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Wednesday, November 19, 2008 12:00 AM

God enough

We should see the ceaseless creativity of nature as sacred, argues biologist Stuart Kauffman, despite what Richard Dawkins might say.

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  • Wednesday, November 19, 2008 07:48 AM

    Food for thought

    Interestingly, there is another Kauf(f)man, the Harvard theologian Gordon D. Kaufman, who says much the same thing in his books "In the Beginning...Creativity" (2004) and "In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology" (2006). There is a lot more divinity-talk in these books than hardened atheists would be comfortable with, but from a fundamentalist/theist's point of view, Kaufman (Gordon) is an atheist.

    It's true that Kauffman (Stuart)'s thinking has a history, as others in this forum have noted. His colleague Harold Morowitz's "The Emergence of Everything" (2004) comes to mind. But Kaufman's is a form of science-based deism that, in the twentieth century, in the hands of Alfred North Whitehead and Samuel Alexander did, in fact, become quite evolutionary and emergentist under the moniker "process theology." The more humanist face of this theology emerged in Henry N. Wieman ("The Source of Human Good," Wieman was MLK's muse), Lewis Mumford's "The Conduct of Life" (1960), in the recent writings of Rabbi Harold Schulweis (as 'predicate theology', the best statement of which is at http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/skirball/schulweis-predicatetheology.shtml), and my own efforts: "God Is the Good We Do: Theology of Theopraxy," and "God, Creativity, and Evolution: The Argument From Design(ers)" (2007 and 2008).

    Bottom line: both God-is-a-crutch-(that-I-don't-need) atheists as well as I've-seen-God-(and-you-haven't) theists will need to change their ideas about what "God" could and should mean *in this day* if they are to stop wrangling over what are in fact long out-of-date and cartoon renditions of God in the minds of both parties.

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