90 - Science & Buddhism
5/1/202643 min
Many Westerners are drawn to Buddhism because it feels rational, experiential, and compatible with science. But Buddhism also includes teachings—like karma, rebirth, and cosmology—that don’t fit neatly into a scientific framework. So how do these pieces fit together?
In this episode, we explore why Western culture often wants Buddhism to be “scientific,” what the Buddha actually taught about direct experience in the Kālāma Sutta, and why Buddhism still includes a healthy form of confidence (saddhā) rather than blind belief. We also look at where Buddhism and science genuinely overlap, where they don’t, and how to approach teachings that can’t be tested in a laboratory.
Using a clear analogy from medicine—where we often trust what works long before we understand how it works—we examine why unprovable teachings like rebirth aren’t dismissed in Buddhism, and why the tradition encourages open‑minded investigation rather than rigid belief or rigid skepticism.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Alan Peto· Host0:29
Welcome to another episode of Learn Buddhism. I'm Alan Pitto. Is Buddhism scientific? This is something that a lot of Westerners really gravitate towards when they start exploring and practicing Buddhism because it can feel and seem like Buddhism is scientific. Things like meditation, well, you can prove a lot of that with neuroscience. So was the Buddha a scientist? Or maybe all these different things inside Buddhism that we don't necessarily believe in if you're a Westerner. Maybe it's like karma or rebirth or the realms of rebirth or existence, cosmology, all the different bodhisattvas. Didn't the Buddha say, "Don't believe anything unless you can test it yourself"? So let's talk about that in this episode. Is Buddhism scientific? And can you disregard things like I just mentioned there, like karma or rebirth, because you can't prove that, and therefore, no scientific