Louisville Process Theology Network

Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanist Perspective

Jun 11, 2009

From the Introduction to ?“Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred?” by Stuart A. Kauffman, biologist and author.

?“On the other side of this vast divide from those who hold to a transcendent God and His authority for meaning and values, are the innumerable secular humanists, children of the enlightenment and contemporary science, who hold firmly to reality as revealed by science, find values in their love for their families and friends, a general sense of fairness and a morality that needs no basis in God's word.
Yet we secular humanists have paid an unspoken price for our firm sense that (reductionist) science tells us what is real. First, we have no well wrought scientific basis for our humanity ?— despite the interesting fact that quantum mechanics on the Copenhagen interpretation assumes free willed physicists who choose what quantum features to measure and thereby change the physical world.
The two cultures, science and humanities, remain firmly un-united. And equally important, we have been subtly robbed of our deep capacity for spiritualism. We have come to believe that spirituality is inherently co-localized with a belief in God, and that without such a belief, spirituality is inherently foolish, questionable, without foundation, wishful thinking, silly?…
I would like to begin a discussion about the first glimmerings of a new scientific world view ?— beyond reductionism to emergence and radical creativity in the biosphere and human world. This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture?…

?… we have a new view of God, not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself. This God brings with it a sense of oneness, unity, with all of life, and our planet ?— it expands our consciousness and naturally seems to lead to an enhanced potential global ethic of wonder, awe, responsibility within the bounded limits of our capacity, for all of life and its home, the Earth, and beyond as we explore the Solar System.

?… a rather astonishing theme that is emerging in this new world view is that the biosphere and human culture are ceaselessly creative in ways that are fundamentally unpredictable and presumably non-algorithmic or machine like. ?… I want God to mean the vast ceaseless creativity of the only universe we know, ours.?”