latest stories: This article is from the In-Depth Report Galileo
and the International Year of Astronomy See Inside July 2008
Sacred Science: Using Faith to Explain Anomalies in Physics
Matt Collins    By the early 20th century science undertook to
become Laplace’s demon. It cast a wide “causal net” linking
effects to causes throughout the past and into the future and
sought to explain all complex phenomena by reducing them into
their simpler component parts. Nobel laureate physicist Steven
Weinberg captured this philosophy of reductionism poignantly:
“All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to
people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and
ultimately to physics.” In such an all-encompassing and fully
explicable cosmos, then, what place for God?  Stuart Kauffman
has an answer: naturalize the deity. In his new book,
Reinventing the Sacred (Basic Books, 2008), Kauffman—founding
director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at
the University of Calgary in Alber