re all interconnected also in a practical way, of course. The carrot I eat is connected to the store where I bought it, to the workers who stocked the shelves and checked me out, to the truck and truck driver who delivered it to the store, to the farmer, and the soil, and the minerals in the soil, and the sun and wind and rain and so on. But let’s stick to the particles that make up the universe.
Are they, in fact, particles? I’m not a quantum physicist, but I understand that those scientists struggle to understand the nature of the universe’s fundamental building blocks. Traditionally, physicists have described the universe in terms of particles and waves, but recent research suggests that this dichotomy may oversimplify a more complex reality. At the quantum level, entities like photons and electrons exhibit both particle-like and wave-like properties, a phenomenon known as wave-particle duality.
Recent theoretical work suggests that the universe may be more fundamentally composed of something even more basic than particles or waves: fragments of energy. And then there’s the matter of quantum entanglement, where the state of one “particle” can’t be separated from the state of another, no matter how far apart they are. This is what Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”
All of this spookiness can lead a rational 21st Century human being to believe that science is far from being able to rule out ideas and phenomena many believers in scientism consider irrational. Here’s philosophy professor J.P. Moreland’s rough definition of scientism:
…[T]he view that the hard sciences—like chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy—provide the only genuine knowledge of reality. At the very least, this scientific knowledge is vastly superior to what we can know from any other discipline.
Moreland calls scientism “the intellectual and cultural air that we breathe.” Perhaps some ethical and religious conclusions can be as factual as those arrived at through the scientific method. Of the 150-plus posts I’ve published so far on From the Pure Land, the second most popular is an early one about the afterlife. It seems “factual” to conclude:
Our bodies get recycled after we die. Why not the unembodied parts of us as well?
And then there’s the meteorological phenomenon called the butterfly effect. The HowStuffWorks website describes it this way:
The butterfly effect is the idea that small, seemingly trivial events may ultimately result in something with much larger consequences—in other words, they have non-linear impacts on very complex systems. For instance, when a butterfly flaps its wings in India, that tiny change in air pressure could eventually cause a tornado in Iowa.
When I think of the butterfly effect and how the tiny particles, waves, or energy fragments that comprise everything we know are interrelated, interconnected, and entangled, more “spooky action” becomes perfectly reasonable. Prayer, chanting, meditation, and what’s going on in one person’s mind will have an impact on others. Here’s Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman in Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness:
Each of us individually has an effect on the lives of beings around us through the quiet processes going on in our minds. If we are full of good feelings, they radiate around us and people want to be near. If we are full of bad feelings, others tend to stay away. So if we would be activists for good, for the positive, we must assume responsibility for our minds as well as our speech and our physical activities, otherwise our negative mental habits will drag down the entire community of beings. On the other hand, when we break through into the liberty of the heart, mind, and spirit in the process of enlightenment, we free others at the same time.
After I paused for the night in writing this post, a Substack with this headline appeared in my email:
Acquire a peaceful spirit and thousands around you will be saved.
It’s a quotation attributed to the ascetic and mystic priest Seraphim of Sarov, a Russian Orthodox saint. My friend, the Soto Zen priest James Ford, used the line in a “meditation” on him today in Unanswered Questions.
This may seem to be an odd time to return to the subject of science, but let’s consider the scientific method, the process of determining facts through experiments and testing. The Buddha taught his followers an early version of the scientific method:
O monks, just as a goldsmith tests gold by rubbing, burning, and cutting before buying it, so too, you should examine my words before accepting them, and not just out of respect for me. —From Santaraksita’s Tattvasamgraha as quoted in Tricycle
In the earlier Kalama Sutta, he advised that one should follow teachings only after one knows for oneself that, when adopted and carried out, they lead to “benefit and happiness.“
Humankind has now had more than two and a half millennia to test the dharma (the Sanskrit word that represents the teachings of the Buddha and the way the world works). Using the scientific method, one can easily conclude that even the “spooky” parts bring “benefit and happiness.”
That brings me to the subject of Secular Buddhism. While I agree with many of its principles, many of its adherents also follow the religion of scientism and reject teachings that have not (yet) been fully confirmed by the hard sciences.
What I value in Secular Buddhism is its focus on the original message of the Buddha. Even as my practice has brought me deeply into the spirit and rituals of Vajrayana Buddhism, it has also led me back to the core teachings.
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