Karma... a word that both is eminently scientific, and also annoyingly religious. I've spent a lot of time exploring both meanings of karma.
Ever since I was a kid I've enjoyed learning about science. In my childhood room I set up a card table that fit oh-so-perfectly inside a corner of my closet. I'd sit down at the table, slide the closet door shut, turn on a light that I'd strung over the clothes rod, and spend many happy hours performing experiments with science kits.
Then, as now, the essence of science for me was cause and effect. Do this, and observe that. (See my "Thanks for the chlorine gas, Mom" post.)
That's the believable side of karma: causes lead to effects which lead to more causes which lead... ad infinitum, back to the beginning of the universe.
Karma, though, generally is viewed as having something particular to do with conscious beings. Usually billiard balls richocheting around a pool table aren't thought of as generating karma. But if a person risks her life to save a child about to step in front of a speeding truck, bystanders will say "that should get her some good karma."
Especially if they're Buddhist.
Buddhism, like karma, comes in both scientific and religious guises. I'm enjoying Owen Flanagan's new book, "The Boddhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized," which aims to sort out the unbelievable supernatural aspect of Buddhism from the believable natural aspect.
This includes karma. Flanagan likes how the current Dalai Lama supports scientific inquiry and findings of modern science, albeit with some caveats which allow supernaturalism to remain part of his Buddhist teachings.
Flanagan says one form of karmic causality discussed by the Dalai Lama is eminently reasonable and scientific.
The idea can be understood straightforwardly as follows: once sentient beings exist they think, feel, and act in ways that have effects. These effects are of two kinds: personal -- both intrapersonal (on the person herself) and interpersonal (on those with whom the person interacts) -- and environmental, affecting the natural and built worlds. To these one should add social, economic, and political effects.
Karmic causation as depicted in this way is natural. It is not due to theistic intervention at the beginning of the process, say, in creating a Big Bang with a plan, nor is there intentional (intelligent) design along the way other than the effects of the sentient beings (human and nonhuman) who eventually emerged and are creating karmic effects = effects via their actions.
However, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religious faiths which have karma as a central tenet don't only look upon karmic causality in this scientific fashion. If they did, karma would be an undeniable truth. Flanagan says that karmic causation then could just be called "sentient-being causation," a subtype of ordinary causation.
There's what he calls a less tame (meaning wilder, farther out, much more unbelievable) Buddhist interpretation of karma, though.
Karmic causation untame... names an ontologically unique kind of causation that accounts for how the psyches of future beings are determined by a set of causal processes that involve more than the environmental cum psycho-social-political-economic effects of previous occupants of the earth.
What is meant by the idea of "the law of karma, by which an intentional act will reap certain fruits" [a Dalai Lama quote] is this: my consciousness does not die when my body does, it goes on and reaps in the next and possibly many (many) future lives what it sows in each antecedent life.
The Dalai Lama, along with his Buddhist followers, admits there's no demonstrable scientific evidence of past lives. So the aforementioned caveat is brought in:
Science finds no evidence for rebirth, but it has not found its "nonexistence."
Well, science also hasn't found the nonexistence of the Tooth Fairy.
But once we get beyond a certain age, we realize that Mom and Dad are better explanations for why a quarter appears under our pillow after a tooth is put there than the Tooth Fairy. (Not sure what the going rate for a tooth is these days; back in olden times, when I was losing my teeth, I recall getting a quarter.)
So regular cause and effect, not involving karmic causality extending over past lives, now seems much more believable to me than Buddhism's karma untamed version. Religious believers, however, will keep on believing until the impetus for belief loses its energy. That's what happened to me, after I wrote a book which espoused the unbelievable aspect of karma.
Which is the essence of karma tame version. People do stuff; then they do different stuff, because causes keep happening, as do effects.
If you believe in reincarnation, then you might as well believe in god, there is no epistimolegical difference. The plain meaning of karma involves reincarnation, hence a supernatural claim.
Cause and effect, insofar as science is concerned, is that a particular cause is observed to have a particular effect, which is objectively verifiable. Science makes accurate limited statements only insofar as they can be born out by evidence.
Statements such as everything is connected are not scientific, this is a broad metaphysical claim. To be scientific, you would need to specifically say all things having mass exert a specific type of effect, gravitational attraction which varies depending on the masses involved and the distance between them. However, not everything need cause an effect on everything else. For example, you cannot tell what I am thinking, nor do my thoughts effect reality.
Posted by: George | January 23, 2012 at 03:13 AM
George, I agree with you as regards what Flanagan calls karma "untamed." Meaning, the notion of karma with supernatural elements added on.
Otherwise, though, karma is just another word for "cause and effect." Yes, we associate that word with supernatural elements, but Flanagan notes that sometimes Buddhists (and others) speak of karma in a completely scientific and naturalistic way.
For example, if I scream at somebody and call them insulting, profane names, that action will incur karma. It will have an effect both on the other person, and on me. Also, on anyone else within earshot.
But believing I might have to be reborn so that this person can clear my karmic debt by screaming at ME -- that's obviously a faith-based belief similar to a belief in God, as you noted.
Posted by: Brian Hines | January 23, 2012 at 09:49 AM
Cause and effect is simply cause and effect. It is fact, not philosophy.
Who cares what the Dali Lama or any other quasi-religious figure has to say about it?
Gravity is simply gravity. Space is space. But the Dali Lama does not seem to have anything to say about those. (?) Obviously (though he might sidestep the religious myth-alications) we are supposed to *care* (compassionate Buddhas) how our actions effect other beings and the future generations on this watery marble in space we call home. Why should we? Well, we just should? That's not very scientific!
Things, events-- and all life ---(including people) bump about, smash head-on, effect the trajectory of other things, etc. Planet earth. Big deal. Who gives a darn about karmic causality in a scientific fashion? Shit happens. Bumper cars bump. What the fruck doth the Dali Lama got to do with it?
Posted by: Betty | January 23, 2012 at 12:34 PM
Brian,
Sort of i suppose, but if everything is cause and effect, then how did the first cause come about? What does Buddhism have to say on that?
I understood from Jon that Buddhism avoids metaphysical positions, but if reality is completely deterministic, as Buddhism contends with its universal law of cause and effect, then to test this we have to ask the basic question, what was the first cause?
Posted by: George | January 23, 2012 at 01:09 PM
George, good question. But asking about a first cause assumes that time began at some, well, time. Otherwise "first" would have no meaning. If the cosmos is eternal, there's no such thing as a first cause.
Buddhism, to my understanding, doesn't posit a creator god, or a creation. So in that regard it seems to have the same attitude as modern science: no one knows what occurred before the big bang, or if time even has a meaning before time as we know it began.
Posted by: Brian Hines | January 23, 2012 at 01:16 PM
But consider this, science, and insofar as a I understand Buddhism, both agree that we have a world of things (not just creations of the mind).
Cause and effect, says that things effect other things, this is strict determinism, it is karma, it is even probably akin to the classical clockwork universe of laplace and newton, it needed a first cause, and this first cause was God.
Science has tried to remove this need for a first cause, by using quantum mechanics, which is based on indeterminacy (or probability) rather than determinacy. In the quantum mechanical world things (virtual particles) spring into and out of existence, uncaused by others things.
Even if the cosmos is eternal and time is cyclical rather than linear, there is a flow or an arrow in one-direction only, that is what cause and effect is saying, i.e. that a first event causes a second event to occur and so on. So if this is so, what was the orginal cause from which all other events precede? Actually, I need to think about this more, rapidly dissapearing up me own ass. Night.
Posted by: George | January 23, 2012 at 02:41 PM
There are several seeming unanswerable questions - unanswerable to the limited capacities of the human organism, that is.
The three that I remember making my head itch as a small child were:
Where does space end? And what's beyond that?
When does space end in the other direction? Meaning, however smaller and smaller we go into things, it seems inconceivable (and against mathematical principles) that there could be an end point. When we reach that apparent point, we can (at least theoretically) halve it.
When did time begin? Whatever point we posit, we can ask, what came before? (Similar logic would apply to time ending.)
Now I know that there are theories abound that attempt to deal with these type of questions. But I for one am not completely convinced. The more we get into these realms, the more we rely on speculative theory - some of which border on the fantastic and very much remind me of the dialectical arguments of religious intellectuals and philosophers.
I don't find this frustrating at all, in fact I find it exiting. That which gives rise to and sustains reality with its boundless order and (dare I say) intelligence (why should the religious stake a claim to this word!) is truly mysterious and enlivening.
The ancients found this so but made the fatal mistake of anthropomorphizing it. Science has come along and is doing a fine job of demolishing that wrong turn - but yet the essential mystery remains.
Posted by: Jon | January 24, 2012 at 06:59 AM
Jon, absolutely. I share your feeling that its amazingly wonderful how the cosmos is just so damn mysterious and unfathomable.
For me, a prime mind-boggler is the notion that all 100 billion or so galaxies, each with 100 billion or so stars, once was much smaller than an atom at the moment of the big bang.
Come on... Can't be true... Or, can it?
I love how reality doesn't conform to my ability to understand it. Also, I hate it. But does reality care about my loves and hates? Nyah. Reality just is what it is, and does what it does.
Posted by: Brian Hines | January 24, 2012 at 10:48 AM