Global Perspectives on Science & Spirituality

This is an interesting collection of essays on Science and Spirituality from Asian or Eastern European authors, but it promises somewhat more than it delivers. It offers a valuable alternative perspective, but raises two questions that it fails to address. Sangeetha Menon argues that Indian philosophy is holistic and treats experience as a total unity, thereby bridging the abyss which the Western intellectual tradition has created between mind and matter. It is rather like the way in which, in colonial days, men in London or Berlin armed with nothing but a ruler and a small scale map, divided up Africa without regard to geographical realities or ethnic unities. Once created the artificial frontiers became the cause of political, economic and military conflict. So perhaps it is with mind and matter. After all what is stomach ache? Is it something in the external physical world, or is it an inner mental experience? The answer has to be both. Makarand Paranjape continues the same argument with science and religion. Again it is pointed out that in Indian thought they are both unified in one search for truth. The conflict between them is a product of Western styles of analysis. His argument is partially wrapped up in politically correct sociology which analyses the question in terms of the colonial and post-colonial cultural experience of India. This does not seem a helpful way into the deeper issues. Surprisingly he makes no use of the work of Radhakrishnan who was probably India's greatest 20th century philosopher who also ended up as President. Radhakrishnan saw Western science as the best and most universal way of exploring the material dimension of existence and the Advaita Vedanta as the best and most universal way of exploring the spiritual dimension, the latter finally including the former. He does, however, mention in passing two famous Indians, Sri Aurobindo and Gandhi, but they raise a problem. Aurobindo was a mystical activist who synthesised Darwinian evolution with the Bhagavad Gita, but after his death his ashram imploded into sectarian irrelevance. Gandhi was a heroic historical figure whose non violent resistance to British rule brought about an almost painless transition from the Raj to independence - as far at least as Britain was concerned. But he was a celibate, vegetarian pacifist who wanted to return India to a simple pre-industrial peasant economy. The India he helped to create is a nuclear armed superpower. Indian spirituality and the modern world have yet to mesh. Jiang Sheng points out that Daoism's flexible equation between existence and non-existence offers a more hospitable mind set to the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle than the rigid logical rationality of strict causality and 'either/or' logic of the West. This is true, but it was Western rationality that actually discovered the Indeterminacy Principle, and the quark, and the statistical randomness of the radioactive disintegration of the atom. In the same way Indian spirituality claims insight into the inner energies of the human body through the idea of the chakras and kundalini energy, but it is Western sanitation and vaccination that has dramatically increased the life expectancy of the average Indian. Again the full mesh between Eastern spirituality and Western science has not been traced. A second unanswered question arises from the contributions from Eastern Europe. Just what is open theology? Coming from an intellectual generation that has only recently escaped the restrictions of Soviet rule, it is understandable that several should assert the virtues of an open system of thought as proclaimed by Popper and Polanyi - a previous generation of refugees from Central Europe. They all see a harmony between the open inquiries of science and theology. However the title of the book is 'Science & Spirituality', while for these contributors spirituality means religion, and religion means Christian theology. To revert to Radhakrishnan again, he interpreted religions such as Hinduism and Christianity as crystallisations of a higher spirituality into limited local dogma and ritual . There is a problem here on the relation between religion and spirituality. Furthermore what does open theology actually mean? The open system of science forces it to be dynamic, and the consensus on its central paradigms evolve and change. Newtonian mechanics give way to Einstein's relativity. Regardless of heresies and maverick theologians, the consensus of the Churches' theology has remained fixed in the declaration of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D., that Jesus Christ was the 2nd person of the Trinity and Perfect Man and Perfect God. It is proud to proclaim the fact. Would open theology self destruct in the manner of John Hick's The Myth of God Incarnate? Would it offer a new spiritual vision for the 21st century? The question is left in the air. This collection of essays is as interesting for what they do not say, as for what they do.