Reinventing the Sacred, Part 1

Stuart A. Kauffman is a university professor and an early advocate of complexity theory. His earlier book At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity is one of my favorites. His new book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, is truly transcendental.

Since the earlier book, which was published in the mid-1990s, Kauffman has moved from being a leading light at the famed Santa Fe Institute, where the study of complexity theory first reached critical mass, to becoming founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

Complexity theory, one of Kauffman's constant topics, is the scientific study of how complex systems crop up and evolve in nature. One such complex system is the biosphere, the sum total of all life on Earth in its nexus of interrelationships and interactions. In At Home, Kauffman shows how the biosphere operates as a much greater whole than would be expected by merely adding up the "sum of its parts."

The earlier book can be considered a prologue to the new one. At Home extended the standard Darwinian understanding of biological evolution by heritable variation (mutations, etc.) and natural selection to add a third sort of evolutionary process: "self-organization." Living systems self-organize, said Kauffman, which means their internal dynamics tend to create surprising yet stable patterns of organization that occupy and exploit novel niches of lifestyle possibilities. These niches are co-created by the very same process, self-organization, taking place on multiple levels at once: molecules, cells, organs, organisms, populations, ecosystems, the biosphere. Self-organization is thus the "handmaid" of natural selection, giving selection abundant candidate material to sift through in implementing Darwin's "survival of the fittest" and bringing about the "origin of species."


Now, in the new book, Kauffman sets many of the same themes in a broader interpretive context, that of "emergence." As biological evolution proceeds, there arises in inanimate matter several hitherto unforeseeable characteristics, such as agency, the ability of individuals to choose certain acts over others. Events which transpire at the activity level of intelligent life are, he says, "doings," while events that take place at the bedrock level of the basic physical particles from which life constructs itself are mere "happenings."

Mere happenings are brute facts without possible value or meaning. The doings of autonomous agents take on meanings and possess values.

Since the earliest days of modern science, scientists have increasingly insisted on "reductionism," the premise that everything in the universe can be fully understood by applying the laws of physics at the level of fundamental particles — the most fundamental particles known today being quarks and gluons — or of the electrons, protons, and neutrons made of quarks and gluons, or of atoms, or molecules, or what-have-you.

Today, some physicists' theories reduce everything to the strings and superstrings that make up quarks, etc. But the reductionistic principle remains the same: explain everything with reference to what happens at the "happenings" level of the basic building blocks of the cosmos.

Kauffman shows that such a strategy simply disqualifies such things as life, agency, consciousness, value, purpose, and meaning from being real, and thus from requiring explanation. "Life" is simply what happens when enough quarks are put together in just the right way, and does not really "exist" in the same way as the underlying particles do. Ditto, with suitable modification, the other examples of "emergent" phenomena — agency, will, consciousness, value, purpose, meaning, etc. — all of which are, from the perspective of strong reductionism, fundamentally illusory.


But, Kauffman shows, there is no need to buy into strong reductionism. We can shift our scientific perspective to one of "emergentism," such that things and events at levels higher than that of the basic particles are deemed fully real.

Admittedly, human knowledge of events at the level of particles is not sufficiently rich to allow us to derive the particles' so-called "emergent" phenomena just from knowing the positions and velocities and capacities for interaction of the myriad bits of matter. Reductionists rule our ability to predict emergent phenomena out solely on the basis of the incompleteness of our knowledge of events at the level of basic physics. That we cannot truly come to grips with them is chalked up entirely to a defect of epistemology.

But that possibility is, Kauffman says, not only epistemologically ruled out; it is ontologically out of the question as well. Emergent phenomena do exist and are real — but they exist only at higher levels of existence/reality than that of fundamental particles and their interactions. Reductionist explanations could never account for emergent phenomena because reductionism cannot truly see them.


At the inception of reductionism, faith begins to come apart from reason. If nothing is real except for purposeless events happening to meaningless particles, then the cornerstone of spirituality — the sense that life has purpose, meaning, value — dissolves. Faith increasingly relocates the source of life, meaning, purpose, etc. as identical with that fountain of all creativity, God. Turning inward and going fundamentalist, faith next claims to preempt science, while actually welcoming the scientific dictum that all besides the Creator God — assuming as a matter of faith that God exists — reduces to meaningless interactions of dumb particles.

Fine, fundamentalism says in the face of scientific reductionism. Reductionist materialism just helps to put our focus where it belongs anyway: on God.

Except ... huge numbers of people don't see it that way, becoming agnostics, atheists, and secular humanists instead. Using philosophies like French existentialism in the mid-20th century, they make elaborate excuses for the central fact that the world is meaningless.

But, says Kauffman in Reinventing the Sacred, we can instead move beyond reductionism. In so doing, we can re-integrate faith and reason, spirituality and science, the humanities with the hard sciences, values-meanings-purposes with brute facts, humanism with religion. The schisms inaugurated by the rise of modern science can be healed by taking the next logical step, which is to move beyond reductionism: to honor as real the things which are given rise to, in our world, only emergently.

It goes yet deeper than that: Kauffman says our world in which new levels of being sprout from the stark soil of particle interactions is quintessentially creative. What it creates and when cannot be predicted with any fine degree of accompanying detail. Though there are laws of physics in the picture, the creativity of the universe extends beyond natural laws, which amount to "compact descriptions beforehand of the regularities of a process" (p. 5). The fruits of emergence can't be described or predicted beforehand — no even by a Creator God. Accordingly, the irrepressible, unpredictable creativity of the universe itself can be reverenced as a God in its own right.

(You can listen to a KUOW-FM interview of Stuart Kauffman about his new book Reinventing the Sacred by clicking here. You can read more about that program here.)