Playing God by Andy Crouch

B. Alan Wallace was a Tibetan monk for fourteen years and the author of a number of books.

One of my favorites is Minding Closely: The Four Applications of Mindfulness. So I was very interested in reading Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice. I was in for a shock.

B. Alan Wallace is not a skeptic at all. He is fully committed to traditional Tibetan Buddhism, including “past-life recall, extrasensory perception, paranormal abilities, and the realization of emptiness and Buddha nature” (33). His skepticism is not towards Buddhism, but towards science, or to be more accurate, scientific materialism.

A Straw Man

Of course, his choice of words is convenient to set up a straw man argument. Quantum mechanics has showed that the universe is not made up of matter. Therefore, in his thinking, materialism is “the faith of the Church Scientific” (127). No, the foundation of science is naturalism, not materialism. Materialism tells us what exists, namely, matter. Naturalism tells us where to look, namely nature. We ask nature a question in the form of an experiment, and the answer is a natural one. Not must be a natural one, but simply that it has always been.

The Church Scientific

The thinking and argumentation in this book is very familiar to me. He argues like a Christian apologist, with similar biases, blind spots, faulty logic, and leaps of faith. He even resorts to name calling, calling modern science “The Church Scientific” (127, 146), calling physics, “the high priests of this new church” (145), and claims that “since Darwin’s discovery of evolution by natural selection and the militant rise of the Church Scientific, for many, the secure attachment to religion has mutated into a kind of ‘dismissive avoidance'” (146).

What does he want science and scientists to do? “The challenge for science is to go beyond the realm of experience of the five senses and objective technical measurements by incorporating into their methodology perceptual knowledge via mental awareness” (18). If it does, then science will accept rebirth, because, “Samadhi also enables one to explore the deep time of the mind by using it as a basis for recalling past lifetimes, thus putting to the test of experience the Buddhist hypothesis that a continuum of awareness preceded this life” (149).

Objective Verifiable Evidence

I have never understood how, if you eliminate what is perceived by the physical senses, that the brain can somehow connect to something outside of itself. The mind knows the inner world, the body knows the outer world. Yes, science should use introspection to help us understand the mind, but objective correlation and verification is still needed. People are often mistaken about their own minds. The success of science has been its insistence upon objective, verifiable evidence. Mind states cannot, by their very nature and domain, tell us about what exists out in the real world.

Summary

In summary, the books title is misleading and, in my opinion, false. The contents are a mixed bag. At times he makes great statements, but he also makes statements that are wrong, misguided, or confused. The problem is that these are so closely messed together it is hard to separate them. For that reason I cannot and do not recommend this book. Clearly he is not the scientist for objective and rational exploration.

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