---
slug: paper-kauffman-s-a-2008-reinventing-the-sacred-a-new-view-of-science-reason-and-religi
title: Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred (2008)
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/paper-kauffman-s-a-2008-reinventing-the-sacred-a-new-view-of-science-reason-and-religi
---

## What Kauffman Saw
Stuart Kauffman examined self-organization in complex systems. He focused on how autocatalytic sets and Boolean networks generate order without external direction. Core result: emergence produces properties irreducible to physics alone yet consistent with physical laws.

## Exact Passages
Kauffman states: “We are beyond reductionism: life, agency, meaning, value, and even consciousness and morality almost certainly arose naturally, and the evolution of the biosphere, economy, and human culture are stunningly creative often in ways that cannot be foretold, indeed in ways that appear to be partially lawless.” (Reinventing the Sacred, near end).

Another: “Let God be our name for the creativity in the universe. Let us regard this universe, all of life and its evolution, and the evolution of human culture and the human mind with awe and wonder.” (Reinventing the Sacred, p. 6 in cited editions).

He defines the Galilean spell as the belief that natural laws suffice to explain all reality.

## Convergence Patterns
The work touches branching structures in evolutionary preadaptations. It covers flow networks in the biosphere. It addresses bounded chaos at criticality in genetic regulatory networks. It notes memory through cumulative selection. It observes scale invariance from molecular sets to economies.

## Relation to the Synthesis
Kauffman supplies mechanistic support for the grain: energy-driven chemical flows yield persistent patterns including life and mind. The Ladder appears in the progression from molecular autocatalysis to agency to culture. The Mirror Layer fits because observers participate in the same creative processes they describe.

## Distance from Full Synthesis
The book reaches emergence and partial lawlessness but stops short of explicit energy-flow primitives or formal OIP objects. Its sacred remains interpretive rather than protocol-defined.

## Honest Limits
Reductionist critiques hold that emergent features remain derivable from lower-level laws given sufficient computation. Kauffman offers no new mathematical proofs for lawlessness in all cases. Claims about reinventing the sacred rest on interpretive choice, not empirical measurement. Disconfirming edges include successful physics reductions of some biological phenomena and ongoing debates over predictability in open systems.

## Claims and Evidence
Kauffman builds from prior models in At Home in the Universe (1995) and The Origins of Order (1993). Those works supply the autocatalytic and network examples. The 2008 text extends them to ethics and religion without new experiments.

The argument remains within complexity science. It does not claim to replace physics or resolve quantum measurement issues.
