The Lotus Sutra is not a counter-example to the Kuzari Principle

 A National Experiential Tradition is defined as:

1)     a tradition accepted by a nation about its own history

2) a tradition that describes a national experience of a previous generation of that nation

3) a national experience that would be expected to create a national       memory that would continue until the time when the tradition is in place.

 

The Kuzari principle says that national experiential traditions are true.

 

Some critics think that the events described in the Buddhist Lotus sutra are a  counter example to the Kuzari principle. Here I will show that those events do not satisfy the definition of an NET and therefore are not counterexamples to the Kuzari principle.

 

Here is a summary of the four main ways in which those events fail to meet the condition of the of the of the definition:

 

A, It is not clear that the events describe large scale human participation at all. Many of the beings described are clearly not human. Even when human terms are used, the numbers are clearly symbolic and not literal. That creates the impression that there is no description of a real human historical event. [So  2) is violated since a national event is a large scale human event.]

 

B. Even if we took the description to refer to large scale human participation, there is no description of the human group constituting a nation who could be the ancestors of a nation that possessed the tradition describing the events. See my discussion of the battle of the Milvian bridge in Reason to Believe pp. 272 - 274 for the significance of lacking national identity. [So 1) and 2) are violated.]

 

In addition, the Lotus sutra originated in a culture distinct from the descendants of the supposed original event.

According to the New World Encyclopedia (https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Lotus_Sutra)

The Lotus Sutra was published in Kashmir (or Punjab) during the Kushan dynasty, under king Kanishka´s reign. The Kushan dynasty was a different civilization than the Haryanka dynasty (that is king Ajātaśatru´s dynasty, who was allegedly present with his people when the Buddha performed the miracles).

As you know, one key component of the Kuzari Argument is (2) a national experience of a previous generation of that nation; that´s because if a relevant enough event happened, it should have left a memory on that nation as a whole, and that makes it verifiable.

It seems that the sutra doesn’t meet this requirement because this book was published by a nation that wasn´t the same nation where the miracles allegedly happened, and therefore the verifiability of the event fades away.

If someone in the Kushan empire asked “how come anybody knows about it” the fourth council would reply, “that´s because it didn´t happened to us, it happened to a different people and those people aren´t here” that means it´s unverifiable and therefore the Kuzari argument would not apply to the Lotus Sutra.

 

 This crucially violates 2). My thanks to Marcus Rayek for this crucial information.

 

C. The Lotus sutra is revered only by one of the three major branches of Buddhism, namely Mahayana. That means that it's authority as a direct revelation from God it's not accepted by the other two schools, namely Theravada and Vajrayana. That means that the veracity of the historical event is rejected by a large portion of the of those who are faithful to Buddhist tradition. That suggests that even in Mahayana it was not regarded as historical fact, but rather as a poetical exposition of fundamental beliefs and practices with which the other two branches somewhat disagreed, rather than a disagreement about an event of revelation. That being the case, the description of the historical events in the Lotus sutra cannot be regarded as a tradition accepted by a nation about its own history. [So 1) is violated.]

 

 

D. The date of origin of the Lotus sutra is very much in doubt. Here are the words of one of the translators of the sutra [https://www.academia.edu/36790850/Tracing_the_progressive_definition_of_the_Bodhisattva_Avalokite%C5%9Bvara_in_imagery_and_textual_discourses]:

We do not know where or when the Lotus Sutra was composed, or in what language. Probably it was initially formulated in a local Indian dialect and then later put into Sanskrit to lend it greater respectability. All we can say for certain about the date of its composition is that it was already in existence by 255 ce, when the first Chinese translation of it was made.

From another source [https://tricycle.org/magazine/how-to-read-the-lotus-sutra/]:

The Lotus Sutra was probably compiled in the first century C.E. in Kashmir, during the fourth Buddhist Council of the newly founded Mahayana sect of Buddhism, more than 500 years after the death of  Sakyamuni Buddha [1] It is thus not included in the more ancient Agamas of Mahayana Buddhism, nor in the  Sutta Pitaka  of the Theravada Buddhists, both of which represent the older Buddhist scriptures that can be historically  linked to Sakyamuni Buddha himself.

 

Given that date for its composition, we can either say it is meant as a literal history and comes into existence in violation of the Kuzari principle, or we can say that it is meant as poetry - and not as literal history - and does not violate the principle. There is no convincing reason that we should opt for the former over the latter. [So 1) is violated.]

 

[[More support for this conclusion is fund in the following quote from the first source above:

In these opening sentences we are still in the world of historical reality or possibility, in a setting in the outskirts of the city of Rajagriha in northern India in which Gautama, or Shakyamuni, very probably did in fact propound his doctrines in the sixth or fifth century bce.

But as Ananda proceeds to describe the staggering number and variety of human, nonhuman, and heavenly beings who have gathered to listen to the Buddha’s discourse, we realize that we have left the world of factual reality far behind. This is the first point to keep in mind in reading the Lotus Sutra. Its setting, its vast assembly of listeners, its dramatic occurrences in the end belong to a realm that totally transcends our ordinary concepts of time, space, and possibility. Again and again we are told of events that took place countless, indescribable numbers of kalpas, or eons, in the past, or of beings or worlds that are as numerous as the sands of millions and billions of Ganges Rivers. Such “numbers” are in fact no more than pseudo-numbers or non-numbers, intended to impress on us the impossibility of measuring the immeasurable. They are not meant to convey any statistical data but simply to boggle the mind and jar it loose from its conventional concepts of time and space. For in the realm of emptiness, time and space as we conceive them are meaningless; anywhere is the same as everywhere, and now, then, never, forever are all one.]]

 

 

In addition, other contradictions and historical problems are pointed out below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE LOTUS SUTRA

Chapter I

Introduction

 

[Text in italics is my addition of historical information.]

Thus have I heard. Once the Buddha was staying in the city of Rājagṛha, on

 

Rājagṛha

Oxford Reference

https://www.oxfordreference.com › view › authority.2...

 

The capital of Magadha until the end of the Haryaṇka dynasty. Built by King Bimbisāra,

Bimbisāra

https://www.oxfordreference.com › viewbydoi › auth...

 

Founder of the Haryaṇka dynasty and first king of Magadha.which he ruled for 52 years (c.465–413 bce) from his palace in Rājagṛha.

So the city was built no earlier than 465 B.C.E. This date is consistent only with the latest dates for Buddha’ life. According to the earlier dates these events could not have happened in his lifetime.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the mountain called Gṛdhrakūṭa, together with a great assembly of twelve

thousand monks, all of whom were arhats whose corruption was at an end,

who were free from the confusion of desire, who had achieved their own

goals, shattered the bonds of existence, and attained complete mental discipline.

Their names were Ājnāta kauṇḍinya, Mahākāśyapa, Uruvilvakāśyapa,

Gayā kāśyapa, Nadī kāśyapa, Śāri putra, Mahā maudgalyāyana, Mahā kātyā -

yana, Aniruddha, Kapphiṇa, Gavāṃ pati, Revata, Pilinda vatsa, Bakkula,

Mahā kauṣṭhila, Nanda, Sundarananda, Pūr ṇa maitrā yaṇī putra, Subhūti,

Ānanda, and Rāhula.

 

20 names for 12,000 monks.

 

All of them were great arhats, known to the assembly.

There were in addition two thousand others, both those who had more to

learn and those who did not. The nun Mahā prajāpatī was there, together with

her six thousand attendants; and also the nun Yaśodharā, Rāhula’s mother,

together with her attendants.

There were also eighty thousand bodhisattva mahā sattvas, all of whom

were irreversible from highest, complete enlightenment (anuttarā samyaksaṃbodhi).

They had obtained the dhāraṇīs, were established in eloquence,

and had turned the irreversible wheel of the Dharma. Each had paid homage

to countless hundreds of thousands of buddhas, planted roots of merit in their

presence, and had always been praised by those buddhas.

 

“Countless” clearly contradicts “hundreds of thousands”. In any case, it is clearly impossible for any real human being to receive homage from hundreds of thousands of real human beings.

 

They had also cultivated

compassion within themselves, skillfully caused others to enter the

wisdom of a buddha, obtained great wisdom, and reached the other shore. All

of them were famous throughout countless worlds and had saved innumerable

hundreds of thousands of sentient beings. They were Manjuśrī, Avalo -

kiteśvara, Mahāsthāmaprāpta, Nityodyukta, Anikṣipta dhura, Rat na pāni,

Bhaiṣajyarāja, Pradānaśūra, Ratnacandra, Can dra prabha, Pūrṇa candra,

Mahāvikramin, Anantavikramin, Trai lokya vikrama, Bhadra pāla, Maitreya,

Ratnākara, and Susātha vāha.

These are the names of all 80,000?!

 

There were altogether eighty thousand such

bodhisattva mahāsattvas.At that time Śakra, king of the devas,

 

Śakra (Sanskrit: शक्र Śakra; Pali: सक्क Sakka) is the ruler of the Trāyastriṃśa Heaven according to Buddhist cosmology. He is also referred to by the title "Śakra, Lord of the Devas" (Sanskrit: Śakra devānāṃ indraḥ; Pali: Sakka devānaṃ inda).^[1] The name Śakra ("powerful") as an epithet of Indra is found in several verses of the Rigveda.

 

Clearly a mythological figure not human.

 

 

 

 

was also there, attended by twenty

thousand devaputras. Candra, Samantagandha, and Ratnaprabha, and the

great devas of the four quarters were there, together with a retinue of ten

thousand devaputras. The deva putras Īśvara and Maheśvara were there,

attended by thirty thousand devaputras. Brahma, the lord of the sahā world,

as well as the great Brahma Śikhin and the great Brahma Jyotiṣprabha were

there, together with a retinue of twelve thousand devaputras. The eight nāga

kings

 

Who were the Naga kings?

Chronology

• Vrisha-naga alias Vrisha-bhava or Vrishabha, possibly ruled at Vidisha in the late 2nd century. ...
• Bhima-naga, r. c. 210-230 CE, probably the first king to rule from Padmavati.
• Skanda-naga.
• Vasu-naga.
• Brihaspati-naga.
• Vibhu-naga.
• Ravi-naga.
• Bhava-naga.

The Naga (IAST: Nāga) dynasty ruled parts of north-central India during the 3rd and the 4th centuries, after the decline of the Kushan Empire and before the rise of the Gupta Empire. Its capital was located at Padmavati, which is identified with modern Pawaya in Madhya Pradesh. Modern historians identify it with the family that is called Bharashiva (IAST: Bhāraśiva) in the records of the Vakataka dynasty.

 

So they are approximately 500 years after the life of Buddha. So this reference to human participation cannot be historically accurate.

 

 

 

 

 

—namely, Nanda, Upananda, Sāgara, Vāsukin, Takṣaka, Anavatapta,

Manasvin, and Utpalaka—were also there, each of them surrounded by several

hundreds of thousands of attendants.

There were four kings of the kiṃnaras

 

A kinnara is a creature from Hindu and Buddhist mythology. They are described as part human and part bird, and have a strong association with music and love. Believed to come from the Himalayas, they often watch over the well-being of humans in times of trouble or danger. An ancient Indian string instrument is known as the Kinnari vina.

 

So these are mythological creatures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

whose names were Dharma, Su -

dharma, Mahādharma, and Dharmadhara, and each had several hundreds of

thousands of attendants. The four kings of the gandharvas were there. They

were Manojna, Manojnasvara, Madhura, and Madhurasvara, each of them

also with several hundreds of thousands of attendants. There, too, were four

kings of the asuras,

 

Asuras (Sanskrit: असुर) are a class of beings or power-seeking clans, related to the more benevolent devas (also known as suras) in Hinduism.^[1]

Since no names are mentioned, this is an indefinite reference impossible to place historically.

 

 

 

 

 

 called Baḍin, Kharaskandha, Vemacitra, and Rahu, each

with several hundreds of thousands of attendants. Mahā tejas, Mahākāya,

Mahā pūrṇa, and Maharddhiprāpta, the four kings of the garuḍas,

 

The Four Heavenly Kings are four Buddhist gods or devas, each of whom is believed to watch over one cardinal direction of the world. In the Sanskrit language of India, they are called the "Caturmahārāja" (चतुर्महाराज) or "Caturmahārājikādeva": "Four Great Kings". In Chinese mythology, they are known as "Sì Dàtiānwáng" (Chinese: 四大天王; lit. 'Four Great Heavenly Kings') or collectively as "Fēng Tiáo Yǔ Shùn" (simplified Chinese: 风调雨顺; traditional Chinese: 風調雨順; lit. 'Good climate'). The Hall of Four Heavenly Kings is a standard component of Chinese Buddhist temples.

 

So the four kings are clearly not human kings.

 

 

 

 were there

together with several hundreds of thousands of attendants. Finally, King

Ajāta śatru, Vaidehī’s son,

I find no historical reference for this person.

 

 So the bottom line is that all the references to the kings and their attendants are references to mythological creatures except for one set of kings who are four centuries too late. That means that the description of this being a large scale public event is entirely unreliable.

 

 

 

 was also there with several hundreds of thousands

of his attendants.

Also notice that all the numbers are in round thousands. There was no interest here in counting the number of actual participants. The numbers indicate great multitudes and perhaps relative size.

 

 

I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published

 

I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work.

Free Press 

 

If you’ve been reading any news about wildfires this summer—from Canada to Europe to Maui—you will surely get the impression that they are mostly the result of climate change. 

Here’s the AP: Climate change keeps making wildfires and smoke worse. Scientists call it the “new abnormal.”

And PBS NewsHour: Wildfires driven by climate change are on the rise—Spain must do more to prepare, experts say.

And The New York Times: How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox.

And Bloomberg: Maui Fires Show Climate Change’s Ugly Reach.

I am a climate scientist. And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus.

So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals: it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it. 

The paper I just published—“Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California”—focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior. I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell. 

This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society. 

To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve. 

The aftermath of the wildfire in western Maui, Hawaii, on August 14, 2023. (Yuki Iwamura via Getty Images)

Why is this happening?

It starts with the fact that a researcher’s career depends on his or her work being cited widely and perceived as important. This triggers the self-reinforcing feedback loops of name recognition, funding, quality applications from aspiring PhD students and postdocs, and of course, accolades. 

But as the number of researchers has skyrocketed in recent years—there are close to six times more PhDs earned in the U.S. each year than there were in the early 1960s—it has become more difficult than ever to stand out from the crowd. So while there has always been a tremendous premium placed on publishing in journals like Nature and Science, it’s also become extraordinarily more competitive.

In theory, scientific research should prize curiosity, dispassionate objectivity, and a commitment to uncovering the truth. Surely those are the qualities that editors of scientific journals should value. 

In reality, though, the biases of the editors (and the reviewers they call upon to evaluate submissions) exert a major influence on the collective output of entire fields. They select what gets published from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is conducted more broadly. Savvy researchers tailor their studies to maximize the likelihood that their work is accepted. I know this because I am one of them.

Here’s how it works.

The first thing the astute climate researcher knows is that his or her work should support the mainstream narrative—namely, that the effects of climate change are both pervasive and catastrophic and that the primary way to deal with them is not by employing practical adaptation measures like stronger, more resilient infrastructure, better zoning and building codes, more air conditioning—or in the case of wildfires, better forest management or undergrounding power lines—but through policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 

So in my recent Nature paper, which I authored with seven others, I focused narrowly on the influence of climate change on extreme wildfire behavior. Make no mistake: that influence is very real. But there are also other factors that can be just as or more important, such as poor forest management and the increasing number of people who start wildfires either accidentally or purposely. (A startling fact: over 80 percent of wildfires in the US are ignited by humans.)

In my paper, we didn’t bother to study the influence of these other obviously relevant factors. Did I know that including them would make for a more realistic and useful analysis? I did. But I also knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.

This type of framing, with the influence of climate change unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers. For example, in another recent influential Nature paper, scientists calculated that the two largest climate change impacts on society are deaths related to extreme heat and damage to agriculture. However, the authors never mention that climate change is not the dominant driver for either one of these impacts: heat-related deaths have been declining, and crop yields have been increasing for decades despite climate change. To acknowledge this would imply that the world has succeeded in some areas despite climate change—which, the thinking goes, would undermine the motivation for emissions reductions. 

This leads to a second unspoken rule in writing a successful climate paper. The authors should ignore—or at least downplay—practical actions that can counter the impact of climate change. If deaths due to extreme heat are decreasing and crop yields are increasing, then it stands to reason that we can overcome some major negative effects of climate change. Shouldn’t we then study how we have been able to achieve success so that we can facilitate more of it? Of course we should. But studying solutions rather than focusing on problems is simply not going to rouse the public—or the press. Besides, many mainstream climate scientists tend to view the whole prospect of, say, using technology to adapt to climate change as wrongheaded; addressing emissions is the right approach. So the savvy researcher knows to stay away from practical solutions.

Here’s a third trick: be sure to focus on metrics that will generate the most eye-popping numbers. Our paper, for instance, could have focused on a simple, intuitive metric like the number of additional acres that burned or the increase in intensity of wildfires because of climate change. Instead, we followed the common practice of looking at the change in risk of an extreme event—in our case, the increased risk of wildfires burning more than 10,000 acres in a single day.

This is a far less intuitive metric that is more difficult to translate into actionable information. So why is this more complicated and less useful kind of metric so common? Because it generally produces larger factors of increase than other calculations. To wit: you get bigger numbers that justify the importance of your work, its rightful place in Nature or Science, and widespread media coverage. 

Another way to get the kind of big numbers that will justify the importance of your research—and impress editors, reviewers, and the media—is to always assess the magnitude of climate change over centuries, even if that timescale is irrelevant to the impact you are studying. 

For example, it is standard practice to assess impacts on society using the amount of climate change since the industrial revolution, but to ignore technological and societal changes over that time. This makes little sense from a practical standpoint since societal changes in population distribution, infrastructure, behavior, disaster preparedness, etc., have had far more influence on our sensitivity to weather extremes than climate change has since the 1800s. This can be seen, for example, in the precipitous decline in deaths from weather and climate disasters over the last century. Similarly, it is standard practice to calculate impacts for scary hypothetical future warming scenarios that strain credibility while ignoring potential changes in technology and resilience that would lessen the impact. Those scenarios always make for good headlines.

A much more useful analysis would focus on changes in climate from the recent past that living people have actually experienced and then forecasting the foreseeable future—the next several decades—while accounting for changes in technology and resilience. 

In the case of my recent Nature paper, this would mean considering the impact of climate change in conjunction with anticipated reforms to forest management practices over the next several decades. In fact, our current research indicates that these changes in forest management practices could completely negate the detrimental impacts of climate change on wildfires. 

This more practical kind of analysis is discouraged, however, because looking at changes in impacts over shorter time periods and including other relevant factors reduces the calculated magnitude of the impact of climate change, and thus it weakens the case for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. 

Science journals—once considered the gold standard for truth—have succumbed to the confirmation biases of their editors and reviewers. (Astrid Riecken via Getty Images)

You might be wondering at this point if I’m disowning my own paper. I’m not. On the contrary, I think it advances our understanding of climate change’s role in day-to-day wildfire behavior. It’s just that the process of customizing the research for an eminent journal caused it to be less useful than it could have been. 

As to why I followed the formula despite my criticisms, the answer is simple: I wanted the research to be published in the highest profile venue possible. When I began the research for this paper in 2020, I was a new assistant professor needing to maximize my prospects for a successful career. When I had previously attempted to deviate from the formula, my papers were rejected out of hand by the editors of distinguished journals, and I had to settle for less prestigious outlets. To put it another way, I sacrificed contributing the most valuable knowledge for society in order for the research to be compatible with the confirmation bias of the editors and reviewers of the journals I was targeting. 

I left academia over a year ago, partially because I felt the pressures put on academic scientists caused too much of the research to be distorted. Now, as a member of a private nonprofit research center, The Breakthrough Institute, I feel much less pressure to mold my research to the preferences of prominent journal editors and the rest of the field. 

This means conducting the version of the research on wildfires that I believe adds much more practical value for real-world decisions: studying the impacts of climate change over relevant time frames and in the context of other important changes, like the number of fires started by people and the effects of forest management. The research may not generate the same clean story and desired headlines, but it will be more useful in devising climate change strategies.

But climate scientists shouldn’t have to exile themselves from academia to publish the most useful versions of their research. We need a culture change across academia and elite media that allows for a much broader conversation on societal resilience to climate. 

The media, for instance, should stop accepting these papers at face value and do some digging on what’s been left out. The editors of the prominent journals need to expand beyond a narrow focus that pushes the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. And the researchers themselves need to start standing up to editors, or find other places to publish. 

What really should matter isn’t citations for the journals, clicks for the media, or career status for the academics—but research that actually helps society.

Patrick Brown is a PhD climate scientist and co-director of the Climate and Energy Team at The Breakthrough Institute. Follow him on Twitter (now X) @PatrickTBrown31. And read Jamie Blackett’s Free Press piece to find out how European farmers are fighting climate change through innovation.

 

The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel

 

Sept. 2, 2023, 7:00 a.m. ET

Virginia Gabrielli

By Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/opinion/cosmology-crisis-webb-telescope.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

 

Dr. Frank is an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. Dr. Gleiser is a theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College.

Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope began beaming back from outer space its stunning images of planets and nebulae last year, astronomers, though dazzled, had to admit that something was amiss. Eight months later, based in part on what the telescope has revealed, it’s beginning to look as if we may need to rethink key features of the origin and development of the universe.

Launched at the end of 2021 as a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, the Webb, a tool with unmatched powers of observation, is on an exciting mission to look back in time, in effect, at the first stars and galaxies. But one of the Webb’s first major findings was exciting in an uncomfortable sense: It discovered the existence of fully formed galaxies far earlier than should have been possible according to the so-called standard model of cosmology.

According to the standard model, which is the basis for essentially all research in the field, there is a fixed and precise sequence of events that followed the Big Bang: First, the force of gravity pulled together denser regions in the cooling cosmic gas, which grew to become stars and black holes; then, the force of gravity pulled together the stars into galaxies.

The Webb data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.

It was not, unfortunately, an isolated incident. There have been other recent occasions in which the evidence behind science’s basic understanding of the universe has been found to be alarmingly inconsistent.

Take the matter of how fast the universe is expanding. This is a foundational fact in cosmological science — the so-called Hubble constant — yet scientists have not been able to settle on a number. There are two main ways to calculate it: One involves measurements of the early universe (such as the sort that the Webb is providing); the other involves measurements of nearby stars in the modern universe. Despite decades of effort, these two methods continue to yield different answers.

At first, scientists expected this discrepancy to resolve as the data got better. But the problem has stubbornly persisted even as the data have gotten far more precise. And now new data from the Webb have exacerbated the problem. This trend suggests a flaw in the model, not in the data.

Two serious issues with the standard model of cosmology would be concerning enough. But the model has already been patched up numerous times over the past half century to better conform with the best available data — alterations that may well be necessary and correct, but which, in light of the problems we are now confronting, could strike a skeptic as a bit too convenient.

Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong. It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science.

A potent mix of hard-won data and rarefied abstract mathematical physics, the standard model of cosmology is rightfully understood as a triumph of human ingenuity. It has its origins in Edwin Hubble’s discovery in the 1920s that the universe was expanding — the first piece of evidence for the Big Bang. Then, in 1964, radio astronomers discovered the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background, the “fossil” radiation reaching us from shortly after the universe began expanding. That finding told us that the early universe was a hot, dense soup of subatomic particles that has been continually cooling and becoming less dense ever since.

Over the past 60 years, cosmology has become ever more precise in its ability to account for the best available data about the universe. But along the way, to gain such a high degree of precision, astrophysicists have had to postulate the existence of components of the universe for which we have no direct evidence. The standard model today holds that “normal” matter — the stuff that makes up people and planets and everything else we can see — constitutes only about 4 percent of the universe. The rest is invisible stuff called dark matter and dark energy (roughly 27 percent and 68 percent).

Cosmic inflation is an example of yet another exotic adjustment made to the standard model. Devised in 1981 to resolve paradoxes arising from an older version of the Big Bang, the theory holds that the early universe expanded exponentially fast for a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This theory solves certain problems but creates others. Notably, according to most versions of the theory, rather than there being one universe, ours is just one universe in a multiverse — an infinite number of universes, the others of which may be forever unobservable to us not just in practice but also in principle.

There is nothing inherently fishy about these features of the standard model. Scientists often discover good indirect evidence for things that we cannot see, such as the hyperdense singularities inside a black hole. But in the wake of the Webb’s confounding data about galaxy formation, and the worsening problem with the Hubble constant, you can’t be blamed for starting to wonder if the model is out of joint.

A familiar narrative about how science works is often trotted out at this point to assuage anxieties. It goes like this: Researchers think they have a successful theory, but new data show it is flawed. Courageously rolling up their sleeves, the scientists go back to their blackboards and come up with new ideas that allow them to improve their theory by better matching the evidence.

It’s a story of both humility and triumph, and we scientists love to tell it. And it may be what happens in this case, too. Perhaps the solution to the problems the Webb is forcing us to confront will require only that cosmologists come up with a new “dark” something or other that will allow our picture of the universe to continue to match the best cosmological data.

There is, however, another possibility. We may be at a point where we need a radical departure from the standard model, one that may even require us to change how we think of the elemental components of the universe, possibly even the nature of space and time.

Cosmology is not like other sciences. It’s not like studying mice in a maze or watching chemicals boil in a beaker in a lab. The universe is everything there is; there’s only one and we can’t look at it from the outside. You can’t put it in a box on a table and run controlled experiments on it. Because it is all-encompassing, cosmology forces scientists to tackle questions about the very environment in which science operates: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of lawlike regularity, the role of the observers doing the observations.

These rarefied issues don’t come up in most “regular” science (though one encounters similarly shadowy issues in the science of consciousness and in quantum physics). Working so close to the boundary between science and philosophy, cosmologists are continually haunted by the ghosts of basic assumptions hiding unseen in the tools we use — such as the assumption that scientific laws don’t change over time.

But that’s precisely the sort of assumption we might have to start questioning in order to figure out what’s wrong with the standard model. One possibility, raised by the physicist Lee Smolin and the philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, is that the laws of physics can evolve and change over time. Different laws might even compete for effectiveness. An even more radical possibility, discussed by the physicist John Wheeler, is that every act of observation influences the future and even the past history of the universe. (Dr. Wheeler, working to understand the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, conceived of a “participatory universe” in which every act of observation was in some sense a new act of creation.)

It is not obvious, to say the least, how such revolutionary reconsiderations of our science might help us better understand the cosmological data that is flummoxing us. (Part of the difficulty is that the data themselves are shaped by the theoretical assumptions of those who collect them.) It would necessarily be a leap of faith to step back and rethink such fundamentals about our science.

But a revolution may end up being the best path to progress. That has certainly been the case in the past with scientific breakthroughs like Copernicus’s heliocentrism, Darwin’s theory of evolution and Einstein’s relativity. All three of those theories also ended up having enormous cultural influence — threatening our sense of our special place in the cosmos, challenging our intuition that we were fundamentally different than other animals, upending our faith in common sense ideas about the flow of time. Any scientific revolution of the sort we’re imagining would presumably have comparable reverberations in our understanding of ourselves.

The philosopher Robert Crease has written that philosophy is what’s required when doing more science may not answer a scientific question. It’s not clear yet if that’s what’s needed to overcome the crisis in cosmology. But if more tweaks and adjustments don’t do the trick, we may need not just a new story of the universe but also a new way to tell stories about it.

Adam Frank (@AdamFrank4) is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and the author of the forthcoming book “The Little Book of Aliens.” Marcelo Gleiser (@MGleiser) is a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College and the author of “The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future.”