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

>>
>> "Damien Valentine" gmail.com> skrev i en meddelelse
>> news:1433408c-2124-479a-9193-6ae270a4f4b2@i76g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
>> On Sep 11, 12:13 am, "thomas p." yahoo.com> wrote:

>>>
>>> He expressed his religious beliefs. The fact that he is also a
>>> scientist
>>> does nothing to support the validity of those beliefs.

>>
>> I'm not even sure how these beliefs are particularly religious. As
>> far as I can tell, he's just swapping the vague word "God" for the
>> technical term "emergence", and hoping that makes everything better
>> somehow, all by itself.
>> ______________________________________________________-
>>
>> I think the hope is that nobody will notice that it is pseudoscientific
>> garbage.
>>
>>

>
>
> 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