The 2008-09 Paul Tillich Lecture: The Open Universe and the Sacred

Stuart A. Kauffman, Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at HDS, whose primary work has been as a theoretical biologist studying the origin of life and molecular organization, delivered the Paul Tillich Lecture on May 4, 2009, in the Memorial Church at Harvard.

[@thenowchurch6419]

Thanks a million Dr. Kauffman and Harvard. I am adding mutualisms to my vocabulary. This is profound and very critical.

[@rogerfriddle5812]

Excellent!

[@lizgichora6472]

Thank you for an Excellent Lecture on Global Ethics and Values, Responsible Free will to enhance Global Civilization. Why Laws are made and how they enable us to become more free as they protect the Human Being to do what they need to do. We need all essentials to maintain Civilization i.e Reason; Intuition, Emotion, Imagination, Story and Metaphor as we extend Justice, Kindness as we walk humbly with God. Very Interesting the Quantum and Classical yet to be proved and studied as Decoherence, started by Rene Descartes .

[@luisruiz3777]

fascinating...

[@kipling1957]

6:34 Niceties over, lecture begins. Recommend 1.5x speed.

[@moxin87]

I'm unclear about the significance of any of his "radical" points.In responding to a deterministic 19th century French mathematician he seems to only declare the obvious: we can never know everything. Duh. The reality of virtually infinite mystery and complexity that can never be fully mapped by human language in the lifetime of the universe does not imply that the scientific language and maps we do have are invalid.

[@arthurmitropolis7303]

Tillich proposes that by acknowledging just how far we are from understanding the true nature of God and the meaning of life, we become more aware of this divisive, either-or mentality, and in doing so we actually draw closer to those big questions, regaining some of that lost depth. He paradoxically proposes that by acknowledging our ignorance in the matter we draw closer to understanding the character of the divine.

[@opinali]

HDS should be ashamed of hosting a talk like this; it's hard to believe that this person is a professional scholar in any capacity. His argumentation is riddled with sophistry, non-sequiturs, "god of the gaps", superficial handwaving and number-dropping of things he clearly has no clue about (quantum physics) and stuff that's just embarrassingly wrong or ignorant even in his area of expertise. Take the mutual evolution of hummingbirds and flowers, for example; he makes this look like a big paradox, but the answer is quite trivial: flowers don't depend exclusively on hummingbirds, their pollen can have other carriers such as bees, or even before any carriers, simply by the wind, so flowers can have evolved independently. Eventually, those insects and birds appeared and they made pollination much more efficient, causing flowers to spread and evolve further in a virtuous cycle. Also, the stickiness in birds' beaks, or various body parts of other pollinating species, is not purely an effect of its utility for carrying pollen; as a general rule, living beings are not covered in Teflon(TM) so stickiness is the rule rather than the exception. What happened was the opposite: flowers evolved their pollen to be ultra-sticky - just google for a microscope image of pollen, it's hard to find a natural surface where those things will *not* stick.

[@spiralsone]

agreed.

[@yukiueda6019]

I love his ideas but he's so damn arrogant