Neural Buddhists

Today's New York Times has an interesting Op-Ed piece by David Brooks with the title, "The Neural Buddhists." The most public conflict between science and religion has been driven by the fundamentalist atheism of people like Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, and Hitchens, to name a few of the more visible.

But Brooks suggests that this debate is going to end up being a sideshow to what he terms "neural Buddhism. He writes,

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universals human traits . It's going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

I have found in the field of psychology a Buddhist religious orientation is cropping up more frequently in conferences and seminars.