Stuart A. Kauffman
A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion
Hardcover: 320 pages
Basic Books, May 12, 2008
ISBN-10: 0465003001
ISBN-13: 978-0465003006
From the book Reinventing the Sacredby Stuart Kauffman. Reprinted by arrangement with
Basic Books (www.basicbooks.com), a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright ©
2008. All rights reserved.
Stuart A. Kauffman is a professor at the University of Calgary with a shared appointment
between biological sciences and physics and astronomy. He is also the leader of the Institute
for Biocomplexity and Informatics (IBI) which conducts leading-edge interdisciplinary re-
search in systems biology. Dr. Kauffman is also an emeritus professor of biochemistry at the
University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow and an external professor at the Santa Fe
Institute.
Preface
The title of this book,Reinventing the Sacred, states its aim. I will 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. My field of research, complexity theory, is leading toward the reintegra-
tion of science with the ancient Greek ideal of the good life, well lived. It is not some
tortured interpretation of fundamentally lifeless facts that prompts me to say this; the
science itself compels it.
Reductionism has led to very powerful science. One has only to think of Einstein’s gen-
eral 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.
But Laplace’s particles in motion allow only happenings. There are no meanings, no
values, no doings. The reductionist worldview led the existentialists in the mid-
twentieth century to try to find value in an absurd, meaningless universe, in our hu-
man choices. But to the reductionist, the existentialists’ arguments are as void as the
spacetime in which their particles move. Our human choices, made by ourselves as
human agents, are still, when the full science shall have been done, mere happenings,
ultimately to be explained by physics.
In this book I will demonstrate the inadequacy of reductionism. Even major physicists
now doubt its full legitimacy. I shall show that biology and its evolution cannot be re-
duced to physics alone but stand in their own right. Life, and with it agency, came na-
turally 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. “Real” here has a particular
meaning: while life, agency, value, and doing presumably have physical explanations in
any specific organism, the evolutionary emergence of these cannot be derived from or
reduced to physics alone. Thus, life, agency, value, and doing are real in the universe.
This stance is called emergence. Weinberg notwithstanding, there are explanatory ar-
rows in the universe that do not point downward. A couple in love walking along the
banks of the Seine are, in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the
Seine, not mere particles in motion. More, all this came to exist without our need to
call upon a Creator God.
Emergence is therefore a major part of the new scientific worldview. Emergence says
that, while no laws of physics are violated, life in the biosphere, the evolution of the
biosphere, the fullness of our human historicity, and our practical everyday worlds are
also real, are not reducible to physics nor explicable from it, and are central to our
lives. Emergence, already both contentious and transformative, is but one part of the
new scientific worldview I shall discuss.
Even deeper than emergence and its challenge to reductionism in this new scientific
worldview is what I shall call breaking the Galilean spell. Galileo rolled balls down in-
cline planes and showed that the distance traveled varied as the square of the time
elapsed. From this he obtained a universal law of motion. Newton followed with his
Principia, setting the stage for all of modern science. With these triumphs, the Western
world came to the view that all that happens in the universe is governed by natural
law. Indeed, this is the heart of reductionism. Another Nobel laureate physicist, Murray
Gell-Mann, has defined a natural law as a compressed description, available before-
hand, of the regularities of a phenomenon. The Galilean spell that has driven so much
science is the faith that all aspects of the natural world can be described by such laws.
Perhaps the most radical scientific claim I shall make is that we can and must break the
Galilean spell. I will show that the evolution of the biosphere, human economic life,
and human history are partially indescribable by natural law. This claim flies in the
face of our settled convictions since Galileo, Newton, and the Enlightenment.
If no natural law suffices to describe the evolution of the biosphere, of technological
evolution, of human history, what replaces it? In its place is a wondrous radical creativ-
ity without a supernatural Creator. Look out your window at the life teeming about
you. All that has been going on is that the sun has been shining on the earth for some 5
billion years. Life is about 3.8 billion years old. The vast tangled bank of life, as Darwin
phrased it, arose all on its own. 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.
Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will
happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as
Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and cou-
rage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives for-
ward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason
alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlighten-
ment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason it-
self has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our
full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never
fully know. The Enlightenment’s reliance on reason is too narrow a view of how we
flourish or flounder. It is important to the Western Hebraic-Hellenic tradition that the
ancient Greeks relied preeminently on reason to seek, with Plato, the True, the Good,
and the Beautiful. The ancient Jews, living with their God, relied more broadly on their
full humanity.
The ancient Jews and Greeks split the ancient Western world. The Jews, as Paul Johnson
wrote in his History of the Jews, were the best historians of the ancient world, stub-
bornly commemorating the situated history of a people and their universal, single God,
our Abrahamic God. With this part of our Western Hebraic-Hellenic tradition comes
our Western sense of history and progress, alive in the creativity of human history. In
contrast, Greek thought was universalist and sought natural laws. The Greeks were the
first scientists in the West.
If both natural law and ceaseless creativity partially beyond natural law are necessary
for understanding our world, and if we as whole human beings live in this real world of
law and unknowable creativity, these two ancient strands of Western civilization can
reunite in ways we cannot foresee. Out of this union can arise a healing of the long split
between science and the humanities, and the schism between pure reason and practic-
al life, both subjects of interest to Immanuel Kant. Science is not, as Galileo claimed, the
only pathway to truth. History, the situated richness of the humanities, and the law are
true as well, as we will see. This potential union invites a fuller understanding of our-
selves creating our histories and our sacred, as we create our lives.
Across our globe, about half of us believe in a Creator God. Some billions of us believe in
an Abrahamic supernatural God, and some in the ancient Hindu gods. Wisdom tradi-
tions such as Buddhism often have no gods. About a billion of us are secular but bereft
of our spirituality and reduced to being materialist consumers in a secular society. If
we the secular hold to anything it is to “humanism.” But humanism, in a narrow sense,
is too thin to nourish us as human agents in the vast universe we partially cocreate. I
believe we need a domain for our lives as wide as reality. If half of us believe in a su-
pernatural God, science will not disprove that belief.
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.
Beyond Reductionism
Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
John Donne’s exquisite “Holy Sonnet XIV: Batter My Heart,” written in about 1615,
when he was a High Anglican churchman, speaks to one of the most poignant schisms
in Western society, and more broadly in the world: that between faith and reason.
Donne wrote in the time of Kepler. Within a hundred years Newton had given us his
three laws of motion and universal gravitation, uniting rest and motion, earth and the
heavens: the foundations of modern science. With Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Lap-
lace, reductionism began and continued its 350-year reign. Over the ensuing centuries,
science and the Enlightenment have given birth to secular society. Reductionistic phys-
ics has emerged for many as the gold standard for learning about the world. In turn,
the growth of science has driven a wedge between faith and reason. It was not so much
Galileo’s geocentric theory (derived from Copernicus) that underlay his clash with the
church but his claim that only science, not revelation, is the path to knowledge.
Today the schism between faith and reason finds voice in the sometimes vehement dis-
agreements between Christian or Islamic fundamentalists, who believe in a transcen-
dent Creator God, and agnostic and atheist “secular humanists” who do not believe in a
transcendent God. These divergent beliefs are profoundly held. Our senses of the sa-
cred have been with us for thousands of years, at least from the presumptive earth
goddess of Europe ten thousand years ago, through the Egyptian, Greek, Abrahamic,
Aztec, Mayan, Incan, and Hindu gods, Buddhism, Taoism, and other traditions. Nean-
derthals buried their dead. Perhaps they also worshiped gods. Recently an aboriginal
tribe was unwilling to allow its DNA to be sampled as part of a worldwide study on the
origins and evolution of humanity for fear that science would challenge its view of its
own sacred origins. Ways of life hang in the balance. This book hopes to address this
schism in a new way.
Part of my goal is to discuss newly discovered limitations to the reductionism that has
dominated Western science at least since Galileo and Newton but leaves us in a mea-
ningless world of facts devoid of values. In its place I will 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, we will find grounds to radically alter our
understanding of what science itself appears able to tell us.
Science cannot foretell the evolution of the biosphere, of human technologies, or of
human culture or history. A central implication of this new worldview is that we are
co-creators of a universe, biosphere, and culture of endlessly novel creativity.
The reductionism derived from Galileo and his successors ultimately views reality as
particles (or strings) in motion in space. Contemporary physics has two broad theories.
The first is Einstein’s general relativity, which concerns spacetime and matter and how
the two interact such that matter curves space, and curved space “tells” matter how to
move. The second is the standard model of particle physics, based on fundamental sub-
atomic particles such as quarks, which are bound to one another by gluons and which
make up the complex subatomic particles that then comprise such familiar particles as
protons and neutrons, atoms, molecules, and so on. Reductionism in its strongest form
holds that all the rest of reality, from organisms to a couple in love on the banks of the
Seine, is ultimately nothing but particles or strings in motion. It also holds that, in the
end, when the science is done, the explanations for higher-order entities are to be
found in lower-order entities. Societies are to be explained by laws about people, they
in turn by laws about organs, then about cells, then about biochemistry, chemistry, and
finally physics and particle physics.
This worldview has dominated our thinking since Newton’s time. I will try to show that
reductionism alone is not adequate, either as a way of doing science or as a way of un-
derstanding reality. It turns out that biological evolution by Darwin’s heritable varia-
tion and natural selection cannot be “reduced” to physics alone. It is emergent in two
senses. The first is epistemological, meaning that we cannot from physics deduce up-
wards 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 onto-
logically real entities. Everything else is to be explained by different complexities of
particles in motion, hence are not real in their own ontological right. But organisms,
whose evolution of organization of structures and processes, such as the human heart,
cannot be deduced from physics, have causal powers of their own, and therefore are
emergent real entities in the universe. So, too, are the biosphere, the human economy,
human culture, human action.
We often turn to a Creator God to explain the existence of life. I will spend several
chapters discussing current work on the natural origin of life, where rapid progress is
being made. Self-reproducing molecules have already been demonstrated in experi-
ments. A Creator God is not needed for the origin of life. More, you and I are agents; we
act on our own behalf; we do things. In physics, there are only happenings, no doings.
Agency has emerged in evolution and cannot be deduced by physics. With agency come
meaning and value. We are beyond reductionist nihilism with respect to values in a
world of fact. Values exist for organisms, certainly for human organisms and higher
animals, and perhaps far lower on the evolutionary scale. So the new scientific view of
emergence brings with it a place for meaning, doing, and value.
Further, the biosphere is a co-constructing emergent whole that evolves persistently.
Organisms and the abiotic world create niches for new organisms, in an ongoing open
textured exploration of possible organisms. I will discuss the physical basis of this
“open texture” in the chapter on the nonergodic universe.
At a still 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. This growth in turn drives the further expansion of the web itself by the per-
sistent invention of still newer goods and services. Like the biosphere, the global econ-
omy is a self-consistently co-constructing, ever evolving, emergent whole. All these
phenomena are beyond physics and not reducible to it.
Then there is the brute fact that we humans (at least) are conscious. We have expe-
riences. We do not understand consciousness yet. There is no doubt that it is real in
humans and presumably among many animals. No one knows the basis of it. I will ad-
vance a scientifically improbable, but possible, and philosophically interesting hypo-
thesis about consciousness that is, ultimately, testable. Whatever its source,
consciousness is emergent and a real feature of the universe.
All of the above speaks to an emergence not reducible to physics. Thus our common
intuition that the origin of life, agency, meaning, value, doing, economic activity, and
consciousness are beyond reduction to physics can be given scientific meaning. We live
in a different universe from that envisioned by reductionism. This book describes a
scientific worldview that embraces the reality of emergence.
The evolution of the universe, biosphere, the human economy, human culture, and
human action is profoundly creative. It will take some detailed exploration of what are
called Darwinian pre-adaptations to explain this clearly. The upshot is that 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. No one foresaw
the Internet in 1920. This unpredictability may exist on many levels that we can inves-
tigate. For example, we do not know beforehand what will arise even in the evolution
of cosmic grains of dust that grow by aggregation and chemical reactions to form pla-
netesimals. The wondrous diversity of life out your window evolved in ways that large-
ly could not be foretold. So, too, has the human economy in the past fifty thousand
years, as well as human culture and law. They are not only emergent but radically un-
predictable. We cannot even prestate the possibilities that may arise, let alone predict
the probabilities of their occurrence.
This incapacity to foresee has profound implications. In the physicist Murray Gell-
Mann’s definition, a “natural law” is a compact description beforehand of the regulari-
ties of a process. But if we cannot even prestate the possibilities, then no compact de-
scriptions of these processes beforehand can exist. These phenomena, then, appear to be
partially beyond natural law itself. This means something astonishing and powerfully libe-
rating. 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 — a world of explosive creativity on all sides. This is a central part
of the new scientific worldview.
Let me pause to explain just how radical this view is. 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 ad-
vance of the regularities of these processes. There is no such description beforehand.
Thus the very concept of a natural law is inadequate for much of reality. When I first
discuss this in detail, in chapter 10, concerning Darwinian pre-adaptations, I will lay
out the grounds for believing that this radical new view is correct. If it is, it challenges
what I will call the Galilean spell, the belief that all in the universe unfolds under natu-
ral law.
There is a further profound implication: If the biosphere and the global economy are
examples of self-consistently co-constructing wholes, and at the same time, parts of
these processes are not sufficiently described by natural law, we confront something
amazing. Without sufficient law, without central direction, the biosphere literally con-
structs itself and evolves, using sunlight and other sources of free energy, and remains
a coherent whole even as it diversifies, and even as extinction events occur. The same
is true of the global economy, as we shall discuss in chapter 10. Such a self-organized,
but partially lawless, set of coupled processes stands unrecognized, and thus unseen,
right before our eyes. We appear to need a new conceptual framework to see and say
this, then to understand and orient ourselves in our ever creative world. We will find
ourselves far beyond reductionism, indeed.
Is it, then, more amazing to think that an Abrahamic transcendent, omnipotent, om-
niscient God created everything around us, all that we participate in, in six days, or
that it all arose with no transcendent Creator God, all on its own? I believe the latter is
so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude, and respect, that it is God
enough for many of us. God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity in the universe. It
is this view that I hope can be shared across all our religious traditions, embracing
those like myself, who do not believe in a Creator God, as well as those who do. This
view of God can be a shared religious and spiritual space for us all.
This view is not as great a departure from Abrahamic thought as we might suppose.
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 Gene-
rator 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 crea-
tivity in the natural universe itself.
The Four Injuries
It would be a sufficient task to unravel the implications of this new scientific worldview
for our unity with nature and life. But the project before us appears to be even larger.
T. S. Eliot once wrote that with Donne and the other metaphysical poets of the Elizabe-
than age, for the first time in the Western mind, a split arose between reason and our
other human sensibilities. The anguish between faith and reason in Donne’s “Holy
Sonnet XIV” is but one of these emerging schisms. With the growth of science and the
Enlightenment, the Western mind placed its faith in reason and subordinated the rest
of our humanity, Eliot’s “other sensibilities,” the fullness of human life.
Almost without our noticing, our secular modern society suffers at least four injuries,
which split our humanity down the center. These injuries are larger than the secular-
versus-religious split in modern society. What the metaphysical poets began to split
asunder — reason and the remaining human sensibilities — we must now attempt to
reintegrate. This is also part of reinventing the sacred.
The first injury is the artificial division between science and the humanities. C. P. Snow
wrote a famous essay in 1959, “The Two Cultures,” in which he noted that the humani-
ties were commonly revered as “high culture” while the sciences were considered
second-class knowledge. Now their roles are reversed: on many university campuses,
those who study the humanities are often made to feel like second-class citizens. Ein-
stein or Shakespeare, we seem to believe, but not both in the same room. This split is a
fracture down the middle of our integrated humanity.
I believe it is important that this view is wrong. Science itself is more limited by the un-
prestatable, unpredictable creativity in the universe than we have realized, and, in any
case, science is not the only path to knowledge and understanding. I shall show in this
book that science cannot explain the intricate, context-dependent, creative, situated
aspects of much of human action and invention, or the historicity that embraces and
partially defines us. These, however, are just the domains of the humanities, from art
and literature to history and law. Truth abides here, too.
A second injury derives from the reductionistic scientific worldview. Reductionism
teaches us that, at its base, the real world we live in is a world of fact without values.
Wolfgang Kohler, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, wrote a mid-twentieth-
century book hopefully entitled The Place of Value in a World of Fact, in which he strug-
gled unsuccessfully with this issue. His efforts had no effect on reductionism and its
claims. The French existentialist philosophers struggled with the same issue, the view
that the real universe is devoid of values. Our lives are full of value and meaning, yet no
single framework offers a secure place for these facets of our humanity to coexist with
fundamental science. We need a worldview in which brute facts yield values, a way to
derive ought from is, just the step that Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David
Hume warned against. Agency, values, and “doing” did not come into being separately
from the rest of existence; they are emergent in the evolution of the biosphere. We are
the products of that evolution, and our values are real features of the universe.
A third injury is that agnostic and atheist “secular humanists” have been quietly taught
that spirituality is foolish or, at best, questionable. Some secular humanists are spiri-
tual but most are not. We are thus cut off from a deep aspect of our humanity. Humans
have led intricate and meaningful spiritual lives for thousands of years, and many secu-
lar humanists are bereft of it.Reinventing the sacred as our response to the emergent
creativity in the universe can open secular humanists to the legitimacy of their own
spirituality.
The fourth injury is that all of us, whether we are secular or of faith, lack a global ethic.
In part this is a result of the split, fostered by reductionism, between the world of fact
and the world of values. We lack a shared worldwide framework of values that spans
our traditions and our responsibilities to all of life, one another, and the planet. Secular
humanists believe in fairness and the love of family and friends, and we place our faith
in democracy. Our diverse religions have their diverse beliefs. But in the industrialized
world all of us are largely reduced to consumers. It is telling that the Nobel laureate
economist Kenneth Arrow, when asked to help evaluate the “value” of the U.S. national
parks, was stymied because he could not compute the utility of these parks for U.S.
consumers. Even in our lives in nature we are reduced to consumers, and our few re-
maining wild places, to commodities. But the value of these parks is life itself and our
participation in it.
This materialism profoundly dismays many thoughtful believers in both the Islamic
world and the West. The industrialized world is seen to be, and is, largely consumer
oriented, materialistic, and commodified. How strange this world would seem to me-
dieval Europe. How alien it seems to fundamentalist Muslims. We of the industrialized
world forget that our current value system is only one of a range of choices. We despe-
rately need a global ethic that is richer than our mere concern about ourselves as con-
sumers. We need something like a new vision of Eden, not one that humanity has
forever left but one we can move toward, knowing full well our propensities for both
good and evil. We need a global ethic to undergird the global civilization that is emerg-
ing as our traditions evolve together.
Part of reinventing the sacred will be to heal these injuries — injuries that we hardly
know we suffer. If we are members of a universe in which emergence and ceaseless
creativity abound, if we take that creativity as a sense of God we can share, the result-
ing sense of the sacredness of all of life and the planet can help orient our lives beyond
the consumerism and commodification the industrialized world now lives, heal the
split between reason and faith, heal the split between science and the humanities, heal
the want of spirituality, heal the wound derived from the false reductionist belief that
we live in a world of fact without values, and help us jointly build a global ethic. These
are what is at stake in finding a new scientific worldview that enables us to reinvent
the sacred
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
1modern secular society, itself the child of the Enlightenment. At base, our contempo-
rary perspective is reductionist: all phenomena are ultimately to be explained in terms
of the interactions of fundamental particles. Perhaps the simplest statement of reduc-
tionism is due to Simon Pierre Laplace early in the nineteenth century, who said that a
sufficient intelligence, if given the positions and velocities of all the particles in the
universe, could compute the universe’s entire future and past. As Nobel laureate phy-
sicist Stephen Weinberg famously says, “All the explanatory arrows point downward,
from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ulti-
mately to physics.” Weinberg also says, “The more we know of the universe, the more
meaningless it appears.”