>
> God as the Emergent Process of Creation.
>
>
>
> A pioneer of complexity science, Stuart A. Kauffman, M.D., is
> Chief Scientific Officer and Chairman of the Board, Bios Group Inc.
> Since 1985, he has served as a consultant to Los Alamos National
> Laboratory, and from 1986 to 1998 as Professor at the Santa Fe
> Institute. Major areas of research include Developmental Genetics,
> Theoretical Biology, Evolution, and the Origin of Life. He was
> awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship
> and The Herbert A. Simon Award.
>
>
>
> Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred
>
> Stuart Kauffman
>
> Abstract
>
>
> "We have lived under the hegemony of the reductionistic scientific
> worldview
> since Galileo, Newton, and Laplace. In this view, the universe is
> meaningless,
> as Stephen Weinberg famously said, and organisms and a court of law are
> "nothing
> but" particles in morion. This scientific view is inadequate. Physicists
> are
> beginning to abandon reductionism in favor of emergence. Emergence, both
> epistemological and ontological, embraces the emergence of life and of
> agency.
> With agency comes meaning, value, and doing, beyond mere happenings. More
> organisms are conscious. None of this violates any laws of physics, but it
> cannot be reduced to physics. Emergence is real, and the tiger chasing the
> gazelle are real parts of the real universe.
>
> We live, therefore, in an emergent universe. This emergence often is
> entirely
> unpredictable beforehand, from the evolution of novel functionalities in
> organisms to the evolution of the economy and human history. We are
> surrounded
> on all sides by a creativity that cannot even be prestated. Thus we have
> the
> first glimmerings of a new scientific worldview, beyond reductionism. In
> our
> universe emergence is real, and there is ceaseless, stunning creativity
> that has
> given rise to our biosphere, our humanity, and our history. We are partial
> co-creators of this emergent creativity.
>
> It is our choice whether we use the God word. I believe it is wise to do
> so. God
> can be our shared name for the true creativity in the natural universe.
> Such a
> view invites a new sense of the sacred, as those aspects of the creativity
> in
> the universe that we deem worthy of holding sacred. We are not logically
> forced
> to this view. Yet a global civilization, hopefully persistently diverse
> and
> creative, is emerging. I believe we need a shared view of God, a fully
> natural
> God, to orient our lives. We need a shared view of the sacred that is open
> to
> slow evolution, because rigidity in our view of the sacred violates how
> our most
> precious values evolve and invites ethical hegemony. We need a shared
> global
> ethic beyond our materialism. I believe a sense of God as the natural,
> awesome
> creativity in the universe can help us construct the sacred and a global
> ethic
> to help shape the global civilization toward what we choose with the best
> of our
> limited wisdom."
>
> http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman06/kauffman06_index.html