The centuries-long polarization between scientific achievement and religious faith in the West threatens the survival of both sides along the divide, according to Robert Thurman, the leading interpreter in the West of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, who will outline how the Buddhist tradition binds religion and science together in a public lecture on Tuesday, April 3, at Columbia University.

In the third of four groundbreaking lectures on science and religion presented this spring by the Center for the Study of Science and Religion at Columbia, Thurman will speak at 6 P.M. in Rennert Auditorium of the Kraft Center for Jewish Life, 606 West 115th Street, between Broadway and Riverside Drive. The first two lectures in the series, by Professors Ruth Fischbach, a bioethicist, and Philip Kitcher, whose scholarship has focused on the conflict between science and religion, drew a tremendous public response and led organizers to move the third to a larger hall. The fourth lecture by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffman will take place on April 17. The lectures are supported by a grant from the Templeton Foundation to promote inter-disciplinary and inter-religious dialogue and research between humanistic disciplines and the physical, biological and human sciences.

Thurman will present his view that the religionist who denies science and materiality and the scientist who denies religion and spirituality set about to destroy "their precious human opportunity for true fulfillment."

Thurman holds the first endowed chair in Buddhist Studies in the West, the Jey Tsong Khapa Chair in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia. After education at Philips Exeter and Harvard, he studied Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism for almost 30 years as a personal student of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He has written both scholarly and popular books, and has lectured widely all over the world. His special interest is the exploration of the Indo-Tibetan philosophical and psychological traditions, with a view to their relevance to parallel currents of contemporary thought and science.

Thurman believes the Buddhist tradition, which emphasizes interaction among ethics, spirituality and science, has much to teach the post-modern world.

The persistent divide between religion and science creates a dangerous world where one side can destroy society by persecuting infidels and the other by "randomly releasing imperfectly controlled and poorly understood substances and technologies," says Thurman.

"This extreme polarization is founded on two serious errors," says Thurman, "the over-spiritualization and derationalization of religions, and the overly materialistic and almost mystical pseudo-rationalism of the sciences."

In the lecture, Thurman will suggest how the Buddhist experience typing science, religion and ethics together can bring a new perspective to those on either side of the divide between science and religion. "The Buddhist tradition has served … as an ethic, a religion, a science," said Thurman. "All three of these are considered essential for the liberation and fulfillment of human beings. Science is necessary so that humans can know the reality of themselves and their world. Religion is necessary for those who have achieved that realization to stabilize their orientation toward true reality … Ethical thought, speech and action are effortlessly natural for those who fully know the intertwined realities of self and other."