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• Tuesday, November 18, 2008 10:08 PM

  Sacred schmacred

  Steward Kauffman has a problem with reductionism and feels uncomfortable with the messy, unpredictable and seemly meaningless nature of the universe. To deal with this Kauffman wants to reinvent the sacred—-a kind o lower case ‘god’ that can well, um… address the awe and the um… reverence and… blah, blah, blah. At one point when Paulson asks him to explain his work on ‘self organization’ and he responds with; “It's harder than you think. I wrote a whole book, "The Origins of Order," and I very carefully never defined self-organization.” Good for you Stewart, you wrote a whole book on a subject without defining what it is. No wonder you have a problem with reductionism; it requires you to get to the point.

  I’ve been critical of this ‘Conversations about Science and Faith’ series for the simple reason that I think that science and faith are mutually exclusive terms. But with that said I also like to give some credit where credit is due. In the last nine questions of this interview (actually seven questions and two statements), Paulson does make a noble attempt to get Kauffman to explain himself. He fails. Kauffman prefers to dance around Paulson’s questions by spouting the kind of vague, mystical claptrap that parades as scientific discourse in pseudo scientific coffee klatches.

  It’s always sad to see great minds waste so much time on ethereal hogwash.

  —Chad Bagley Read Chad Bagley's other letters
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