Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion | 
 enlarge | Author: Stuart Kauffman
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
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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 4 more reviews...
 A tolerant atheist June 25, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
Although the title of the book suggests its author is a theist, he is not but is not as hate-filled toward opponents as are such as Hitchens or Dennett. He is in fact "politically correct" to a fault in the sense of welcoming diversity, including that of religious views and even ethical standards.
This attitude is mainly expressed toward the end of the book, with great optimism of finding "a global ethic and reinvent the sacred for our planet, for all life, and for ourselves" (p.288). This in presumed absence of a God who would provide that ethic and that sacred.
In search of the ethic, the author, with other atheists, says that its standards evolve (the last, Darwinian, word frequent with him), downplaying the permanency of rules like the Ten Commandments. He cites (p.268) a "trenchant" book by Sam Harris, who turns the simple commandment "Thou shalt not steal" into an evil one applying to slaves as Hebrew property. The commandment like others, however, lists no qualifications and appears justified through the ages. In his discussion of diversity the author likewise never mentions the "golden rule" (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you), common to virtually all cultures. Furthermore, he doesn't indicate how the "global ethic", God absent, is to be implemented.
Turning to the title's Reinventing the Sacred, the author argues for again a substitute for the sacred of God. That his thinking is careless can be disclosed by some instances. Believing to illustrate "Popperian" falsifiability (p.147), which is to "falsify" a principle by finding a counterexample, he argues that a claim by Intelligent Design proponents about a biological entity as too complex for Darwinian evolution is falsified, because part of that entity was found amenable to evolution. But the complexity is not a principle. Darwinian evolution is. Therefore, instead, finding any organismic part not amenable to Darwinism would falsify Darwinism. Another example of his thoughtlessness is stating (p.184): "the parallel axiom of Euclid, that parallel lines never cross, was negated". That parallel lines never cross (meet) is their definition, which therefore cannot be negated.
As to his seeking a substitute for God, he tries to show that everything is not reducible to physics (p.5): "We live in a universe, biosphere, and human culture that are not only emergent but radically creative. We live in a world whose unfoldings we often cannot prevision, prestate, or predict..."
This "emergence" and "creativity" he contends is not merely not reducible to physics but because we can't "predict" it, it is beyond laws altogether, quoting a definition of "natural law" as "a compact description beforehand of the regularities of a process". But he confuses laws themselves, always applying, with unknown future events that conform to those laws. All physical events, however unpredictable, are known to obey physical laws, and the author's argument falls flat.
He musters other support, like quantum mechanics, which "did away with the determinism of Newton and Einstein" (p.15). This, however, does not distinguish the higher, "emergent", occurrences from the lower, "reductionist", ones, equally applying. He further speaks of a "propagating organization of processes" that are "right before our eyes" (p.88). The first quoted, confounding, phrase though does not seem to clearly bring before our eyes what it refers to. It can be understood as about the organism in its self-propagation.
And here is something really "right before our eyes" and not taken account of, as I have tried immodestly to call to attention in reviews here and in my occasionally mentioned book. What is persistently overlooked is that the question of whether biological occurrences are only subject to Darwinian processes resulting from aimless natural forces does not hinge merely on biological structure but on biological activities. Organisms are obviously constantly and throughout acting with the aim of survival, namely not aimlessly. This translates also to their structure, for their aim of survival, of self-preservation, guides their development from conception to full maturity in giving them the means by which to survive. That is to say, Darwinian randomness regarding living organisms is seen false, with the opposite, their goal-directedness in every aspect, true. That there must be a coordinating force with that aim of the organism's survival follows, call it a higher power or other.
An additional observation I might make is that the reviewed author's repeated contention that "The creativity in nature should truly be God enough for us" (p.100) does not comport with the universal yearning for God as of concern for our interests and salvation.
Interesting, but... June 5, 2008
17 out of 22 found this review helpful
The main premise of this book is that the traditional God of the Bible is not an accurate view of what God, or a god, actually is. Kauffman tries to reinvent, just as the title states, our view of God to be the 'creativity' the universe possesses through "emergence." He then goes into several examples of emergence, starting with life itself and going through economics, quantum mechanics, etc. For example, one of his main points is that life cannot be reduced to physics, nor can the basic principles of laws of physics be reversed to 'obtain' or deduce life itself. I believe he is accurate, based on our knowledge, at least up until this point.
I do believe, however, that his premise that the real god of the universe is nothing more than this 'emergence', is nothing more than philosophy. Kauffman does his best to show this scientifically, at which he fails miserably. The truth is that emergence itself is a touchy subject, at best, and assumes we know everything there is to know about a phenomenon. Therefore, his so-called scientific 'evidence' for rejecting the God of the Bible is nothing but opinion or perhaps scientifically oriented philosophy. But, admittedly, his discussion of the topic of emergence (the inability of certain phenomena to be derived from basic physics) is quite interesting. It actually lead to more questions than answers, for me, though.
 Is God the cause or the effect? June 3, 2008
9 out of 13 found this review helpful
Much of the first half of the book is a review of concepts that were introduced in Kauffman's earlier books, 'Investigations' and 'At Home in the Universe'.
Kauffman transitions from interesting science about evolution, in the beginning, to the proposal of a new religion in the end.
Kauffman again brings forth his notion of 'order for free', which has always perplexed me because life cannot exist without sunlight and, every second of every day, the Sun fuses nearly 7x 10^8 tons of hydrogen to create the energy to sustain life. That doesn't sound 'free' to me.
As mentioned in the book, the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time. The state of the universe at the time of the Big Bang had to be it's most highly ordered state because, ever since the Big Bang event, the universe has been expanding, and order has been giving way to entropy.
The fundamental question that is avoided in this book is "Where did all of this primordial order come from?"
Is it not logical that the 'isolated system' be expanded to include something outside of our understanding of the universe to provide the original order?
Kauffman is adamant to discard a transcendent God, i.e. one that transcends time and space as we know it. Rather, he proposes that God is in the 'effects' of the universe where life, the biosphere, consciousness and the economy emerge from processes that are not reducible to physics.
The book covers topics from autocatalysis, Bose-Einstein condensates, and the Schrodinger equation to ethics, morals and religion.
While I do not agree with all of it, I recommend the book as it will provide you with a smorgasbord of thought.
Less inspiring than expected May 31, 2008
2 out of 13 found this review helpful
The title of this book is misleading. It makes the reader think that Dr. Kauffman will offer a coherent and inspiring link between science and religion. In fact, however, the endeavour is mostly that of descriving several gaps, misconceptions or misguided hopes of science for which a never clearly defined concept of natural creativity is proposed as a solution.
Accepting the Sacred May 19, 2008
14 out of 19 found this review helpful
Richard Kauffman is always interesting to read. His earlier books are much more technical than the one under review. In Reinventing the Sacred he tackles philosophical problems rather than science. His scientific background gives him a platform on which to build a spiritual view of the world without invoking religion or transcendent gods. His attack on reductionism reminds me very much of the work of Arthur Koestler. Though Koestler was not the scientist Kauffman is, his theories on the need to go beyond reductionism are very similar. Kauffman does a good job of putting these ideas into a scientific paradigm - emergence. I only wish he weren't so human oriented. The universe is much larger than humanity, and man's place in it is not important, except to man himself. But the book is a wonderful read and, indeed, Kauffman does follow in the tradition of Spinoza/Einstein.
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