Buddhism = Science?
Does Buddhism conflict with modern science? Among all the major religions of the world, Buddhist teachings do not have any major or significant conflicts with modern science.
It does not have any creation myths, nor does it attempt to attribute any natural phenomenon to supernatural causes.
Buddhism embraces the fully the Theory of Evolution which quite clearly demonstrate the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence. Thus, it has no difficulties with fossil remains, carbon-dating and geological evidence with modern science uses to date the age of the earth to be around 4.5 billion years. These discoveries in fact comment the Buddha's comment that the earth has been in existence for eons.
The Buddha has said specifically that there are countless star systems in existence, and that our world is a speck of dust compared to the vastness and diversity of the universe. He did not claim that the earth was created by unseen deity or that humans are a special creation of that deity.
Using modern astronomy, satellites and radio telescopes, we can observe the trillions of stars and billions of galaxies in the universe, and see clearly that the Buddha made a very accurate observation of our place in the cosmos.
The Buddha's concept of time, in the context of the universe, seems to be very much in accordance with modern science. Buddhism measures the timescale of te universe in "Kalpas" which are inconceivably long periods of time. He gave the analogy of silk cloth brushing the top of a mountain once very hundreds years. The time it takes for the mountain to be worn away is approximately the duration of one "kalpa".
Therefore Buddhist cosmology is quite inline with the current scientific estimates of the age of the universe, which is taken to be about 13.7 billions years old.
Also very interesting, the Buddha mentioned that the universe is in continual state o expansion and contraction and that these cycles last for unimaginably long periods of time, or for many, many "kalpas" it seems that he anticipated the oscillating universe. Theory by more than 2,00 years.
In one of his discourser, the Buddha held up a cup of water. For a long time, nobody understood what he meant but today we can see through a microscope that there are in fact countless micro-organism in any cup of water. Thus there may still be many things the Buddha said that we have yet to discover and comprehend.
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