Divine Evolution (not I.D.)

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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Thought this fit nicely with a couple of current threads:

Divine Evolution

By Stuart Kauffman (Director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary and Watson Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at the Harvard Divinity School)

Full article: www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/ … 89f6bf&p=1

Selected quotes:

I claim we must, once again, evolve our sense of God, reinvent the sacred, reclaim our human spirituality, seek to converge on a global ethic across our diverse civilizations, integrate our full humanity as no civilization has sought to do, and build with wisdom toward a global civilization, hopefully forever diverse, that will emerge even as – perhaps because – we may face economic collapse.
[…]
I believe that we no longer need a Creator God, we need God’s creativity.

And the scientifically radical new world view I will sketch suggests that the dreams of Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and Schrodinger of a fully lawful universe entailed by the fundamental laws of physics are wrong.
In its place, at least for the biosphere, econosphere, and human culture and history, if not aspects of the abiotic world, is a partially lawless ceaseless, generous and generative creativity that seems to force us to rethink our foundations
[…]

  • And the central question: Do you think you could say ahead of time all possible Darwinian pre-adaptations for all species alive now? You may say you do not know all species alive now, so I restrict my question to: Can you prestate all possible pre-adaptations that might arise for humans?
    […]
    Once there were lung fish, swim bladders were in the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere. Two billion years ago, when no multi-cellular organisms existed, swim bladders were not in the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere. Then we seem to be saying that we do not know what is “in” the Adjacent Possible of the bio-sphere. We do not know the set of the possibilities
    […]
    We confront something not in our science; the present state of the bio-sphere, economy, history, call it the “Actual,” sets its Adjacent Possible, then something new among these opportunities emerges, and resets the Actual and a new Adjacent Possible in a partially lawless, ceaselessly creative, generative, yet non-random emergence. We have no concepts for this in our science. It is new and, if true, it must change our world view in ways we cannot foresee. The universe is forever creative and partially beyond natural law.

If we cannot know what can happen, then reason, the highest human virtue of our beloved Enlightenment, is an inadequate guide to living our lives forward into what my colleague, Harvard theologian Gordon Kaufman, calls Mystery. We need reason, emotion, intuition, imagination, story and metaphor, all we have evolved with and constructed as biohistorical animals.
[…]
WHAT REALLY MATTERS

We have much to rethink about what is truly of value to our lives and how to orient ourselves.

Are we mature enough to begin to give up the Creator God and keep the creativity? I think just maybe we verge on being ready to do so: Let God be our name, our chosen invented symbol, for the fully natural creativity in the universe. We are not made in this God’s image; we, too, are this God, along with butterflies, lichen, and streams.
All of life and the planet are sacred.

We are invited to membership so we are not alone. We are invited to stewardship to the best of our limited knowledge. We are invited to re-vision a global ethic as a global civilization may emerge and our civilizations co-evolve together and invent new cultural forms, an ethic that can guide a global civilization we can partially shape as it emerges, partially unknowably.

We are invited to live with faith and courage, for that has been the mandate of life, never fully “knowing” for 31/2 billion years. This God is awesome, nurturing in the vast possibilities it affords, although bad and evil abound. We are invited to a sharable sense of the sacred and God across all our sacred traditions.

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Sounds pretty good to me.

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With all do respect to his hard work in his field:

Summary…
We keep finding out new stuff that shows that old stuff was wrong.
Therefore, God is our creation.
Let’s embrace our awesome creativity of what we don’t know!

woohoo… :unamused:

And this:

Translates to:

shrug
Sartre already beat him to the punch:

It just sounds like he just had his personal realization of it.

4

I give it to you that it’s a popular piece, Stumps. I did, though, find something in its simplicity refreshing… as an athiest, about the attitude towards theism. And also, of course, as a simpleton… For instance:

Would you allow any room for coopting “God” during such emergencies? It at least provides some point of connection… anyhow, I think the article is just a teaser… he has a book out, “Reinventing the Sacred”, don’t know anything about it though.

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I’m spiritual; a theist for most of my life and currently; largely for the reasons cited by Sartre.

Let me put it this way.
The world might be ending in 2012 by some crazy alien psycho invasion, or cosmic damnation.
OK, fine…now I can concern myself with such an idea and get all wrapped up in it and forget about my life and focus on that horrible end to all life instead.
My life would become shit; regardless if that occurs.

Or I can just let that be whatever it comes out to be and just concentrate on what I can do in my life; love my family and strive for personal peace and ego-satisfaction.

Keeping this in mind…

The world can be completely devoid of any gods and I could be believing in jack shit and cosmically wasting my time.
OK, fine…now I can concern myself with such an idea and remove the idea from my life and try to find an alternative spiritual experience in something tangibly related to humanity; like philosophy, science, or life in general as it is.
My life would become pretty flat and methodical about reality as I go about searching for my personal spiritual replacement in the world that is in front of me.

Or I can just let the reality of any gods be whatever it comes out to be, as well as whatever the reality of the cosmic eternal life of humans may or may not be, and just enjoy what I get out of my religious experience and paths as they relate to my life enriching the values that I hold in a spiritual manner, which allows for them to be somewhat tangible as an essence.

shrug
Personally…I choose the latter.

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I see what you’re saying, Stumps. Perhaps it’s simply a case of audience, and Kauffman is principally speaking to atheists/non-theists, providing them with the possibility of participating in observance of a very powerful archetype within the terms of non-supernatural commitments. What would the dialectic (yes, I know that is too simple a structure for the issue) look like between theists and a/non-theists, if the latter took up this paradigm?

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I see it often enough…

It’s not about the atheist supposing spirituality; it’s about the theist dropping their extremely defined ideals of spirituality and reaching across to find the common agreement of spirituality experienced as being human between the theist and the atheist.

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I don’t agree in this instance, though I conceed to the rationale of your jaundice. But in this case, I think the driving thought is more in the vein of providing a better reasoned home for the orphaned spirituality of the “everyman athiest”, e.g. they who might blindly travel through phases of sundry “spiritual populisms”, none of which really hold water, and who otherwise suffer blank periods of simple spiritual displacement, but remain unable to take up the theistic experience. My sense is that this spiritual reinvention transcends itself out of simply a commitment to scientism (the reigning proxy), but retains science’s backbone while at once explicitly involving the presence of Mystery, and thereby re-legitimizing non-scientific means of expression. The question I would pose, rather, would be how a practice of worship would gain definition.

To return to a previous point of yours:

Would it be fair to characterize you as a “spiritual hedonist”? If it would, then might not the above “reinvention of the sacred” simply offer an expanded menu for the spiritual palate?

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I don’t immediately think of the concept with a bitterness attributed, but I do admit that I am soured by and religious individual that is overbearing, but I feel the same way about people in general regardless of their position.

I’m not a big fan of converting people to anything on the grounds of pushing.

To the point though…you just said what I meant when you stated:

The reason I say that it is the theist’s responsibility is simply because the theist runs a tight control of beliefs compared against the atheist when it comes to spirituality.
The theist, then, needs to be able to have an open mind for discussion and find areas of common understanding if they wish to hold discourse on the topic of spirituality with an atheist.

Otherwise, the conversation will simply become an examination of the theist’s religious holdings as examined by the atheist, which isn’t the same conversation at all.

Well…let’s be careful here.
I don’t pursue just things that are good.
I believe the overall experience that I gain is good, but I do not look down upon negative experiences as they allow for some of the most profound growth as it causes introspection.
Even where profound growth is not gained, the negative is still needed as it is part of our wonderful experience of being human.

I mean come on!
I’m a human being!
It’s amazing how many people skip this amazing fact, and in my opinion, gift…regardless if it’s given or just is the way that it is.

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Agreed on your otherwise, statistically anyway. Conceptually, though, I think what’s up for grabs currently revolves precisely around whether “a tight control of beliefs” is what is called for. I grant you there’s great utility in having such command, but, in terms of what I think Kauffmann seems to be pointing at, a mechanism for providing some slack (in terms both of science and religion) is in demand so as to reintroduce a pragmatic form of spirituality to contemporary searchers. It is a curiosity within myself, as a flabby athiest, that a “spiritual sense” accompanies my thoughts, and though I most often dismiss it as an after-effect of having stared at a religious flame, I still feel a need to provide it some practical context. But any thought of placing it in a stricter confine (for instance, in my case, attempts at Buddhism) seems to diminish it. It seems to require a very loose and unpredefined framework. I see Kauffmann’s attempt to describe a creative arena as perhaps offering something along those lines… though I certainly don’t have any grand commitments in that regard.

Ok, but do you pursue negative (spiritual) experiences? Actually, though, I get the impression that you’re someone who’d be prepared to… though in that same moment, it occurs to me, then, that you’d be a candidate for experiencing a “reinvented sacred” perhaps precisely for what you’d gain for going through the process… just some rushed conjectures, though… Anyhow, speaking of pursuing good things, time for some time with my lovely wife… :wink:

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No…people need to be flexible and hold to their intuition more, and not their dogma.

I’ve been saying that dogma is not my soul for as long as I can recall.

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Psychobabble. He uses (and invents) words inserted into paragraphs where where a phrase or sentence would do. All he’s saying here is that we are creative creatures living in an objective world.

“Econosphere” :question:

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Econosphere = the realm of greatest conspiracy, where Science becomes Religion and the Divine is asked to create (e.g. derivate) things out of Nothing all over again, and to do it with mathematical precision just to keep things theoretically consistent…

The stuff I was more interested in was the imagery created by how he presented the notion of “adjacent possible” (might need to refer to the full article for that)… which is where he’s implying much more than that we’re simply creative creatures living in an objective world, but that the whole notion of “objective world” gets reconceived into something beyond just permutations and combinations, and affords a much more compelling sense of “creation” (and mystery)… making “creativity” much more intimately what our challenge truly is… some sort of transcendental materialism… :question:

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Not “econ-”, as having to do with money or economics???

Would I be wrong to transliterate that as wondering whether there is a divine spark co-existing with our material existence or not?

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I think there is a God that has always existed as long as we’ve had questions. This God, call it divine if you like, is not a being, but is everything we do not know…yet. And as always, the more we learn, the less we know. This is what makes the God infinite.

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I view God as equivalent with Truth. And since Truth (God, if It is sentient) is (probably) infinite, as we learn more, we still come no closer to complete knowledge.

Again, I don’t believe anyone can conceive of something/anything that’s “always been”.

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Ya, “econo-” not “eco” : I have visions of the quantum mathematicians who hired out their guns to financial institutions as believing their command of numeracy was tantamount to a prophet’s connection to the Divine, i.e. the idea that God is in the details (in this case, numbers).

I don’t know. I guess that’s the question. My impression is that, if such is the case, it is nonetheless a “reinvented” perception of what “divine spark” might mean… e.g. (if I may shift metaphor) a relatively new set of comparatively empty baggage, ready to be packed for a different sort of (e.g. fully global) trip to a revised destination (e.g. “here”). Not that we couldn’t pack our lucky underwear and a few favorite other things… :smiley:

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…and nameless, so to speak…

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While I can’t grasp the philosophical ‘proof’ to it’s fullest, the statement I presented has been thrown back at me as a step in the the proof of the existence of God. It is supposedly one of the tenets in theology. It rides along the analogy that trying to grasp what God is, is like trying to put the ocean into a cup.

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Yes, something along the lines of Anselm’s Ontological Proof… though it might also be said that tautologies abound in it, and that, even as a step, we needn’t require it is a step to “proving God” per se. At this point, at best it “proves” Mystery, or rather, simply points it out. Equally (though not to re-raise this worm can), trying to grasp what “nothing” is is like trying to drink the empty half of the cup… in that regard, though, what is the ontological status of the “adjacent possibility”? If, in fact, it is truly as yet undetermined, then from a temporal point of view, does it share some quality of as yet “being nothing”? In any case, the mystery for us is how we might be implicated in the ordering of the “actual possibility’s” existence (to vaguely refer to David Bohm’s thoughts)…