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Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion Hardcover – May 6, 2008

by Stuart A. Kauffman (Author)

61 customer reviews

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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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kauffman, a complexity theorist at the University of Calgary, sets a huge task for himself in this provocative but difficult book: to find common ground between religion and science by redefining God as not a supernatural Creator but as the natural creativity in the universe. That creativity, says Kauffman, defies scientific assumptions that the biosphere's evolution and human activity can be reduced to physics and are fully governed by natural laws. Kauffman (At Home in the Universe) espouses emergence, the theory of how complex systems self-organize into entities that are far more than the sum of their parts. To bolster the idea of this ceaselessly creative and unpredictable nature, Kauffman draws examples from the biosphere, neurobiology and economics. His definition of God as the fully natural, awesome, creativity that surrounds us is unlikely to convince those with a more traditional take on religion. Similarly, Kauffman's detailed discussions of quantum mechanics to explain emergence are apt to lose all but the most technically inclined readers. Nonetheless, Kauffman raises important questions about the self-organizing potential of natural systems that deserve serious consideration. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Stuart A. Kauffman is the founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics and a professor of biological sciences, physics, and astronomy at the University of Calgary. He is Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow, and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His books include The Origins of Order and At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. He lives in Calgary, Canada.

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; 1st Edition edition (May 6, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0465003001
ISBN-13: 978-0465003006
Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 61 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #764,662 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4185 in History & Philosophy of Science
- #1269 in Science & Religion
- #24237 in Philosophy (Books)

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Perplexed

May 10, 2008

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This is a hard book. A work of generative genius that is almost a sustained prose poem on the subject of how reductionism is not really a good way of looking at how the universe works.I found the early part of the book which shows how the operation of biological processes cannot be determined by or derived from the laws of physics understandable and convincing. This is his home territory from his work on autocatlytic sets described in his previous book At Home in the Universe that I really liked. But then Kauffman proceeds to build less convincingly and somewhat more opaquely a super structure on top of this to accomodate culture, the economy, consciousness and indeed the role of quantum theory in consciousness. In this process he frequently lost me at the detailed level, even when directionally his arguments made sense at the macro level: they were interesting and suggestive, but they were like a large flip chart report out of a brainstorm and the clarity of understanding that should have been central to his case was lost. And like a poem he repeated his mantra of the laws of physics not predicting biological processes, adding a little more to the chorus each time. I suspect Kauffman's genius and fast processing brain intimidated his editors, who were simply not tough enough with him. If perhaps 50 times during this book, they had said to him: 'Stuart exactly what do you mean here? Tell us and we will put it in words that your audience will understand'. Then this book would have reached its full potential. My editor uses the wonderful term 'muddy': too much of this book is muddy.It's great interesting mud but mud is mud. His closing pleas for a different take on ethics are heartfelt, appealing but are not as well connected with the foregoing framework as they could easily have been. Ultimately I preferred his previous book At Home in the Universe. But hard as this book is, it is worth some trouble and maybe like Gregory Bateson's work, someone will write a commentary on this book that makes it all clear. And yes ultimately I believe he has the beginnings of the reinvention of the sacred in his sights. He did begin to shift how I see things, and that was worth the journey.

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Wayne Lynn

Searching for meaning in a reductionist world

March 12, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I respect and admire what Kauffman is trying to do with this book. I think it will be a while before we learn to appreciate with awe and wonder this biosphere called Earth and the universe in which it resides. Well done though.

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Jaume Puigbo Vila

Some frontier science with a goodwill message

September 6, 2008

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

"Faced with a new mutation in an organism, or a fundamental change'FITNESS-- in its living conditions, the biologist is frequently in no position whatever to predict its future prospects. He has to wait and see. For instance, the hairy mammoth seems to have been an admirable animal, intelligent and well-accoutered. Now that it is extinct, we try to understand why it failed. I doubt that any biologist thinks he could have predicted that failure. Fitness and survival are by nature estimates of past performance." George Wald, Nobel Prize winner.

This book has two main general ideas: One is that reductionism, although an extremely successful philosophy of science, does not suffice to explain reality. The other is that the ceaseless creativity of the universe, that part that escapes reductionism, should be revered as "the sacred". Kauffman calls this "God" in an effort of "rapprochement" between agnostics and religious people, since he envisages a future global civilization.
The first idea is developed mainly in the context of evolution in the chapter titled "The Nonreducibility of Biology to Physics", although some physicists, such as Laughlin, are also mentioned, temperature being a classical example of emergent physical phenomena. Kauffman claims that evolution cannot be predicted and, as we see in the citation above, he is not alone. He makes similar claims for the economy, human mind, human history, our legal system, etc.
The second idea is not that new either and Kauffman himself admits that his idea of God is similar to Spinoza's.
Kauffman tries to search for some general laws for emergent phenomena and he hints some of them, including some mathematics of graph theory and random Boolean networks and the use of some concepts such as "minimal molecular autonomous agent". He says, for example: "This raises the fascinating but unproven possibility that , due to natural selection, life achieves a maximization of the product of total work done multiplied by the diversity of work done by being dynamically critical. Then cells would be maximally efficient in carrying out the widest variety of tasks with the maximum total work accomplished, given energy resources available".
The author also suggests that the origin of life might have been systems of autocatalytic molecules and thinks that "self-organization, order for free, is as much a part of evolution and natural selection as historically frozen accidents".
The most controversial chapter, as Kauffman readily admits, is the one about the quantum brain in which he takes the idea of Penrose, which has not had many followers so far. Kauffman believes that the human mind is not algorithmic. Euler's creation of topology by solving the Könisberg's bridges problem is an example, according to Kauffman, of the non algorithmic operation of the human brain. He ads that computations are devoid of meaning, they are purely syntactic. This flies in the face of the strong artificial intelligence theory of consciousness. Kauffman says that meaning derives from agency. Although a controversial idea, a quantum brain, however, would help to solve such hard problems as free will since quantum mechanics is an acausal theory.
The author believes that the conscious mind is a persistently poised quantum coherent-decoherent system, forever propagating quantum coherent behavior, yet forever also decohering to classical behavior. Recent studies seem to prove that chlorophyll maintains a quantum coherent state for a very long time compared to chemical-bond-vibration frequencies. So may be this hypothesis of the quantum brain is not so far fetched.
The last chapters are dedicated to ethics and to an effort to reach out to religious people and Kauffman is aware that convergence of agnostics and religious people can take generations and that we may never fully agree.

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Amazon Customer

Most important ideas in modern science philosophy

July 7, 2019

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Goes well with Kauffman’s later work. Deep but understandable. He changes long-standing paradigms.

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