American Buddhist Net

By Josh Macdonald
DAILY BRUIN COLUMNIST

A new trend has developed in the validating of religion – pseudoscience, the attempt to veil subjective religious beliefs with objective scientific theory.

Intelligent design proponents have been filing lawsuits across the U.S. to get the theory taught in high schools alongside evolution. In October 2005, a lawsuit was filed against the University of California, hoping to require the UC to give high school credit for intelligent design curriculum. The movement was stopped in its tracks, however, when a Supreme Court case characterized intelligent design as an attempt to get creationism into public classrooms .

Science and religion have a rough relationship. They attempt to answer many of the same questions in different ways. While empirical science relies on objective data, achieved through repeated, controlled experiments, most religions focus on a subjective truth, using such mechanisms as faith.

While scientists incorporated evolution into theories which can be tested experimentally, intelligent design theorists have produced no testable hypotheses. Rather than pose a question for experimentation, the theory argues simply that no theory can explain biological complexity.

This type of pseudoscience not only misleads people not versed in scientific theory, but it also undermines the study of subjective states of consciousness that do have objective, empirical aspects.

Take meditation, for instance. A study by Richard Davidson, a neuroscience professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, showed that Tibetan Buddhist monks managed to structurally alter their brain functions.

Davidson's study showed that while meditating, Tibetan monks produced gamma waves – which represent extremely focused thought – thirty times stronger than a control patient. Davidson also documented that normally erratic brain waves became more synchronized during meditation and that the part of the brain associated with positive emotions was more active.

With this study in mind, organizers for the Society for Neuroscience's annual conference invited the Dalai Lama as a guest speaker. Despite the relevance of Davidson's study, a faction of neuroscientists petitioned against the Dalai Lama's presence at the conference, arguing that the high-profile religious leader would allow religious ideas to overshadow the other more objective and substantive scientific studies.

In a Wired magazine article, Bai Lu, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, said "We don't want to mix science and religion in our children's classrooms, and we don't want it at a scientific meeting."

Attempts like those of intelligent design to commandeer science to validate inherently unscientific religious principles have soured scientific interest in subjective experiences.

Those who petitioned against the Dalai Lama's appearance focused not on the research, but on other unscientific Tibetan Buddhist beliefs.

They refused to accept certain subjective experiences produced through Tibetan Buddhist meditation as scientifically valuable because of their association with other unscientific aspects of Buddhism.

When the subjective consciousness has objective, measurable qualities, it can provide important guides for empirical experiments. Scientific studies have shown that meditation not only affects structures in the brain, but mechanisms in the body as well. A 2000 UCLA study suggested that transcendental meditation helped reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and death by reducing the thickness of artery walls.

Understanding how the subjective consciousness interacts with the physical brain and body requires that scientific communities at least entertain the intangible, subjective experience.

Maintaining the distinction between objective science and subjective pseudoscience is a worthy cause to protect the progress of scientific thought. But rejecting all subjective experiences as irrelevant merely because they have religious associations may keep us from finding objective answers to the hardest questions of our existence, those still buried deep beneath the subjective consciousness.

E-mail Macdonald at jmacdonald@media.ucla.edu.

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