Hi, I'm just learning how to blog ...

[Ulrike Reinhard]

... so this is my first effort. (me is Stuart Kauffman; I, Ulrike just copied the post in the right field:-)))) I thought I might talk briefly about what using the word "God" to mean the creativity in the universe is starting to mean for me. The answer is, to my surprise, a lot. Like most scientists, but not all, I do not and have never believed in a supernatural God. My own earliest steps towards something spiritual were two. First, I had in about 1971, thought about the origin of life and concluded that life must be based on something far deeper than the beautiful template replication offered by double stranded DNA or RNA. It must, I thought, be based on chemistry, catalysis, and displacement from chemical equilibrium. I sketched a theory in which sufficiently complex mixtures of chemicals would be expected to catalyze so many reactions among themselves that "collectively autocatalytic sets" would be expected to arise. Focusing on small proteins, or peptides, as the molecules in question, led to the question of the probability that such peptides could catalyze reactions, and later, could mimic hormones or other biologically important molecules. In turn this was one route to what is now combinatorial chemistry and high throughput screening. In about 1983 I returned to the topic and managed to prove analytically that one would expect such a spontaneous formation of self reproducing molecular systems. I was, of course, deeply moved, for if correct, life may be far more probable than we had thought. I remember climbing up a waterfall route into Desolation Valley in California, home to many young adventures, and sitting quietly on a boulder and thanking God. I don't know what sense of God I was thanking, but I felt profound gratitude that such an idea might be right, so life might be "At home in the universe', which became the title of my second book.
In 1993 I participated in a small conference hosted by the Gihon foundation in Northern New Mexico, with three others. We were supposed to consider the most important issues confronting humanity - as if any four people could be useful. The centerpiece of this meeting was set by a wonderful bear of a man, N. Scott Momaday, Kiowa, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, six foot six inches, perhaps 260 pounds, bass voice. He told us the most important problem confronting humanity was to reinvent the sacred. I was stunned. As a scientist, I had no conception that it was permissible to speak in such language. Scott's phrase changed my life. Our small group considered an emerging global civilization, the cultural tensions it would create, the need to reinvent the sacred, and, Scott's phrase in the report we wrote, "create the transnational mythic structure" to sustain the global civilization that will emerge.

Obviously, I have taken Scott's phrase as the title of my new book, Reinventing the Sacred, with credit in the chapter notes. I thought then and think now, that Scott Momaday was exactly right. We do have to reinvent the sacred - in part for this secular, commitized, age. In part we must consider doing so to span across our civilizations as, under the pressure of globalization that our little group foresaw, is in danger of retreating into fundamentalisms.
So the Gihon Foundation meeting is the initial source of the book and subject we are discussing. The core of this new book is new science strongly suggesting that reductionism is inadequate scientifically, that emergence is real, and most surprisingly, that the evolution of the biosphere, economy, civilization, and perhaps aspects of the abi0tic universe do not seem to be sufficiently describable by natural law. In its place is an unexpected - since Newton - creativity in the unfolding of some aspects of the universe. We ourselves, as humans, are the unexpected fruit of this partially lawless evolution of the biosphere. But then we are members with all of life in this same partially lawless, awesome "becoming" of the universe.

God, I believe, is our own invented symbol, d0wn the ages, across the thousands of gods we have worshiped. It is we who have told our gods what is sacred, then they have revealed to us what we told them to tell us. It has always been us talking to ourselves. But this is no crisis, it is wonderful. It does not mean that what we deem worthy of being held sacred is not sacred, it means that what we will embrace as sacred is our own choice. So the question becomes, following Scott Momaday, whether at this stage in our human evolution we are just beginning to be ready to be responsible for our own choices of what to hold sacred. I think the answer is yes, and that it is we, together, who must reinvent the sacred. Then we must derive from it a renewed spirituality that will lead us towards a global ethic that will become Scott Momaday's "transnational mythic structure" to guide the emerging global civilization.
So we come to whether we should use the "God" word to mean the fully natural creativity in the universe. I am ever more convinced that we should do so. To those of us who are secular humanists, this step is deeply worrisome. We remember Galileo forced to recant by the Inquisition. We want no religion that requires that we forego the truths of the real world. We remember the millions killed in the name of God. We forget the comfort, sense of unity with a transcendental God, and orientation for life that religion also brings. For those who believe in God, even the idea that it could be we, ourselves, who take responsibility for what we will deem sacred is Godless heresy. I understand and emphathize. Yet, we also need to create a common spiritual space across our civilizations as we co-evolve together. Those who believe in a supernatural God can also consider embracing the idea that the creativity in the natural universe that this God created is itself awesome and worthy of reverence, and that it leads us to hold all of life and this planet sacred and view it with a sense of stewardship to the best of our limited knowledge.

Now to myself: I have now lived for two years with the thought that God is the natural creativity in the universe. It is affecting my life in ways I would not have expected. A summer ago, sitting on my porch along side a sweet little river, the Elbow, looking at a hillside covered with spruce, I found myself thinking, "I can cut down those trees if I choose, but I better have a very good reason to do so, this is God's work." I looked at the river and thought, "I could dam this river, but I'd better have a very good reason to do so, this is God's work." In my own life, I am finding that the symbol "God" used to mean the very creativity in the universe, and membership with all of life that we all share, and the planet we share, does in fact, bring a sweet and enlarging sense of joy, responsibility, and humility. How graced we are, not by a Creator Agent God, but by the staggering emergence of the universe, life, and human civilization, so much of it, it begins to appear, partially beyond natural law. So, since we do no t and cannot kinow, we live into Mystery. We need a sense larger of ourselves and too much of our current society where we are consumers, not citizens of the world. We can lift up our eyes to a reality we can revere, share, use wisely, but protect. This God is reality, even as we love to kill one another. Then we are invited to Scott Momaday's proclamation: We must reinvent the sacred.

[Paul B. Hartzog]

"As a scientist, I had no conception that it was permissible to speak in such language."

Well said.

I am pursuing my own investigation into what I have called "panarchy" which is a way of thinking about how deeply "network culture" penetrates into everything. (Note that we speak of both human cultures and biotic cultures).

We are clearly transitioning into a world where our notions of Being are shifting from hierarchical representations to networks. The consequence is that we begin to see our selves as being relationally-constituted entities embedded (and embodied) in landscapes of autopoietic networks: ecological, biological, economic, social, political.

These are the landscapes we are creating and to which we must adapt. To me, "reinventing the sacred" means reapprecating the sacra-ment that is a universe in which order emerges.

When we learn to listen differently to the world and each other, we will hear the sacred in the silences in between.

Thanks for having me.

[Gordon D. Kaufman]

At 9 p.m., 3/6/08 Gordon Kaufman said: I am glad this web-cite has been set up. I have never before posted an entry of this kind, but I am moved to do so today, after reading Stu's remarks. Unlike Stu, who comes to the question of God through his reflections as a scientist, I am a theologian who has been thinking about God throughout much of my life and have in the past 20 or so years found it very rewarding to imagine God - not in the traditional way - but as the massive creativity manifest throughout the universe. In the past couple of years, Stu and I have met, have become good friends, and have helped each other to learn how to think of God in this new refreshing way. It is good that a group, that will expand our conversation about God as creativity, with the voices of many others who also sense that this is an important moment for human civilization, a moment in which, perhaps, we humans are finding a way to "reinvent the sacred" for our time.

[Stuart Kauffman]

Gordon, mentor and friend, I'm glad you are part of this discussion. If I may, I'd like to say something I am finding, that I even sent you outside this blog site, and ask your comments as a theologian on the issue.
God, understood as the creativity in the universe, is not an Agent Creator God, let along a theistic God. This God cannot love us, but is the awesome creativity in nature. We can, on the other hand, love this God, we can revere the creativity in nature that has given rise to the entire biosphere, human culture and almost all of our real lives. Then if we are conceiving of a religion with God as the creativity in the universe, how shall we conceive of this as sustaining and orienting our lives? I did try a first prayer, sent to you, if I may quote my first try: "May the love of God - the creativity in the universe - sustain you." It would seem that we need to answer some of our most profound human emotional and spiritual needs with this sense of God. Gordon, you have thought about this for many years. Do please share some of those thoughts with us. Stu

[Gordon D. Kaufman]

Gordon Kaufman responding to Stu Kauffman:
You are certainly right, Stu, with your comments on the emotional and other difficulties that arise when modern folk seek to exchange the old traditional anthropomorphic God-idea -- the idea of God as one who loves us and desires to save us from all evils -- for the idea of God as the ongoing creativity in our massive universe, this evolutionary universe that the modern sciences have brought in to our awareness. But these matters can be to some extent addressed if we remember what an amazing creativity it is that we are talking about here, a creativity that is an utter mystery beyond all human comprehension. We are speaking here about the creativity that has gradually brought all this vast enormously diverse universe into being. And among all this vastness and diversity, creatures like us humans -- with our self-consciousness, thoughtfulness, capacity to be responsible, free, and creative, etc., but also with our enormous inclinations and powers to bring into being horrible, gross evils and ugliness -- we humans have also been brought into being (in some hundreds of thousands of years!) by this very same creativity. When one considers the fact that it has been a very long slow path through which our humanness came into being, there seems to be good reason to have some measure of hope that this trajectory of creativity on planet Earth may go on well into the future. This hope, of course, provides a different kind of emotional and spiritual life than the traditional anthropomorphic God made available. It is a life appropriate to grown-up responsible human beings, and is quite different, of course, from the emotional life appropriate to those who thought of themselves as being children cared for by their heavenly Father. Just as the transition from childhood to responsible maturity is often very difficult for us humans to make, especially during adolescence, so also this religio-cultural transition is often very difficult for persons in our culture -- so deeply rooted in the traditional thinking about God -- to make. But for those who are willing and able to make this transition to a faith in and commitment to this magnificent mystery of creativity, a new vista opens up for human life, a vista that invites us and enables us to find profound meaning in our human existence, despite its frightful problems.

[Gordon D. Kaufman]

Gordon Kaufman responding to Stu Kauffman:
You are certainly right, Stu, with your comments on the emotional and other difficulties that arise when modern folk seek to exchange the old traditional anthropomorphic God-idea -- the idea of God as one who loves us and desires to save us from all evils -- for the idea of God as the ongoing creativity in our massive universe, this evolutionary universe that the modern sciences have brought in to our awareness. But these matters can be to some extent addressed if we remember what an amazing creativity it is that we are talking about here, a creativity that is an utter mystery beyond all human comprehension. We are speaking here about the creativity that has gradually brought all this vast enormously diverse universe into being. And among all this vastness and diversity, creatures like us humans -- with our self-consciousness, thoughtfulness, capacity to be responsible, free, and creative, etc., but also with our enormous inclinations and powers to bring into being horrible, gross evils and ugliness -- we humans have also been brought into being (in some hundreds of thousands of years!) by this very same creativity. When one considers the fact that it has been a very long slow path through which our humanness came into being, there seems to be good reason to have some measure of hope that this trajectory of creativity on planet Earth may go on well into the future. This hope, of course, provides a different kind of emotional and spiritual life than the traditional anthropomorphic God made available. It is a life appropriate to grown-up responsible human beings, and is quite different, of course, from the emotional life appropriate to those who thought of themselves as being children cared for by their heavenly Father. Just as the transition from childhood to responsible maturity is often very difficult for us humans to make, especially during adolescence, so also this religio-cultural transition is often very difficult for persons in our culture -- so deeply rooted in the traditional thinking about God -- to make. But for those who are willing and able to make this transition to a faith in and commitment to this magnificent mystery of creativity, a new vista opens up for human life, a vista that invites us and enables us to find profound meaning in our human existence, despite its frightful problems.

[Paul B. Hartzog]

I can't help but think that the presence of self-organization in the universe provides us with a platform to move from a parental metaphor of support (not only God but governments as well) to a more mutualist "peer to peer" horizontal network society in which the appropriate metaphor is one in which we take care of each other.

[Stuart Kauffman]

Paul, I agree with your intuition about self organization, including Maturana and Varela's autopoesis, my own autocatalytic networks for the origin of molecular self reproduction, Robert Ulanowicz, and his Ascendancy measure of the energy flow in an ecosystem and his own ideas about autocatalytic systems in biology, ecology and the economy. At the moment, I am hoping one can find similar examples in the abiotic universe, for as Per Bak, one of the inventors of self organized criticality who died tragically a few years ago said, the complexity of the universe screams out to be understood and hardly is. I have a theoretician's dream that self constructing non-equilibrium systems like biospheres, economies, and perhaps structures in the universe, just maybe the universe itself as a whole - a truly radical and wild speculation, evolve over long times such that, on average, they maximize the diversity of organized processes that can occur. This seems not improbable for our own biosphere as a secular trend, and our global economy over the past 50,000 years that has grown from perhaps 100 goods and services to ten billion in New York alone. And the economy has autopoetic systems in it. For example, the automobile replaced the horse and drove out the buggy and saddlrey and so on, but created the conditions for an oil and gas industry, paved roads, traffic lights, traffic police, bribing traffic police, fast food restaurants, motels and suburbia. In turn, suburbia houses the people who then need the automobiles. It is an autopoetic, or autocatalytic "whole" that has become a centerpiece of the modern economy. Ulanowizc points out that two such autocatalytic webs competing for the same resources "fight one another", as US automakers buying up trolly companies in US cities to end competition for passengers. The same must be true in ecosystems. I find myself wondering if there are general laws about autopoetic but competing and collaborating systems, biotic and abiotic - if the latter exist - and how they structure themselves and organize the flow of matter, energy and information. There is major science to be done here. And if successful, it can only add to the grandure of the creativity of which Gordon Kaufman speaks. Stu

[Kris Sargent]

Mr. Reinhard and others,

This subject fascinates me, so I hope you won't mind if I say a few things. I've been striving with the definition of God for several years, and I agree with most of what is written here; however, I wonder if we can and should go further than 'creativity'? To me there's also of an 'is' in God, and even a 'was' and 'maybe'. Of course, creativity could stand-in for all of this, but I wonder if we should abstract a bit further (no pun intended).

The universe began with the original pure distinction (the "Something-not-Nothing" preserved by all cosmological and sub-particle theories). We can thus say the first act of God was a creation of "distinguishability". This leads me to posit the definition of God as "Something-not-Nothing."

Thus, to me, God reveals himself in the world as Something-not-Nothing -- as information, unconcealment, aletheia, wave-function collapse, curvature, etc. -- which cannot quite be encapsulated by the concept 'creativity.'

I think this allows us to make a few significant statements about us. If it's the case -- and everything I've read says it is -- that the human brain and its products comprise the most complex 'systems' in the universe, then we can truly say we are the tip of an arrow leading away from the Nothing; we are the greatest Somethings in the universe. We are the greatest accumulation of distinguishability, so whether you use logical depth or algorithmic randomness in defining complexity, our specialness is preserved.

And if we buy into that, then we also see that the question of whether we are doing the will of "God" turns not just on creativity or emergence per se. Instead, it orients the entirety of our existence -- our creations _and_ omissions -- toward the next great Something, the next level of complexity, the next mark of logical depth. As such it gives sentients like us a North Star toward which to direct our various activities, a context and a narrative in which we can find the meaning of our existence. Then, when all this is combined with our knowledge of man and his environment, it gives us a measure with which to judge good from bad, and thereby gives us a foundation for moral and political philosophy.

Maybe it's just me -- I am after all trying to rebuild these subjects using information-theoretic and bio-theoretic concepts -- but I find it hard to "usefully" recapture the sacred with just the concept of 'creativity'.

Regards,
Sargent

[Paul B. Hartzog]

"self constructing non-equilibrium systems like biospheres, economies, and perhaps structures in the universe, just maybe the universe itself as a whole - a truly radical and wild speculation, evolve over long times such that, on average, they maximize the diversity of organized processes that can occur."

Honestly, I think that's pretty close but I would follow Bateson and suggest "optimize" and not "maximize."

Moreover, I tend to turn to the three dynamics in Hinduism to underscore what is going on in the universe: creation, preservation, destruction.

Yes spontaneous self-organization occurs, but so does dissolution. The way I see it, complex systems come into being, persist, and evanesce across all scales and times. Right now, we participate in many complex wholes, some large, some small, some fast, some slow, and we are also being participated in by other parts (I turn to Niklas Luhmann for this kind of thinking).

As global culture increasingly manifests overlapping interpenetrated dynamics at spatial and temporal scales that we can perceive (panarchy), this will provoke (I think and hope) a new renegotiation of ourselves and our landscapes.

Hope that makes sense.

[Gordon D. Kaufman]

3/20/07 All of the aspects of the universe that are cited in the last few comments are certainly grand and awe-inspiring. But they all have come into being in one way or another, all are products of some kind of creativity. The notion of creativity is, of course, the profound insight of our forefathers who, millennia ago, gave us the idea of God, whose creating (as they said) has brought into being all that has been, is now, and all that will be. Below is a short unpublished piece that I put together some time ago. It is about thinking of this amazing creativity itself as what we today should understand to be God.

Creativity
Gordon D. Kaufman
(Copyright 2008)

Religious conservatives often take strong objection to modern evolutionary theory, a theory regarded by most scientists as providing the best understanding we have of the development of life on planet Earth, including human life. The theory of evolution, these conservatives claim, rules out the basic traditional religious belief that God created the world and all that is in it – including us humans – and it is, thus, a serious threat to religious faith. I believe this is a misplaced argument; and I want to suggest here that the theory of evolution actually opens the door to a much more awe-inspiring understanding of God than we find in traditional religious thinking and worship.
In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam God has been understood most fundamentally as the Creator – the source of this magnificent universe and all its contents. This understanding is drawn largely from the grand opening chapters of the Bible, where God is displayed as like a kind of all-powerful human being. In Genesis 2, for example, God takes clay from the ground and – like a human potter or sculptor – molds it into Adam. In Genesis 1, a considerably later more polished presentation of God’s creative activity, God is portrayed as like an all-powerful magician or king who gives an order, “Let there be light!” and light is mysteriously created immediately. These similarities of God’s actions to human kinds of action were not, of course, the main theme of these stories: their central message was that this whole glorious universe and all its contents, including us humans, was brought into being by amazing acts of creativity – a profound mystery beyond human comprehension.
In the biblical story, this mysterious creativity is not confined to the ultimate beginnings of everything: it continues to be manifested from time to time, bringing new realities – quite unexpected new realities – into being. As the prophet Isaiah declared, for example:
Thus says the Lord,…
“I am about to do a new thing: (43:19a)….
From this time forward I make you hear new things,
hidden things that you have not known.
They are created now, not long ago;
before today you have never heard of them” (48:6b-7).
Here Isaiah presents God as virtually the mystery of creativity itself, continuously bringing new things into the world. Where did these ancient story-tellers get the idea of this mysterious creativity?
The authors of the early Genesis texts were obviously aware that many new things come into the world through human artistic handiwork and human speaking. This was likely the source of their idea of creativity. And it is not surprising, therefore, that they imagined God’s creativity as proceeding in these human-like ways. So in Genesis 1 and 2 it was God’s almighty creativity about which they spoke. The human-like feature of these stories is not, of course, their main point: it is their presentation of the fascinating mystery of creativity that is their important gift to us.
Today we have a fuller understanding of our universe and of the creativity that has brought it into being – and like the old biblical creativity story, this new one also is profoundly mysterious. The story begins with the so-called Big Bang which occurred some 14 billion years ago. Why or how did this Big Bang occur? We have no way of knowing that, as astrophysicist Stephen Hawking tells us. It is a great mystery. Following upon the Big Bang the creativity continued (why? we don’t know – more mystery!). And very gradually the cosmos – with its galaxies and stars and planets, and many different sorts of atoms – began to form, as this mysterious creativity continued through many evolutionary stages, over billions of years. Eventually conditions were such that life could be created; and it appeared on planet Earth. A further great mystery! The creativity continued on with the evolution of that life into many amazing patterns and forms, as it gradually covered the earth. Animal life was created, and in the course of more billions of years we humans gradually came into being. What a magnificent mystery this evolutionary story is: everything there is has come into being through creativity!
I am suggesting here that we think of God not as the human-like creator of the Bible but simply as this creativity itself. As we have been noting, this massive creativity is a profound mystery to us, largely beyond our comprehension; and there is no reason today to think of it as human-like. This amazing evolutionary story greatly widens and deepens our conception of this mystery. Creativity – God! – this awe-inspiring mystery is manifest through all of this long process from the Big Bang down to the year 2008. And we can hope and expect this creativity will continue on for a long future.
The evolutionary story that our sciences have found so fruitful in their work is throughout (as we have been noting) a story of this mystery of creativity. And this profound mystery itself, I am suggesting, we can quite properly think of as God. Human talk about God – from the beginning of the Bible onward – has been talk about creativity, an ongoing creativity. Evolutionary thinking is no threat to God-the-mystery, nor is it a threat to faith in this God. It is a kind of thinking that brings all that is into intimate relation with the mystery of God.