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Reinventing the Sacred Rating: 7 on a scale of 10 Review I believe Stuart Kaufman is a physician and a philosopher by training. He hangs out at the Santa Fe Institute, so he is bright enough to sit around and get paid to think. Thinking is probably his greatest asset, and as such, it also implies the possibility of a great imbalance. Like Dr. Kaufman, I too, have spent a great deal of time thinking and am similarly likely unbalanced. Fortunately, I actually understood nearly all of what he was talking about (probably my prior biology and mathematics background). I don't especially agree with him or his primary premise, but that's okay. His basic premise is: there is no need for God, we can love and appreciate the sacredness of the universe and the world we live in without having to draw on the symbol known as or referred to as "God". He believes the "sacred" can exist independent of any concept of God. If I understand him correctly he is an atheist. He takes us on a journey demonstrating how the earth was able to evolve life without the involvement of God. He does this through the consideration of very basic principles. This is not a book about evolution per se. This is a complex vital discussion of concepts about how we have looked at the world and universe. Okay, I'll come clean up front, I believe there is a God. I am in my mid-fifties, and have had a secular formal education. I have a Bachelor's degree with majors in mathematics and biology, a Master's degree in Interdisciplinary studies in counseling, psychology and general science, and a Doctor of Medicine degree. I worked my way through all the really nifty fun classes like Evolution, Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy, Embryology and Animal Behavior during my undergraduate years. I truly loved this stuff. Never the less, the God-less world portrayed in the realms of academia never made any sense to me. Since February of 1974, I have read every issue of Scientific American printed. I generally read most of the magazine. In addition, I read on a monthly basis the standard journals of internal medicine and a couple of other magazines such as Backpacker, PC World, American Hunter, and Home Power. I can say with some certainty that most of the literature I read has little concern for our origins except for Scientific American. In this magazine, I find a minimum of at least one (usually several) articles, opinion piece(s) or short piece that "bash" anyone who seems to believe in God or fails to accept evolution as anything less than settled knowledge and fact, suggesting that they are somehow deficient (usually not individually deficient but they are viewed as the collective masses of scientifically illiterate who believe anything but the ideas espoused by learned types who know the truth). I remember professors from college and medical school who were like this also, but there were some (even many) who were not. I consider myself to be highly literate in science. As Carl G. Jung noted in his writings, and even the titles of his books, western man has been searching for his soul for some time now. I would say Stuart Kauffman is also searching for his soul. A soul can be hard to find when you assume you don't have one. This is, unfortunately, the way "modern man" pursues the empty place within himself that has no name. Stuart Kauffman wants a world of sacredness, but wants no God. I suppose he could consider Buddhism, but then they might have some less than intellectual concepts to go along with it, and their origin story might be unacceptable at best. I think he would do well to ask himself why he needs a story of origin with no God, just as I have to ask myself why I prefer an origin story with God in it? Stuart Kauffman's god is as he describes it "fully natural". His god is the natural "creativity" seen in the universe. He sets out to show us how creativity can happen with no god, yet would have us accept that the very nature and essence of creativity represents a god we could all accept whether atheist or believer. This god is not a being but instead is simply the creative process of the evolution of DNA in the life around us. He believes this process is worthy of being considered sacred. This "life" emerges from the milieu and is not something you can predict based on basic principles of physics. I have to say I truly enjoyed his description and understanding of "emergence". He spends a fair bit of time explaining how reductionism, the idea that things can be reduced down to the basic concepts of physics, fails to lead to any principles that would predict the development of life. Biological systems are seen as "emergent" in this sense, they are entities that cannot be predicted to develop based on the underlying basic principles of physics. He describes many different things as being emergent, for example, economies are emergent among human beings, there are no basic principles from which they can be predicted to naturally assemble so to speak. Development of entities seem to emerge from the lower levels of organization, things that build up so to speak may be thought of as emergent when you cannot seem to predict their occurrence based on rules governing the lower level of organization. This is an important concept. One of the important ideas I learned about in mathematics, but even more cogently in my graduate training in counseling, was to have an acute awareness of a person's and my personal assumptions about problems, philosophy, etc, i.e. what are the underlying assumptions being talked around but not always mentioned. In mathematics we always called it the "given" when we were doing proofs. Sometimes the given is actually quite extensive in reality, even vast. It consists of what we accept as true before we start to show our new proof. The same is true in psychology and medicine. The kinds of philosophy a person believes in, what their spiritual beliefs are, what prior experiences they bring to a given situation, what their fears are, what their past experiences with disease or doctors are, etc., all greatly effect their understanding, compliance and adherence, follow-up, emotional responses, etc. These are the ideas of Aristotle expressed in his ideas on dialectics. The best way to attack another's argument is to come at the basic underlying assumptions In this book, it is important to understand that he is describing a system of thought and belief based on the premise that there is no God. He has no proof that there is not a God, nor is it easy to prove the positive that there is a God. He is well aware you have difficulty proving a negative. And, believers are well aware that it is hard to prove the positive case. He is mostly concerned with the proposition that "if" is there is no God, then you could conceive of the world coming into existence and developing by the concepts he describes. He is attempting to create a coherent system of the development of the earth and universe that can be understood without invoking the God symbol. In the process of studying his system we are encouraged to marvel at the wonder of it all to the point where we see the system as sacred in and of itself. In the beginning of the book he describes four "injuries" in our secular society: 1) the artificial division between the sciences and the humanities, 2) the artificial idea that we live in a reductionistic scientific world where the "real world we live in" in truth has no values, 3) that spirituality is foolish or at least questionable, and 4) we all lack a global ethic. In order to create the sacred we will need to be healed from these injuries. We will need to heal the split between "reason and faith", between "science and the humanities", the want of spirituality, "heal the wound derived from the false reductionist belief that we live in a world of facts without values", and we will need to develop a "global ethic". I actually applaud these concepts, but for very different reasons than what he gives. His thinking on these subjects is rather rudimentary at this point in my opinion. His second chapter discusses reductionism and moves into Godel's incompleteness theorem. The key point being that given a rich system of mathematical concepts, you can always come up with questions about the system that do not have answers and will never have answers. You cannot reduce rich systems to base principles that can answer all the questions about a system. If you could, then you could know absolutely everything about the system, obviously, we are from reaching anything remotely close to this. And, the key point of the theorem is that it cannot be done. There are likely things about God that cannot be known. There will be things about evolution that cannot be known. We must live with ambiguity. We must live by "faith" no matter what system we choose to follow. What strikes me as interesting is that God told us that a few millennia ago. Stuart Kauffmann, despite all his sophistication and intellect tells us the same thing, we must take some things on faith. He uses the same word as the religious communities use. The difference is he assumes there is no God. The split between science and the humanities is a significant issue. On the surface it seems like a split between the so called "hard sciences" (the ones who are now telling us we must take some things by faith) and the so called soft fields of literature, philosophy, art, psychology, political science, etc. I would like to suggest a much more insidious issue here. It is an issue that permeates our society and the world. It is a huge issue that goes essentially unnoticed. In the realm of Myers-Briggs psychological type it has to do with the differences between the Thinking and Feeling functions. Jung believed we all had preferences for one function to collect information/data and one function for making decisions. The thinking and feeling dichotomy is related tto thinking and feeling based values used for making decisions. Thinking based values are linear, analytic, time based, dispassionate, data driven, impersonal, objective, etc. The feeling based values are relational, people-centered, warm emotionally, non-linear, passion driven, personal, subjective, etc. The thinking feeling preferences are two very opposite paradigms. They complement and balance one another in a very real fashion, but they seem or feel like foreigners to each other. As the world of academia has developed over time, those who have pursued realms with a predominance of thinking based values have tended to be scientists such as physicists, chemists, mathematicians, biologists, philosophers and engineers. In this world thinking is clearly "in charge". Meanwhile, those with a predominance for feeling based values have tended to be in realms such as literature, drama, art, theology, psychology, counseling, music, etc. In these realms, feeling based values have been "in charge". Let me give you an example. My young son, a very strong thinking based values type, went off to college initially wanting to be an English major. Now, can an English major be a thinking type, yes, absolutely. Will he enjoy a realm where feeling based values predominate, perhaps not so much. It took him about a year to realize there was to much discord between his preferences as a thinker and the demands needed to do well in a realm based predominantly on feeling based values. The story is more complex because there are other preferences in play for his particular situation, but it was clearly a major factor. This paradigm of difference can erupt into full blown conflict with regularity. It happens routinely in marriages, child rearing, churches, clubs, dating, counseling, employer-employee relations, the military, in preferences for political candidates, local politics, state politics, national politics, international politics, religion, education, labor relations, and on and on and on. The issue is not in the particular area being considered, but in the deeper level relating to the differences inherent in the values used by people who prefer thinking or feeling based values for decision making. This sounds sort of simple in a way, but in fact it is remarkably complex. Carl Jung spent his life studying these sorts of differences and found a rich and deep understanding of human beings which seems to be unknown to most people in science. Carl Jung, in contrast to most other physicians, psychologists and psychiatrists, believed we were inherently or naturally spiritual creatures. I believe this is quite true. When Kauffman says we need to heal ourselves from our wounds with regard to spirituality, I agree, but my understanding of what needs to happen may be a little different. I believe we must heal the rift between preferences such as feeling and thinking based values by learning to value and balance both aspects of humanness. This sounds simple on the surface, but it is devilishly hard to accomplish. A high quality liberal arts education, in theory, should be able to accomplish the task, but, alas, I have just such an education and I know that it was woefully inadequate to the task. My wife has a wonderful seminary education and hers comes closer, but even there they just scratched the surface. Our society and world are awash in the battles that erupt between the differences that exist in deep seated psychological preferences. These differences drive conflict at all levels of relational interaction; from person to person, person to group, group to group, and at all levels from friends to nation states. It can be further seen in recent writings to drive the cyclical activity of generational history and thereby contribute to some of our bloodiest wars and our most sacred caring. These events can all be understood in terms of deep psychological preferences. Do we need a new ethic, yes, we surely do? Where would we find such a new ethic? The answer to the question is not to be found in the pages of Stuart Kauffman's book. In an amazing moment in the book he faces our reality quite squarely, realizing that regardless of what we choose to put our faith in we must make meaning in our lives despite the ignorance we must confront. He then says, with no mention of its source, "Our choice is between life and death. If we choose life, we must live with faith and courage, forward, unknowing." Let me state this from a different perspective. Let us turn to a different source and find the same words expressed by God:
I contend the "new ethic" is nothing of the sort. The ethic is old, even ancient. The new ethic is to be found in an understanding of and embracing of the value of what I call "the other". Throughout literature, theology, poetry, music, history, and art we are compelled to deal with those people and ideas we consider to be "the other". How do we do this? Across the entablature of a building on the campus where I attended college stand these words carved in stone, "He who dares to teach must never cease to learn". I submit this is a significant part of what we must do to find the "new ethic". But, there is no new ethic. Our ethic is ancient and old. To find it we must go to the ancient texts, to the inner well, to the places where dreams live. We must seek to understand ourselves ever more deeply. We must recognize how shallow we are. We must come to grips with how we create and maintain "the other" all around us. The "most other" among us is the concept and person of God. This is the hardest of all for us to grasp. It is so hard, Stuart Kauffman would take thousands of years of profound and meaningful history and chuck it in the trash. I must be fair to Dr Kauffman and say that on page 250 of his book he makes an attempt to mend things up some. He wonders if rationality is only a part of Carl Jung's "tetrad of how humans find their way in the world and science itself begins to tells us that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives forward? Then perhaps we must reexamine and reintegrate the arts and humanities along with science, practical action, politics, ethics, and spirituality, as Flanagan writes." If one studies Jung thoroughly, one would find that this is indeed the case. If I can use thinking in place of rationality, then we clearly find the opposed opposite "feeling" as an essential requirement for balance in the world. The world we live in is sorely out of balance. He speaks of a need for a "new global ethic". He speaks of a need for a new Eden. I agree with him that Eden is a powerful symbol. He says Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. In my New American Standard Bible, Adam and Eve ate from the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil". He says it is no sin to have knowledge. I agree to a point, but to have knowledge and be unbalanced is not very useful. We rather excel at knowledge at this point, yet still we struggle greatly to use it wisely. Eden sounds like a wonderful place when I read about it and project into it what I want to see there. I have heard Eden preached about often, and many would like to go back there. But, I have no wish to return to Eden. To return to Eden would be to return to that period of development where we were just gaining consciousness. When I read the story of Eden I hear something very different than most people hear. When I read about Eden I hear a story about children. I remember well when my children were small. They had a calendar with a saying on it, "The beginning of wisdom is the naming of things". Our development progresses in just this way with the early words consisting of the naming of things such as mama, dada, water, doggy, toy, chicken nuggets, etc. When I read that God brought the animals before Adam to name them, I project an image of Adam as a child. What great fun it would be to sit with Adam and let him name the animals. This is God nurturing a child in my estimation. The child will need a mate like all the other creatures. We find God creating woman in a way that we can almost understand today. Now we have two children together. Like all children they have been given some directions. They have been told to stay out of the pomegranate tree in the center of the garden. They are not to eat it's fruit. We all have told children what not to do. And, children, being children, do not always obey. This story makes so much more sense to me when I see them as young. They are barely aware. They are growing up. The serpent comes and "tempts" them to do what they have been told not do. I remember well the days of youth and the older boys, more aware boys, who would try to get me to do something I knew I should not do. This serpent though was very clever. He knew how to tempt children. He suggested to Eve that if she ate the pomegranate she would be like her father/mother God. This is such a devastating temptation. It is virtually impossible to imagine them doing anything other than what they did. I feel so sorry for them to have to grow like this. I can't tell you what an ache I feel somewhere deep inside. I have raised children, and I know my children, and even myself, were just like Adam and Eve. What child doesn't want to be just like their parent at some point. There is a whole phase in the elementary years when my son wanted to be just like me. It was awe inspiring and humbling. You could see this little guy wanting to be just like dad. This is what they were tempted with, they could be just like their parent, God. Of course they ate the pomegrante, they had to eat it, to do other would deny the love and respect they had for their father/mother God. They wanted to be just like God, and the more aware serpent knew this would entice them into doing something they should not do. They ate the pomegranate, and truth be told, they did become like their father/mother. Now like every child, they grew suddenly. They were given a new level of awareness. Now they knew they were naked. What parent hasn't watched their child run naked through the house, oblivious, unaware, and deliciously free in a way most of us have forgotten. I remember well our children doing this. And, well I remember the day when our oldest turned about seven years old. Suddenly, without warning, she became aware she was naked. There would be no more running across the room with bare butt and flying hair for her. We are all naked before God, but now we cover up. We cannot return to Eden because we are aware at a level beyond Eden. Still God has told us to come to him as a little child. Now this is the big challenge. How do we come to God as a little child with all the awareness we have as adults? This is no small task. Going back to Eden is regressive. The challenge is to approach God as a little child from the perspective of all we know and feel as an adult. This is a great task, and not an easy one for us. It is the knowledge of good and evil that allows us to be adults in our awareness. The difficulty comes when we use our knowledge of good and evil so destructively. A new paradigm will not help. We must synthetically put together what we already know and feel. We must strive for a world where "the other" is valued and respected. The challenges before us are immense. As God told Joshua, "Be strong and courageous, for you shall give this people possession of the land which I swore to your fathers to give to them." It will require courage and a willingness to search deeper into the well of our souls as people. Throwing God out will only worsen our depravity and take us far from the roots of our healing. We need to heal the rifts that exist between our basic psychological qualities. We can only do this by coming to know ourselves and the other, by coming to grips with and balancing our differences, and learning to value the other. We must surrender our projections and in so doing remove the log from our own eye before we try to help the speck in our brothers eye. We may find the speck in our brothers eye is just the reflection of the tree in our own eye. This sounds sort of poetic, but it is very difficult. By the time enough of us figure it out, we are old, getting ready to move on, and some never figure it out. We live in a world of people barely aware, yet we feel very alive. Throwing out God would be like cutting off your head to save your life. I can't imagine a sadder situation. Stuart Kauffman would have us revere the natural creator god. I am sorry to say, God is so much bigger, and far more powerful than this meek proposition. What Stuart Kauffman proposes is a surrender to oblivion couched as wonder and mystery. His soul-less world would die in ignominy. God cannot be easily killed by an act of the mind or will. Thinkers cannot so easily cast God aside. Oh, they try, but alas, such futile attempts are attempts at dissociation. Those who have tried the hardest to dissociate from God have been the ones who turned around and found God right there. Our task is delve deeper into the spiritual. We must plumb dive deeper into the clear water. Fundamentalist approaches will not get us there. Creating a new thinking based fundamentalism will not get us there. No, we are going to have to work much harder. Recently, our Friends church and a local Catholic church have been sponsoring a series at our local hospital watching the PBS series Unnatural Causes, dealing with our problems in health care and health. Recently, I have also been reading Bruce Alexander's book The Globalization of Addiction. The series and this book both have a focus on how the dislocation of people from their culture leads to disease and poor health. I like this focus. I believe this paradigm can get us closer to where we need to go. But, the complexity is so overwhelming. Still, I believe we can do it. And, we must do it generation after generation, recreate culture, rediscover the other, learn to value the other and find balance in all aspects of our lives. Jesus put it simply, Love God, and love our neighbors as ourselves. The details take a lifetime. All opinions are those of Curtis Climer, MD Copyright 2010
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