Science, Technology & Worldviews

Science and technology are never received raw. Every tradition on this site has met them with a worldview; a settled account of what the world is, what a person is, and what knowledge is for; and has answered them out of it: embracing, regulating, resisting, reinterpreting. This section tells that story era by era, keeps a register of the traditions' recorded stances toward particular technologies with their reasons attached, profiles each tradition's posture, and gathers the live flashpoints where the answers now carry deadlines. Its baseline is the complexity thesis: particular people, institutions, and disputes; never the war of two abstractions.

Showing the Buddhist family only. Show everything

The Eras

Fourteen eras, told in the order the evidence gives: particular people, institutions, and disputes; never two armies. Each era names its domains, its worldview stakes, and the places elsewhere on this site where its story continues.

c. 200 BCE – 1900 CE Chinese Imperial Imperial China sustained the world’s longest-running state science: an astronomical bureau serving the Mandate of Heaven, a correlative medicine of qi and the five phases, and engineering on a continental scale. Era · Astronomy and cosmology, Mathematics, Medicine and anatomy, Engineering and materials, Agriculture and food c. 500 BCE – 1600 CE Indian Classical In India, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine developed inside temple and court cultures: zero and the decimal system, Āryabhaṭa’s rotating earth, the Kerala school’s infinite series, and Āyurveda’s medicine of balance. Era · Mathematics, Astronomy and cosmology, Medicine and anatomy 2000 – present Contemporary CRISPR, consumer genomics, machine intelligence, and a warming climate: the live questions now arrive as engineering deadlines, and the traditions answer them divided within themselves as much as between one another. Era · Computing and AI, Genetics and biotechnology, Neuroscience and consciousness, Ecology and climate, Biology and evolution, Space

Flashpoints

The live questions, where the traditions' answers now carry engineering deadlines.

Flashpoint Artificial intelligence and human dignity Learning systems that counsel, accompany, and target: the live question is not machine consciousness but what may never be delegated; and every tradition on this site answers that accountability stays with persons. Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Secular and naturalist Flashpoint Gene editing and the germline Easy technique, unconsenting subject, speculative benefit: the 2018 edited babies drew one condemnation in many vocabularies, and the line between somatic therapy and germline design is now the field’s governing border. Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Secular and naturalist Flashpoint Transhumanism and the body Mortality as an engineering backlog: lifespan, cognition, and the body as a draft to be revised; and the counter-question, asked in every dialect on this site, whether a self indefinitely revisable remains a self. Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Secular and naturalist Flashpoint The limits of medicine The ventilator meets the ars moriendi: a working consensus against vitalism, hospice as a shared institution with Christian roots, and the assisted-dying argument proceeding jurisdiction by jurisdiction through every tradition’s courts of conscience. Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Mainline Protestant

The Technology Register

5 technologies, each with the traditions' recorded stances and their reasons. Open the register · Compare traditions on one technology

Tradition Profiles

Profile Buddhist A contemplative psychology that laboratories now study, a cosmology of vast cycles, and a modernist rule; stated by the Dalai Lama; that where demonstration contradicts doctrine, doctrine must change; karma and rebirth mark the boundary of that concession. Cetanā (intention), Impermanence, Dependent origination, Buddhist modernism

Relationship Models

How science and religion are said to relate; from Conflict to Techno-asceticism. Read the models. The baseline of this section is the Complexity model: no timeless essences, only cases.