Stuart Kauffman sees the god word as our most vital symbol and he wants to take some of its sense of the sacred from the hands of the religious – not all of it, just some - who apply it to a transcendent god, and bring it into this world so we can experience that sense of the sacred - awe, wonder, splendor – in nature’s nonreductionist, creative, spontaneous self-organization at more and more complex levels of existence from which emerges unexpected, surprising creatures and an unpredictable future. This ceaseless creativity, which, he notes, is “awesome in what has come to pass in reality, and God enough for me and many, where God is the creativity of the universe, yielding a global ethics of respect for all life, the planet, awe, wonder and spirituality cut free from a transcendent God.”

That natural god fits into our secular culture and would bring with it the sense of the sacred heretofore attributed exclusively to a transcendent god. He supports his argument with marvelous evidence from the sciences and builds a strong case for this natural god who would fill the void left by the failure of reason as a basis for natural morality, values and ethics.
If the empirical evidence does not suffice to judge reason a failure – and it should – this ceaselessly creative, unpredictable future cares the burden of proof, “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 itself has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason.” (Emphasis original.)

Although the Newtonian machine model of the universe provided astonishing material benefits, it also drove us into a wasteland empty of meaning and value. That result was predicable. Reductionism rendered it inevitable. Reduction is the engine that drove, and, for some still drives Newton’s machine – for others, the machine is off the roads in a museum. This absolute reductionism incorporates absolute determinism and demands absolute obedience to
absolute laws. No agent free to make choices could survive, or submit to, this tyrant and, without free agents, the humanities we
all love so well are passing imaginary fantasies. We are, fundamentally, no more than ball bearings in that infernal machine.

Thank God, natural or otherwise, for people like Stuart Kauffman.
My question is can Kauffman’s natural God do the job – and the job is to serve as the basis for a global ethic? I’m not convinced. Although I am convinced that this God will lead us in the right direction, I suspect Simone Weil was right when she cautioned us that without a supernatural source of inspiration, the relentless forces of nature reign supreme in this world, even in human affairs.
I also suspect that Cormack McCarthy had something like that in mind, at least in the movie, No Country for Old Men, and in his most recent book – soon to be a movie - The Road. If anyone responds, I would like to consider the question further.

The Pari Dialogues will be released in the USA and Canada on 25 April. Copies can also be ordered at all bookstores, amazon.com or via the Pari Publishing website.

We’d very much like to have your feed-back on the book and any of its essays.

The Tablet for 22 March 2008 carries articles on both the Templeton Prize winner Michael Heller and George Lemaitre which add comment to the religion and science debate. Lemaitre was born in 1894 and had a gift for mathematics but also a desire to enter the priesthood. In addition to his ordination he studied with Eddington at Cambridge, Shapley at Harvard. While Einstein believed that his field equations implied a static universe, Lemaitre argued for an expanding universe and obtained supporting data from Hubble.

While Lemaitre did not initially think in terms of a “big bang” his later work suggested that a universe could not have existed for an infinitely long period in the past and he con conceived of L’atom primitive, a super-dense sphere that would disintegrate and produce an expanding universe. It was George Gamov who later proposed the Big Bang, in contract to Fred Hoyle’s Steady State Universe.

In 1951 Pope Pius XII took the position that the scientific theory of the Big Bang confirmed the biblical creation story. This apparently caused great embarrassment to Lemaitre, who met with the Pope to add caution on drawing parallels between a scientific theory and the book of Genesis. From that point on he published no further research on the big bang. Lemaitre’s position appears to be similar to that of the Emeritus director of the Vatican Observatory as expressed in the Pari Dialogues Volume 1.

The article concludes with a remark by Dirac who, when speaking with Lemaitre suggested that cosmology is the branch of science that lies closest to religion. Lemaitre did not agree and suggested that psychology may be closest to religion.

This is the text of a talk Colin Tudge gave at the Ian Ramsey Centre & Sophia Europa International Conference on “Human Persons and the God of Nature” which was held on September 3-6, 2007 at Oriel College, Oxford.

HUMAN NATURE AND THE IDEA OF RELIGION
How Darwin showed that religion is part of our nature and is a good thing.

In this talk I want first to argue that there really is such a thing as human nature – a set of behaviours and attitudes that all human beings share: although this is an idea that many, especially in recent decades, have denied. Then I want to suggest that our human nature endows us with a powerful predilection for religion. Many do accept this but some of them, including some particularly vociferous modern biologist-atheists, suggest that this is a thoroughly bad thing – that in this, our inherited nature has led us astray. But I want to suggest that our inherited predilection for religion is a good thing and indeed is essential. Those who insist that our evolved religiousness is a bad thing generally don’t know what religion is. Neither, it seems to me, do those biologist atheists really understand the implications of Darwin’s ideas on evolution – which is odd, since they tend to argue in Darwin’s name.

Many philosophers over many centuries have argued that the human mind at birth is a tabula rasa, a blank wax tablet, waiting to be inscribed by life’s experiences. People commonly ascribe the expression “tabula rasa” to John Locke’s Essay of 1690, although he never actually used it – it comes from the Latin translation of Aristotle. But Locke did say that the human mind at birth is a “white paper”, which surely means the same thing. If we are indeed born with blank minds, then we can hardly be said to have a “nature” at all. But the notion that we do start life as tabula rasa has played a big part in modern sociology. Certainly in the 1970s when my children were young we were commonly assured from on high that girls behave like girls only because their parents give them dollies to play with, while boys are boys only because they are given footballs. For a time it was politically incorrect to suggest anything else. Read the rest of this entry… »

This article explains the nature of number archetypes, and other extraordinary events that were verified by senior researchers at Princeton University, School of Applied Science….

http://www.groundreport.com/Opinion/THE-NOSTRADAMUS-CODE-EXPLAINED

Replies to: entelekk @ aol. com

The physicist David Bohm used to speak of science as “the pursuit of truth, no matter where it leads” – as to emphasis that one can never put conditions on where truth would lead us. In this respect it is sometimes said that the scientific quest and the religious quest are similar in the sense that both involve a search for “truth”

But here a word of caution is required for is that word “truth” have the same meaning when applied to religion as to science? Here we should recall Wittgenstein’s caution “don’t ask what a word means, ask how it is used”. For Wittgenstein many of the “pseudo-problems” of philosophy were the result of confusions in language – because when the same word, such as “consciousness”, is used by several speaker they may each believe they are discussing the same concept but in fact using the word in subtly different ways.

The same applies to “truth” – how is the pursuit of truth by a physicist similar and how is it different from that of an individual who is seeking some spiritual or religious truth? An individual on a spiritual quest – and here it is easy to degenerate into New Age vagueness – is seeking something that is transcendent, numinous that they are pursuing a sense of mystery and wonder, that they have some sort of innate sense of the sacred. But some of those terms may also resonate with the physicist who has spent a lifetime staying with “the Big Question”, sensing the numinous nature of some underlying mystery and experiencing a sense of wonder and awe.

Historically there have been many tensions between science and religion. And here by “science” I mean a particular social structure with mutually understood rules of procedure, independent reproduction of results, systems of verification, a recognition of who belongs and who lies “outside the pail”, and a particular power structure. By religion is equally implied a more or less hierarchical structure with dogmas, theology and agreed upon beliefs.

Set aside this are the individual scientists who may, like the Sandemanian Faraday, adhere to a shared set of beliefs – in that particular case it led him to reject Newtonian action at and distance and seek a unification of electricity, magnetism and even gravity. On the other hand there is an Einstein who said.”To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.”

The issue I’d like to focus on in this section is that of boundaries – where do the boundaries lie between the institutions of science and religion and where should they lie? For example, the Big Bang has been used to support the Genesis creation story – science as a justification of religion. On the other we have the philosophical caution that while science can tell us about Change it cannot tell us about Creation. Indeed George Coyne, former Director of the Vatican Council warns against Religion and Science becoming the “Two Sacred Cows”.

Then there were all those physicists in the early twentieth century that were constantly invoking God. “The good lord is subtle but he is not malicious”, “God does not play dice with the universe”. That sense that as physics approaches the ultimate levels it is approaching the Creator or Hawking saying “then we shall know the mind of God”.

(In this respect, and to lighten the debate, let me recall the story told about Dirac when a group of physicists wondered by he never involved God to make a point about physics. “Every time he says I”, came the answer,” he is referring to God!”

The debate between religion and science has become particularly active with the publication of a number of books including Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Rupert Sheldrake’s take on Dawkins can be found at www.sheldrake.org/D&C/controversies/Dawkins.html. Other recent books include Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett and The Dawkins Delusion?: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine by Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath. In Is Nothing Sacred?, edited by Ben Rogers, atheists and agnostics grapple with the question “Why is it we consider some things inviolate or sacred if there is no God?”

This blog is to encourage an open debate on the issues surrounding religion and science, their respective limits, their areas of conflict and those areas in which they offer complementary approaches.

The Pari Dialogues, based on talks and articles given by visitors to Pari, continue this debate. They include:

George Coyne. S.J., emeritus director of the Vatican Observatory, who argues that no recourse to a creator God is required in order to explain the origin of life or the universe. Yet agrees with Galileo that the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature speak of the same God.

Virginia Del Re McWeeny reflects on the “correspondences” between Sufism and Science while Sean Howard sees a “deep complementarity” between Western and Native American science”.

James Kemp reflects on the visions of contemporary science and that of Simone Weil.

Colin Tudge explores what religion means to him personally as a scientist.

F. David Peat looks at the way a religious beliefs in the unity of the world led Faraday to a unification of electricity and magnetism and also how Pasteur wished to preserve the purity of the scientific quest from the contamination of metaphysical speculation while admitting that science could never tell us about “the essence of things”.

Edy Altes asks how religions could contribute to a just and sustainable economy.

John Avery asks if war is an inevitable institution or if leaders like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela have provided us with an alternative. Just as the historically ancient practice of slavery is considered unacceptable by civilized nations today, will the institution of war also become extinct?

Your posting and comments are welcome.