Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion | 
 enlarge | Author: Stuart Kauffman
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
List Price: $27.00
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Sales Rank: 1977
Media: Hardcover
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Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0465003001
Dewey Decimal Number: 215
EAN: 9780465003006
ASIN: 0465003001
Publication Date: May 5, 2008
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Product Description
Consider the woven integrated complexity of a living cell after 3.8 billion years of evolution. Is it more awe-inspiring to suppose that a transcendent God fashioned the cell, or to consider that the living organism was created by the evolving biosphere? As the eminent complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman explains in this ambitious and groundbreaking new book, people who do not believe in God have largely lost their sense of the sacred and the deep human legitimacy of our inherited spirituality. For those who believe in a Creator God, no science will ever disprove that belief. In Reinventing the Sacred, Kauffman argues that the science of complexity provides a way to move beyond reductionist science to something new: a unified culture where we see God in the creativity of the universe, biosphere, and humanity. Kauffman explains that the ceaseless natural creativity of the world can be a profound source of meaning, wonder, and further grounding of our place in the universe. His theory carries with it a new ethic for an emerging civilization and a reinterpretation of the divine. He asserts that we are impelled by the imperative of life itself to live with faith and courage-and the fact that we do so is indeed sublime. Reinventing the Sacred will change the way we all think about the evolution of humanity, the universe, faith, and reason.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
A rewarding challenge July 25, 2008
This is one of the most difficult 'popular science' books I've ever read. But as much as my brain meat hurts while my neurons are busy trying to cram everything into their speculated quantum semi-coherent computational system, I'm really enjoying the lasting effects of digesting Dr. Kauffman's perspective.
I haven't quite finished yet; I'm on the philosophical payload at the end of the book right now, and as a humanities guy who works with scientists I couldn't agree more with Kauffman's assessment of the relationship between the two fields. We've gained a lot over the past few centuries by parsing and segregating our fields of study & endeavor. Books like this demonstrate that we've reached a point in the evolution of intellect that re-integrating, on some level, will well serve to push our understanding of the world even further.
On the Limits of Science and 'Faith' July 23, 2008
I will start by saying that this is one of the most inspiring reads I have had in a while on the borderlands between 'faith' and science. A difficult read; at times a perplexing read--yet Kauffman always returns to the point he is trying to make, and each time adds something to the offer. I will qualify this accolade by saying that Kauffman only ever gets to the trailhead in this book; he doesn't define "the sacred" very articulately at any point in the book, and he doesn't delve very deeply into his idea of "God." Yet the journey he takes you on is well-worth the effort it takes to follow his erudite analyses of cosmological, evolutionary, cultural and even economic case studies in "emergence."
He uses these case studies to urge that we need a new concept of God, and a new concept of the sacred. Kauffman is trying, here, to build a bridge between religious and scientific worldviews, and attempts to do this by embracing important concepts from the religious traditions of our species. He makes the very resonant point that "new religions" have always built new temples upon the sacred sites of older religions and reinterpreted them. He urges that a scientific understanding of "the sacred" should be built upon earlier religious concepts, and not reject the traditions of the past out of hand. He is for re-interpreting the ideas of "God" and "the sacred," not rejecting them as anathema to the scientific worldview. This is a courageous step; one that may do some good toward healing the rift between science and religions in our culture.
Kauffman has taken some very important steps, here, I think, and has given other thinkers new platforms from which to launch out into deeper explorations of the "sacred" dimension of reality from a naturalistic, scientific point of view.
 Perfect for both spirituality and college-level science holdings July 10, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
REINVENTING THE SACRED: A NEW VIEW OF SCIENCE, REASON AND RELIGION comes from a pioneer in the field of complexity theory, and here offers a radical new world view: that of the natural universe as a ceaseless creativity which is unpredictable - and which should be considered divine in itself. This concept of 'sacred' can be recreated, Kauffman writes - and his title shows how to refine a view of God into a different kind of system entirely. Perfect for both spirituality and college-level science holdings, it offers a challenging new way of perceiving spirituality and deity.
Say hello to ambiguity July 10, 2008
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
The pretense is that emergence provides an unambiguous account of evolution. I will argue that ambiguity remains, even after a close read of Kauffman's "Reinventing the Sacred."
First note that alone natural selection is found to be a fixture that operates on a space-time fabric that is impacted by emergence. Why do I write this? Well, because natural selection is context dependent; i.e., random mutations and the associated phenotypic bio-forms are represented by a presumed sample space; and because the success of natural selection depends on a fitness landscape. It is emergence that is found associated with "ceaseless creativity" that is closer to being context independent, but ambiguity betrays this interpretation. Nevertheless, natural selection is found beholding to emergence and the unspecified context that lurks behind the ambiguity. Therefore, natural selection is provisional, and indeed, the space-time fabric can be coopted by an agency that turns natural selection into artificial selection. Gone now is the concept of the "blind watchmaker," invented by Richard Dawkins. And say hello to ambiguity again. Only a context independent natural selection would permit Dawkins's leap to an evolution that lacks foresight, otherwise Dawkins cannot speak for the context. Emergence provides a loop-hole that neither Darwin or Dawkins anticipated. This loop-hole is present because emergence carries its own ambiguity, as we will see.
Kauffman's struggles with this apparent tension. Kauffman (page 32) writes: "I have spent decades muttering at Darwin that there may be powerful principles of self-organization at work in evolution as well, principles that Darwin knew nothing about and might well have delighted in." Kauffman (page 33) then writes: "With one sweeping idea he [Darwin] made sense of the geological record of fossils, the similarity of organisms on islands to those on nearby major land masses, and many other facts. This is the hallmark of outstanding science. I say this because many who believe in the Abrahamic God still deny evolution and attempt to justify their denial on scientific grounds. This is a fruitless exercise." But the fact remains that natural selection is nothing without emergence and the unspecified context that Kauffman fails to represent completely.
Kauffman lauds the "natural" God that is found associated with the apparent "ceaseless creativity," even while he rejects the "Creator God." I think the Creator God is Kauffman's abstraction that sees a God that is held separate from God's creation, perhaps like the presumed Abrahamic God that created the universe in six days and left us to our own devices. No doubt that some outspoken fundamentalists will see God this way. However, it seems unreasonable to say that God is separate from God's creation, in my view. Christians pray to God, and live by the golden rule, and this can only imply that God is again united with God's creation. Moreover, mystics from all religions report being united with God, and they report a non-dual awareness, and this is far from Kauffman's Creator God. The concept of "natural" in Kauffman's naturalistic God is equally ambiguous given that ambiguity cannot be removed from emergence. A good definition of "natural" depends on what is non-natural, and if "non-natural" is poorly defined then so is "natural" poorly defined.
Now Kauffman is a pretty smart fellow, and so it can't be that he is completely blind-sided by these issues. He is smart to point to L. Wittgenstein's "language game" and C.S. Peirce's "semiotics." Kauffman notes that teleological language (stated motivation) cannot be reduced to happenings (physical causal events); otherwise, we are left with a language game, like changing red to blue, and blue to red, and saying nothing useful. Kauffman notes that meaning cannot be removed from agency. He tells us that Darwin's theory cannot be reduced to physical laws that govern particles. Kauffman completely rejects reductionism, because things that come with meaning are found emerging in a way that cannot be denied. He writes that emergence must be "partially lawless," presumably coming from a criticality near chaos and order. But Kauffman only admits that this emergence is ambiguous enough to call intelligent design non-science, before stopping short.
Kauffman (page 146) writes: "Intelligent design is based on probability arguments. It says that the flagellar motor, for example, is too improbable to have arisen by chance. It is irreducibly complex and so improbable that there must be a designer. But we saw above that we cannot make probability statements about Darwinian preadaptations, for we do not know beforehand the full configuration space. ID simply cannot compute that a given irreducibly complex entity such as the flagellar motor could not have come about by a sequence of Darwinian preadaptations in reasonable time. Its probability calculations are entirely suspect. The sample space is, again, not known beforehand."
Darwin's theory did not anticipate life's extreme cooption of prior adaptations, a cooption that creates a novel function that is found emerging from the criticality. Darwin only predicted slow and gradual modifications of existing functionality, this is something Kuaffman corrects. However, it is this cooption that is found necessary, otherwise Darwin's theory would have found its refutation in the face of extreme cooption. Nearly all our very few 25,000 genes have been coopted from far distant ancestors that were clueless of humanity! Why has this evidence of teleology been ignored? Because what emerges from the criticality is open to ambiguity: representing emergence by a series of Darwinian preadaptations (followed by mindless opportunism) is ambiguous as noting the irreducible complexity of the apparent cooption that points to recognition. The ambiguity is present because evidence for recognition gets reinterpreted as a representation. We could note that this ambiguity remains irreducibly complex within language use, and this is enough to save both intelligent design and Darwin's theory as two aspects of one evolution.
Cooption is the discovery of new meaning from prior functions, and therefore, it is cooption that is subjected to Wittgenstein's language game. Darwin's theory fails (or is saved) for the very same reason that intelligent design fails (or is saved), because what feeling emerges from the criticality is subject to ambiguity. This is the ramification of the context dependency of natural selection. Without something connecting natural selection to concrete reality, natural selection generates only a series of happenings and the question of agency slips quietly away.
Now if you think I am being overly critical of Kauffman's book, think again. It is worth five stars. Kauffman at least pointed to the criticality from which evolution and reality emerged, yet he has not publically admitted that Darwin's theory is found beholding to the same criticality. His mistake is small, even as he limits his treatment (of the evolution war) to representations (transitions in state space) and ignores recognition; note, however, that Kauffman correctly treats recognition in his treatement of mind (chapter 12). I only note that the same criticality relates to our words, their meaning, it relates to our motives and desires, and the criticality is the doorway from which tomorrow (Kauffman's "adjacent possible") will come; I think Kauffman agrees with this. Kant called the criticality the "third antinomy," the apparent conflict between natural law and freedom, and it signifies the subject-object unity given by Kant's "synthetic." We can only explore the antinomy by way of a transcendental idealism; a kind invented by Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, or Husserl. The Chinese refer to the criticality as the Tao, and the early Greeks call it the Logos. The Christians call it the Holy Spirit. The criticality comes with a middle term, and it is strangely felt: so much so that Kauffman reinvents the sacred, and refers to a naturalistic God. Everything else is a language game, so pick your flavor.
a work of genius and at times intellectual lassitude July 8, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
There were times reading this book, I thought it deserved five stars, at other times two or three. There were sections of sheer genius and others of intellectual meandering. To fully appreciate this book, it would take expertise in philosophy, mathematics, computer science, physics, genetics, economics, and neuroscience. Very few people can claim these, including myself, a neurologist. The more logically rigorous sections were a bit ponderous, but worth the time.
The main theme of the book is that nature is endlessly creative and it is through this creativity that we experience the sacred. His first point is that nature is non-reductionistic, that is we can't use elementaty physical laws, as Laplace's demon does, to derive the complexity of the universe. These more complex laws are emergent and nonergodic. He then applies these principles to explain a variety of phenomena, including the origin of life, genetic diversity, markets, and even consciousness. He concludes the book paying homage to the spititual gifts of pantheistic creationism. In this comprehensive endeavor, he sometimes falls short.
His arguments for eschewing reductionism are generally well taken. He invokes Godel's incompleteness theorem and quantum physics to bolster his argument. Outside of non-Boolean non-commutative mathematical attempts to eliminate the randomness of quantum physics, I see no other objections. On the other hand, I see it as the duty of any self respecting scientist to carry redutionism as far as it can go. It is not clear to me how Kauffman determines when a system is truly emrgent. Even when he runs his computer simulations to the point of criticality, he can't be sure he isn't missing some reductionist principle. Throughout the book he will look at a complex system and muse almost in awe, without any further argument, that it is non-reductionistic. It reminds me of Paley after staring at a watch arguing that like natural systems infer a creator. In Kauffman's case it is nature. Unlike his fellow pantheist, Spinoza, Kauffman believes in free will. He gets to this point by having the mind control the quantum decoherence process. Having almost no basis to make this statement, his genius still shines through, presaging the first human attempt (recently published) to control this process through the phase qbit. It puzzles me why Kauffman treats consciousness as a "sacred" entity that could not possibly emerge from classical physics. Some of his much simpler networks generate emergent rules. I don't understand why Kauffman believes that one hundred billion neurons and one trillion glial cells could not possibly lead to consciousness in light of the fact all neurons, and now recntly discovered, some glial cells, generate action potentials.
Ulimately, the question should be asked, does Kauffman's view of nature reinvent the sacred? Yes, if awe, beauty, and creativity are only considered. This view is probably not too comforting for the average person in times of despair or as he or she contempates his or her own mortality .
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