Reinventing the Sacred - Stuart Kauffman

Reinventing the Sacred - Stuart Kauffman


paulbhartzog
25th August 2008


Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion
Stuart A. Kauffman
2008, Basic Books

There are some books that do not fade after the first encounter. They do not let go of the mind, instead re-surfacing again and again, because they communicate something fundamental, something vital, with the potential to change an entire worldview. Stuart Kauffman’s “Reinventing the Sacred” is one of those books, rarely-encountered, that collects a plethora of profound wisdom into one powerful read. This new work from a preeminent complexity theorist contains not only fluid prose but also important insights into physics, biology, human nature, economics, and culture, with serious implications for our changing world and our personal lives.

His laudable goal is to heal perceived rifts between science and the humanities, and in so doing, create possibilities for a sustainable and ethical future. To achieve this goal, he takes us on an excursion into the beauty of complexity.

To begin, Kauffman explains the difficulties that an overemphasis on reductionism presents for Science, as well as reviewing how some scientists, including theorists of complex systems, have responded to these issues.

Science faces two primary difficulties: first, an inability to predetermine the state space of all possibilities, and thereby to calculate probabilities, and second, an inability to determine in advance which properties of a thing are the ones that “matter.” For example, the only way to calculate the probability of a standard die roll is to know the total number of sides on the die. If the die is magnetic and the table iron, the outcome could change. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing the effect in advance, just as there was no way of knowing that swim-bladders in fish (which are used for buoyancy) would prove useful as lungs and catalyze migration onto land. Traditional causally-oriented predictive Science becomes impossible. Recent theories of self-organization, auto-catalysis, and emergence are the latest response.

Emergence is apparent when the properties of some whole group of elements possess properties radically different from what one could infer from its component parts. A typical example is that the liquid properties of water cannot be deduced from the water molecule itself, much less from the hydrogen and oxygen that comprise it. Reductionism fails in the face of emergent properties.

Diversity is a crucial factor. As diversity in the parts increases, interaction possibilities also increase, as does the likelihood of auto-catalytic self-organized emergence. Consequently, Kauffman expands his conception of emergence to include human agency and free will. Kauffman suggests that these factors evolve because they further increase interaction possibilities and thus the likelihood of emergence. In other words, agency and free will are not evolutionary accidents, but are instead to be expected given the nature of the universe.

At this point, Kauffman embarks on a discussion of “the quantum brain” and proceeds to show ways in which mind and matter co-create the world and ourselves by shaping interaction possibilities and choosing from among alternate futures. His fascinating example is that of energy reactions in chlorophyll, wherein quantum indeterminacy “permits the chlorophyll system to simultaneously explore in parallel all possible [future] pathways” and choose the most energy-efficient one.

Ultimately, indeterminacy becomes a key concept in “Reinventing the Sacred.” Not only can we not know, we cannot even know what we cannot know. Some kinds of uncertainties are embedded in the universe itself. Moreover, just as we cannot arrive at a full understanding of any lawful regularities in physics, neither can we arrive at any self-consistent axioms for ethics or morality.

Kauffman suggests that “the word we need for how we live our lives is faith, bigger by far than knowing or reckoning. A committed courage to get on with life anyway.” But this faith, the reinvention of the sacred, does not mean that we must invoke a transcendental “Creator God.” Instead, in a near pantheistic move, Kauffman turns to the immanent creative forces in the universe, to “God as the unfolding of nature itself.” The role for human agency in the unfolding universe is what Kauffman calls “living forward into mystery.” Using an example of monkeys who give surplus food to those monkeys who have the least, Kauffman suggests that compassion and fairness are our best anchors for living forward into mystery.

All in all, while there are points to argue with, it is the arguments that the book provokes that are its deepest treasure. Stuart Kauffman offers an open invitation to begin a conversation that challenges both new and old understandings of the world and our place in it. If you read only one book this year, read this one. Then read it again. I’ll even get you started. Here’s the Preface and Chapter One.


From the book Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman. Reprinted by arrangement with Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2008

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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 reintegration 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.
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 modern secular society, itself the child of the Enlightenment.
At base, our contemporary perspective is reductionist: all phenomena are
ultimately to be explained in terms of the interactions of fundamental particles.
Perhaps the simplest statement of reductionism 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
physicist Stephen Weinberg famously says, “All the explanatory arrows
point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry,
to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.” Weinberg also says, “The
more we know of the universe, the more meaningless it appears.”
ix
x Preface
Reductionism has led to very powerful science. One has only to think
of Einstein’s general 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 human 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 reduced to physics alone but stand in their own
right. Life, and with it agency, came naturally 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 arrows 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
Preface xi
rolled balls down incline 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
beforehand, 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 creativity 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 courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But
the fact that we must live our lives forward 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 Enlightenment, is but one of
the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has
finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite
xii Preface
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, stubbornly 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
practical 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 ourselves 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 traditions 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 supernatural God, science will not disprove that belief.
Preface xiii
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.




1
1
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
2 Reinventing the Sacred
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
Laplace, reductionism began and continued its 350-year reign. Over the
ensuing centuries, science and the Enlightenment have given birth to secular
society. Reductionistic physics 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 disagreements between Christian or Islamic fundamentalists,
who believe in a transcendent 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 sacred
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. Neanderthals 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 meaningless 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.
Beyond Reductionism 3
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 subatomic
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 understanding reality. It turns out that biological
evolution by Darwin’s heritable variation 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 upwards 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 ontologically 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.
4 Reinventing the Sacred
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 experiments. 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 persistent invention of still newer goods and services. Like the biosphere,
the global economy 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 experiences. 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 advance a scientifically improbable, but
possible, and philosophically interesting hypothesis about consciousness
that is, ultimately, testable.Whatever its source, consciousness is emergent
and a real feature of the universe.
Beyond Reductionism 5
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 preadaptations 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 investigate. 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 planetesimals. The wondrous
diversity of life out your window evolved in ways that largely 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 unpredictable. 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 regularities of a process. But if we cannot even prestate
the possibilities, then no compact descriptions of these processes beforehand
can exist. These phenomena, then, appear to be partially beyond natural
law itself. This means something astonishing and powerfully liberating.
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
6 Reinventing the Sacred
computer imaginable can make a compact description in advance 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
preadaptations, 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 natural 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 constructs 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, omniscient 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 Generator God who
Beyond Reductionism 7
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 creativity 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 Elizabethan 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 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.
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
8 Reinventing the Sacred
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 struggled 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 spiritual 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 secular 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
Beyond Reductionism 9
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 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 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.