Stuart Kauffman: The Open Universe and the Sacred

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• April 25, 2009 07:18AM Trudy Johnson-Lenz

  Thanks, Howard, for these provocative notes from Stuart Kauffman's lecture.
  
  Your post prompted me to look further into Kauffman's recent work on reinventing the sacred and how he relates that to developing a global ethic.
  
  A year ago he wrote in a Perspective for New Science magazine:
  

  Yet what is more awesome: to believe that God created everything in six days, or to believe that the biosphere came into being on its own, with no creator, and partially lawlessly? I find the latter 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. From it, we can change our value system across the globe and try, together, to ease the fears of religious fundamentalists with a safe, sacred space we can share. And from it we can, if we are wise, find means to avert wars of civilisations, the ravages of global warming, and the potential disaster of peak oil.

  
  

  To understand his argument more fully, I discovered this excerpt from his 2008 book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, posted on John Brockman's The Edge. Here Kauffman discusses the Four Injuries.
  
  The current issue of P&P explores the implications of the fourth.
  

  The Four Injuries
  
  ....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 humanities 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. Einstein 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. ...
  
  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....
  
  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 spiritual but most are not. We are thus cut off from a deep aspect of our humanity....
  
  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 remaining 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 medieval 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 desperately need a global ethic that is richer than our mere concern about ourselves as consumers. 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 emerging as our traditions evolve together.
  
  Part of reinventing the sacred is 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 resulting 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.

  
  

  A tall order! I'm glad to see Kauffman engaged in this momentous task, along with many others. Thanks for adding his voice to P&P.

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