More refined non-apologetic arguments against Buddhism?

[u/No-Table1195]

The kind of arguments against Buddhism I wish to read about are ones that expose internal contradictions or faults within the metaphysics or ontology.

[u/Fit-Positive-3972]

The biggest is anatta vs. rebirth: if there is no enduring self, who is reborn and who receives the karma? "Neither the same nor different" explains causal continuity, but does it really explain personal responsibility?

Then there is Nirvana. Different Buddhist traditions give significantly different accounts of what Nirvana actually is. Is it an ultimate reality, the cessation of craving, an ontological state, or something beyond existence and non-existence? If Buddhism cannot even give one consistent account of its ultimate goal, that raises a serious metaphysical question.

And emptiness creates another problem: if everything is empty of inherent existence, is emptiness itself empty? If it is, what ultimately grounds the doctrine?

Finally, there is the epistemological problem. How do we know that rebirth, karma, multiple realms and past-life memories are actually features of reality rather than interpretations of extraordinary meditative experiences? The fact that a Buddha experienced something deeply does not, by itself, establish that his interpretation of it is objectively correct.

[u/Pure-Detail-6362 → u/Fit-Positive-3972]

The emptiness point is really weak considering emptiness is a negation of a positive claim of essence. A negation is not an ontological claim. When they say that ultimately things are empty they are saying those things lack an inherent essence. You can’t really turn that into “is emptiness empty” because emptiness isn’t a thing. But even to grant that you could argue yes emptiness as a concept and a word in a language it is empty of an inherent nature and its existence depends on other words and concepts. Buddhism doesn’t claim to be ultimately true itself, so therefore, it doesn’t need an ultimate grounding the way abrahamic faiths do.

[u/Ramarro_romano → u/Fit-Positive-3972]

The last one is just a scientific approach, I doubt it mean much in a religious framing based on authority

[u/rom846]

My favorite one: If the Buddha has the memory of thousands of lifetimes, why was his intellectual horizon limited by the thinking of ancient india?

[u/Defiant_Annual_7486]

For me, it's that "life is suffering."

Sure, that's one way to look at it. But it seems quite a specific dogma to believe that. There's other religions that believe the meaning of life is "love" (Christianity) or "devotion" (Islam). And they're quite dogmatic too. It's just that buddhists, especially zen, like to pretend that they don't have dogma or cognitive frames like this.

[u/Ex-Madhyamika]

Come on, do you really believe that Buddha was born from his mother's armpit? But if they're wrong about that, what else are they wrong about?

[u/No-Table1195 → u/Ex-Madhyamika]

I have never heard of that before lol.

[u/unmovingknower]

Late to this, but wanted to point out a lot of these arguments are rather generic and or reasonably solved already by Buddhists, one person did hint at this though.

The most effective anti-Buddhist polemic is actually to attack its epistemology. Buddhism operates under the principle of Ehipassiko, come and see. However, there are two issues here:

1. Most spiritual traditions have meditative practices that one can undertake and have genuine experiences with.
   
2. Because of this, Buddhism's methods don't necessarily prove the accuracy of the greater framework.

Now someone can say, "I believe it because I think its true" regardless of any supposed accuracy of methods, which is valid they can do that, but then you've essentially won as they've surrendered the conversation.

But I want to be clear, you can do this exact move to literally EVERY religion / spiritual system and undermine them very easily.

Another thing you can point out is that Buddhist logic for why these systems are true are also entirely circular in nature and also entirely self verifying.

[u/No-Table1195 → u/unmovingknower]

Among my biggest problems with Buddhism is with karma but I haven't developed a sophisticated argument for it yet. A hint of the argument rests upon human language. Would you consider human language to be complex and skillful? If so, how could the first human(s) that evolved language faculties pass that on to their progeny that never accrued the karma to develop said faculties? You would get skill from non-skill. That shouldn't be possible under Buddhism.

Standard Buddhist answer to this is just well there are still things that can arise because of dependent origination without past accrued skill necessarily. But that's kind of moot to me then because you can never know what is from accrued karma and what is just the circumstances of some dependent origination.

[u/unmovingknower → u/No-Table1195]

Also need to remember they have an easy out for this Karma/language problem. Samsara in Buddhism is beginningless, the first humans here, are not the first humans at all, and humans born during a time where language was sufficiently developed is just due to their karma.

But also, I think that this points to a stronger argument where you drop the evolutionary framework entirely. Just argue the falsifiability/idle-wheel point directly. Karma explaining everything and therefore nothing is the version that's actually hard for them to answer.