Natural Creation
By
Stuart Kauffman
New Scientist, May 7, 2008
Edited by Andy Ross
With globalization, a global civilisation is beginning to emerge.
Our diverse cultures are being crushed together. One response is a retreat into
fundamentalisms. Clearly there is an urgent need for some new thinking.
That is why I wrote Reinventing the Sacred. For those of faith, such an
enterprise is sacrilegious. Those who are not religious remember Galileo and
want no part of a faith that demands retreat from the truth.
The process of reinventing the sacred requires a fresh understanding of science
that takes into account complexity theory and the ideas of emergence. It will
require a shift from reductionism, the way of thinking that still dominates our
scientific world view.
This world view has two features. One is determinism. As the physicist Steven
Weinberg put it, the explanatory arrows all point downwards from societies to
people to organs to cells to biochemistry to chemistry and ultimately to
physics.
Many physicists are coming to doubt the adequacy of reductionism. I am with
them: I do not believe that the evolution of biosphere, economy and human
culture are derivable from or reducible to physics.
The second transition in our view of science is based on Darwinian
pre-adaptations. A pre-adaptation is a property of an organism that is of no
selective value in the present environment, but might become of selective value
in some different environment and therefore be selected.
Could we enumerate ahead of time all possible Darwinian pre-adaptations for all
organisms alive now, or even just for humans? If the answer is no, this breaks
the spell cast by Galileo, that everything in the universe is describable by a
natural law. If a natural law is a compact description of the regularities of a
process, there seems to be no natural law sufficient to describe Darwinian
pre-adaptations.
So the unfolding of the universe appears to be partially beyond natural law. In
its place is a ceaseless creativity, with no supernatural creator. If, as a
result of this creativity, we cannot know what will happen, then reason is an
insufficient guide to living our lives. We must use reason, emotion, intuition,
all that our evolution has brought us.
To believe that the biosphere came into being on its own, with no creator, and
partially lawlessly, is a proposition so stunning, so worthy of awe and respect,
that I am happy to accept this natural creativity in the universe as a
reinvention of "God". From it, we can build a sense of the sacred that
encompasses all life and the planet itself.
Breaking the Galilean Spell
Edited by Andy Ross
My aim is to reinvent the sacred. I present a new view of a fully
natural God and of the sacred, based on a new, emerging scientific worldview.
This new worldview reaches further than science itself and invites a new view of
God, the sacred, and ourselves — ultimately including our science, art, ethics,
politics, and spirituality.
This is not the outlook science has presented up to now. Our current scientific
worldview, derived from Galileo, Newton, and their followers, is the foundation
of modern secular society, itself the child of the Enlightenment. At base, our
contemporary perspective is reductionist.
Reductionism has led to very powerful science. One has only to think of
Einstein’s general relativity and the current standard model in quantum physics,
the twin pillars of twentieth century physics. Molecular biology is a product of
reductionism, as is the Human Genome Project.
The reductionist worldview allows no meanings, no values, no doings. It led the
existentialists in the mid-twentieth century to try to find value in an absurd,
meaningless universe, in our human choices. But to the reductionist, the
existentialists’ arguments are as void as the spacetime in which their particles
move.
Biology and its evolution cannot be reduced to physics alone but stand in their
own right. Life, and with it agency, came naturally to exist in the universe.
With agency came values, meaning, and doing, all of which are as real in the
universe as particles in motion. Thus, life, agency, value, and doing are real
in the universe. This stance is called emergence.
Even deeper than emergence and its challenge to reductionism in this new
scientific worldview is what I call breaking the Galilean spell. Galileo rolled
balls down incline planes and obtained a universal law of motion. Newton
followed, setting the stage for all of modern science. Perhaps my most radical
scientific claim is that we can and must break the Galilean spell. Evolution of
the biosphere, human economic life, and human history are partially
indescribable by natural law.
This web of life, the most complex system we know of in the universe, breaks no
law of physics, yet is partially lawless, ceaselessly creative. So, too, are
human history and human lives. This creativity is stunning, awesome, and worthy
of reverence. One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless
creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures.
The ancient Jews and Greeks split the ancient Western world. The Jews were the
best historians of the ancient world, stubbornly commemorating the situated
history of a people and their universal Abrahamic God. In contrast, Greek
thought was universalist and sought natural laws. The Greeks were the first
scientists in the West.
We need a place for our spirituality, and a Creator God is one such place. I
hold that it is we who have invented God, to serve as our most powerful symbol.
It is our choice how wisely to use our own symbol to orient our lives and our
civilizations. I believe we can reinvent the sacred. We can invent a global
ethic, in a shared space, safe to all of us, with one view of God as the natural
creativity in the universe.
I propose a worldview beyond reductionism, in which we are members of a universe
of ceaseless creativity in which life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness,
and the full richness of human action have emerged. But even beyond this
emergence, there are grounds to radically alter our understanding of what
science itself appears able to tell us.
Biological evolution by Darwin’s heritable variation and natural selection is
emergent in two senses. The first is epistemological, meaning that we cannot
from physics deduce upwards to the evolution of the biosphere. The second is
ontological, concerning what entities are real in the universe. For the
reductionist, only particles in motion are ontologically real entities. But
organisms have causal powers of their own, and therefore are emergent real
entities in the universe.
At a higher level, the human economy cannot be reduced to physics. The way the
diversity of the economy has grown from perhaps a hundred to a thousand goods
and services fifty thousand years ago to tens of billions of goods and services
today, in what I call an expanding economic web, depends on the very structure
of that web, how it creates new economic niches for ever new goods and services
that drive economic growth.
The evolution of the universe, biosphere, the human economy, human culture, and
human action is profoundly creative. We do not know beforehand what adaptations
may arise in the evolution of the biosphere. Nor do we know beforehand many of
the economic evolutions that will arise. This unpredictability may exist on many
levels.
My claim is not simply that we lack sufficient knowledge or wisdom to predict
the future evolution of the biosphere, economy, or human culture. It is that
these things are inherently beyond prediction. Not even the most powerful
computer imaginable can make a compact description in advance of the
regularities of these processes. There is no such description beforehand.
Some Jesuit cosmologists look out into the vast universe and reason that God
cannot know, from multiple possibilities, where life will arise. This Abrahamic
God is neither omniscient nor omnipotent, although outside of space and time.
Such a God is a Generator God who does not know or control what thereafter
occurs in the universe. Such a view is not utterly different from one in which
God is our honored name for the creativity in the natural universe itself.
We desperately need a global ethic that is richer than our mere concern about
ourselves as consumers. We need a global ethic to undergird the global
civilization that is emerging as our traditions evolve together.
We need to find a new scientific worldview that enables us to reinvent the
sacred.
Excerpted from:
> see Stuart's 5-min video intro
Stuart A. Kauffman is a theoretical biologist and complexity theory pioneer
and originally trained as a doctor. He is head of the Institute for
Biocomplexity and Informatics, University of Calgary, in Canada. He is also an
emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, a
MacArthur Fellow, and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
From the Amazon Customer Reviews:
Leslie Ann Keller:
This is a fabulous book. Stuart Kauffman's ideas are powerful and
sensible, above all else, inspiring.
I do not have the technical background to critique his ideas and I look forward
to reviews written by those who do. However, Kauffman's essential premise — that
which is sacred is the immeasurable, unfathomable creativity of the universe —
resonates at a deep level.
The space of all possibilities, this is what Kauffman celebrates. I love his
enthusiasm.
Historied:
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
autocatalytic sets described in his previous book. But then Kauffman proceeds to
build less convincingly and somewhat more opaquely a superstructure on top of
this to accommodate culture, the economy, consciousness and indeed the role of
quantum theory in consciousness.
Too much of this book is muddy. 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. But maybesomeone will write a
commentary on this book that makes it all clear.
Shalom Freedman:
The main idea of this work , if I understand it correctly, is
that the universe is an evolving, creative, self-organizing system. Creativity
and unpredictability are inherent in its development.
Kauffman wishes to stress that while he does not deny the possibility of a
transcendent creator who directs the whole process, he does not favor this
possibility. As he understands it, the creative process in itself is sufficient
to provide an explanation of the overall continuing development of the universe.
I have not read the whole of this work so I do not know how he sees the process
going on through vast stretches of cosmic time. I do feel his work is of
tremendous interest.
AR Kauffman is a genius in the style I best understand, and his views on refashioning the sacred make excellent sense to me.
