Reinventing the wheel

The advertisement for "Reinventing the Sacred" by Stuart Kauffman just came in from WIE. The intro seemed interesting enough:

"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 our full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never fully know."

Then, however, I googled the title and found a video with Kauffman himself explaining the essentials of his view on the Sacred and what it is that needs to be reinvented. In short, Kauffman is another highly intelligent person who unfortunately can see only two major cultures in today's "First World" - namely, the ahteistic, agnostic, secularist humanist on one hand, and the rigid, fundamentalist, mythic-God worshipping believers on the other. For those of you fluent in integralese, that's the classic level/line fallacy, commited not long ago by the Four Horsemen (with a feable nuanced exception by Sam Harris, not to make much of). Kauffman too speaks of "faith and reason". So, it's back to square one with this attempt in reconciling the opposites which are not really that. There is potential, nonetheless, in Kauffman's point of view, to become influential in both camps and this then may well serve as an introduction to a truly transformative discussion with more integral ideas being included as necessary for building mutual trust. (Just speculating, of course.) Kauffman mentions Wittgenstein and Weinberg, but certainly won't mention Wilber and Wallace who have done more to bridge the Gap, known both as matter vs. mind and science vs. spirituality. First, however, I should read the book that won't let biology be reduced to physics (chapter 4) - of course Kauffman is a biologist - while wondering if ethics and even "the Sacred" can be somehow reduced to "biocomplexity."

There's a Ning network devoted to Reinventing the Sacred, where you'll find the aforementioned video and some discussion that you may want to join if you resonate.

And finally a quote from the book:

"Today the schism between faith and reason finds voice in the sometimes vehement disagreements between Christian or Islamic fundamentalists, who believe in the transcendent Creator God, and agnostic and atheist "secular humanists" who do not believe in the 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. (...) Ways of life hand in the balance. This book hopes to address this schism in a new way."

Ok - Aztec, Mayan, Incan? But do read the pages made available at Amazon's Search Inside.