Is God the cause or the effect?

books:


	• Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion Stuart Kauffman Basic Books, 2008 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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Is God the cause or the effect?

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.

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Perplexed

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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Interesting, but...

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.

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Less inspiring than expected

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

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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reviews: page 1, 2

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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