Rebirth and the Western Buddhist - Khamkoo

48 Rebirth and the Western Buddhist
firmly entrenched within science itself. For over a century,
especially since the publication of Darwin's The
Origin of Species in 1859, biologists have been telling us
that we are no more than very complicated machines,
who have come into existence by a series of chance
processes. We are here only because our ancestors were
more successful than others in the ruthless struggle for
existence. There is no purpose to life except to compete
and survive-any inclination to help other human beings
is merely part of a hereditary behaviour pattern which
happened to favour the survival of our species. Mechanism,
the belief "that all living things are completely explicable
in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry," 84
has scored success after success, while the opposite approach
of vitalism, the belief "that there is something
distinctive about living matter which places it in a class
above the level of the mere machine, no matter how
complex the machine may be" , 84 has been refuted on
point after point and for most of this century has been
virtually obsolete.
In face of this challenge to the Dharma, what can
Buddhists do? Three main approaches are possible:
1. Fundamentalism: maintain all the traditional beliefs
of Tibetan Buddhists and reject Science entirely. This is
Losang Gyatso's approach when he tries to laugh off the
ideas that human beings evolved from lower animals and
that perception of pain in the foot proceeds via transmission
of a nervous impulse to the brain. It may be
possible for Tibetans in India, but for us in the West it is
not a live option.
2. Retreat: define separate spheres of interest for
Science and religion, accepting that physical truth must
be mechanistic and leaving it to the scientists, while
religion must be confined to spiritual truth. This approach
has been adopted by many Christians, and perhaps
one could prune the Buddhadharma so as not to
trespass on the scientific domain.