Buddhism; Buddhist Philosophy; Sufficient Reason; Theology; Religions
摘要
‘I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran’, says the robust and bluff believer, Francis Bacon, as the studio manager reaches to switch off the sound on his Elizabethan cultural perceptions, ‘than that this universal frame is without a mind... God never wrought miracle, to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it...’. ‘It is true’, he goes on, ‘that a little philosophy incline man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringer men's minds about to religion’. Bacon assumes that the atheist rejects ‘religion’, not just belief in God: no middle term is readily available to him. There is a lingering nuance that ‘atheism’ is ‘shallow’ in its rejection of ‘religion’, which we can register, and even deploy, without thereby endorsing theism: can now insist that the rejection of theism is not yet atheism. Or can we? This is familiar enough stuff for Buddhists, who seem typically in their ‘non-theism’ to represent an agnosticism of indifference rather than of perplexity. But we need to recall why it might seem contentious, and revisiting the scene of religious perplexity can be salutary, since religious dialogue is not apologetic opposition but imaginative engagement.