Kauffman's a leading theorist of emergence, and here proposes that the unpredictability and creativity of complex emergent systems is wonderful enough to deserve to be called "God."(He's also thinking of Pierre-Simon Laplace's famous response to Emperor Napoleon I, who had asked where God was in Laplace's deterministic system: je n'ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse.)
Not sure how many theists or atheists Kauffman's going to win over with this, but his argument that we must "break the Galilean spell" - the reductionism of a modern science which thinks everything can be reduced to physics, and the entire future could in principle be predicted if we had a complete inventry of the present - is very exciting! Not to mention a clever dig at Daniel Dennett's tediously old-fashioned critique of religion Breaking the spell (though Stuart may have it in for another Galilean too...).
(When I finished the book I was disappointed - but it did help me imagine the better book it might have been.)
