In article <48c93406$0$56791$edfadb0f@dtext02.news.tele.dk> "thomas p." yahoo.com> writes:

Well, not really. I'm currently halfway through the actual book (Kaffuman
is never a page-turner) and the science is not at all questionable. And
insofar as the God here being one any Christian would care to claim,
Kauffman's "God" makes the god of the Enlightenment Deists look like a
tribal idol. Kauffman's god is purely what he sees as the restless,
endlessly self-organizing nature of the material universe -- and nothing
else. Nothing else.

Kauffman's real target is not the materialist viewpoint at all, but rather
the reductionist stance -- the idea that everything can (in principle at
least) explained from the bottom up, that one could start with atoms --
or with the Big Bang -- and explain tadpoles and ant societies and human
brains by working your way upward.

Kauffman disagrees -- again, NOT for anything like goddidit, and not as a
rejection of the naturalist, materialist position -- but simply out of a
conviction that at each new level, there are emergent properties and
principles that cannot be derived from the level below. When you get to
crystals of chemical compounds, there are principles at work that could not
(even in theory) be derived from quantum mechanics. At the level of
biochemistry, chemistry no longer suffices to explain everything. Living
organisms cannot be adequately described by biochemistry. Brains cannot be
explained solely by in terms of cytology. Economic systems cannot be
derived from psychology. Convincing you of this point of view is the
motivation of "Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and
Religion."

This is nothing more -- or less -- than a thesis that our traditional
scientific goal, pure reductionism, is not sufficient to get us all the way
there, that the existence of emergent principles are also required. There
is nothing here for the hopeful believer who, on hearing "God" and "noted
scientist" in the same book review, would think find anything at all
compatible with his religious convictions.

-- cary