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Whistle Stopper - Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion
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List Price: $27.00
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Manufacturer: Basic Books
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 215
EAN: 9780465003006
ISBN: 0465003001
Label: Basic Books
Manufacturer: Basic Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: 2008-05-05
Publisher: Basic Books
Studio: Basic Books
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Perfect for both spirituality and college-level science holdings
Comment: 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.
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Summary: Say hello to ambiguity
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: a work of genius and at times intellectual lassitude
Comment: 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 .
Customer Rating:
Summary: A tolerant atheist
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but...
Comment: 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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Editorial 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.
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