05.10.08
Reinventing the sacred? don’t count on it from scientism
Reading: Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (Hardcover)
by Stuart Kauffman (Author)
Kauffman is one of the major critics of standard Darwinism, and this book (which I will comment on later) continues the saga of self-organization, which confronts the ID challenge head on, without finally settling its own question.
I note a few points: first, science isn’t going to reinvent the sacred any time soon, and ought to clean up its Darwin mess first. Of course, it won’t, and ‘reinventing the sacred’ would be license (not speaking of Kauffman, as such) for a pastiche of scientism, ideology, and economic propaganda. Give us a break.
As things stand now, anyone who even mentions Buddhism in close quarters is branded a kook. There isn’t any hope for scientists to reinvent the sacred, then, as far as I can see. They can’t even study the history of the subject.
Kauffman’s book has a lot of good material, but I was disappointed to see a one-paragraph dismissal of Kant’s classic ethical theory. I am not a Kantian or a defender of Kant’s ethic system, but it is something I don’t dismiss lightly, as it is probably the closest we will ever come to penetrating the enigma of ethics and evolution.
That theory posits some counterintuitive ethical stances, and is often challenged for its position on such things as lying. But the critics often fail to study the subject in the fashion it deserves, and land on some distortions of Kant’s position. The question is not that Kant’s ethical critiques are successful or not, but that his experiment is the most brilliant in the history of ethical philosphy, and leaves one with a sense of wonder, and an enigma with a question, how could his limited breakthrough be completed, and repaired? The mystery is how such a simple tactic could have come so close, not that it suffers frayed edges due to some contradictory aspects.
Part of the confusion of critics is to take its theoretical structure as a practical code of ethics, which it isn’t quite, there being complex distinctions in the abstract that aren’t intended to apply to practical situations. The key must lie in the issue of ‘maxims’, which points to the stage at which Kant’s ethical abstractions begin their transition to practical realizations.
The whole study is confusing because Kant sets up brilliantly the right framework for a study of ethics, and then proceeds from there to something different, a very specialized kind of system, of ethics and rationality. But his framework is much broader and could ‘cash in its chips’ in other ways. Schopenhauer has another. Actually, Schopenhauer’s streamlining is perhaps excessive here, and reinventing Kantian ethics in the matrix of Schopenhauer is another possibility.
The point for science is to see how the question of will, and the limits of our representations, create a basis for ethical enquiry that is not constrained by reductionism.
In any case, the issue of the a priori in relation to ethics is a brilliant breakthrough, and should be a far better candidate for understanding evolutionary ethics than the current concoctions of scientism.
We need to be vigilant here, because after the success of Darwinian confusion, scientists are getting ambitious to concoct their own versions of the ’sacred’, an activity doomed to failure in the current environment of biological reductionism.
James said,
May 10, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Kauffman deserves praise for being honest about Darwinism, but the whole self-organization spiel is getting a bit tiresome (all of the parties in this debate are hopeless at this point). Are his ideas ever going to result in anything more than intellectual masturbation? If I really wanted to hear some nonsense about “wholeness” then I would become a Chopra groupie.