As was pointed out in chapter 2, creativity is a mystery that we humans cannot understand and behind which we cannot go. Through our concepts of causation We are able to understand various processes of transformation, of change, in things that already exist. But mere change is not what We mean by the Word "creativity" for changes can generally be understood and often explained, and they do not involve the coming into being of something truly\novelL The concept of creativity in no way explains how or why new realities have come into being; rather, it simply gives a name to the profoundly mysterious fact that novel realities have come into existence in the course of time. As the ancient phrase create ex nihilo suggests, the coming into being of the truly new--the totally unexpected, the utterly inexplicable--is not something of which we humans are in position to make sense.
In our Western religious traditions the coming into being of the new has generally been thought of as brought about by God. And K0 say that God thought of as some kind of personal being that has existed from eternity-has created everything does seem to give a kind of explanation of the existence of the world and its contents. But how is this to be understood? According to Genesis 1:3, "God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light." God said this, and God said that, and all these things immediately sprang into being. We can imagine such events as magical happenings of some sort, but we have no actual experience of events of this kind (though a distant partial analogy may be Seen in the work of a poet or potter, as the writers of Genesis saw); therefore we really have no way to understand what these words mean. Although they evoke some specific images and ideas, we are left with the sense that we are saying something quite important though very vague and unclear: we do not know what it is that we are saying. In the biblical account God's creative activity is not confined to the origin stories of Genesis. Rather, from time to time, God continues to bring into being new realities: "They are created now not long ago; before today you have never heard of them" (Isaiah 4857). Paul refers to Christians as "new creations" (2 Cor. 5117), and in Revelation we are told that God is going to "make all things new" (21:5) at some future time. All of these claims, of course, are completely unsubstantiated belief It is our familiarity with the biblical account, and with the basic idea of God as omnipotent Creator of all things, that leads us to suppose that we understand what we are saying when we utter these words. But in fact we cannot grasp the idea of creation, of something coming from nothing. This remains for us a profound mystery.
What, then, are we to make of the paraphrase of the opening words of the Fourth Gospel with which this chapter began: "In the beginning was creativity and . . . [this] creativity was God"? Two quite different interpretations come to mind. In the ordinary understanding in the beginning . . . Creativity of John's Gospel, it is usually assumed that to say"the Word was God" (1:1) is a declaration that the Word (which a few verses later will be identified with jesus) is fully( divine. john goes on to emphasize this point immediately by stating, ‘All things came into being through" this Word (1:3); this is what created the heavens and the earth. Were we to follow this pattern of interpretation, my paraphrase would be redundant, simply asserting that the creativity" that brought all things into being is nothing other than the activity of the creator~and we would be left with our familiar ideas about both God and creativity The other interpretation of the paraphrase, however, turns this all around and asserts that the phrase "creativity was [or is] God" is not redundant at all but rather a claim about what our word "God" designates: it is creativity that is God; when we use the word "God," it is the profound mystery of creativity to which we are referring, and it would be a mistake, therefore, to let the familiarity of our personalistic images and ideas of God get in the way of our recognizing the significance of this point. The word "creativity" as we have been noting, leaves the question of how or why the new comes into being completely open, and (in this second interpretation) the word "God" is the religious name for this mystery that goes beyond human understanding. This interpretation implies that we should beware of unconsciously importing any images or ideas-personalistic or other into our thinking about God, for that would be refusing to acknowledge the ultimacy of God's (creativity) profound mystery instead of facing up to what that mystery means for us. It would be claiming we know something that we cannot possibly know why and how there is something and not nothing.
In the Genesis 1 story although the created realities spoken of there--like the sun and moon, plants and animals and humans--are all things that we know perfectly well, just what the creator God is, or how and why God is able to bring these sorts of things into being, remains completely unexplained. It is interesting to note that (as we shall see) the modern story of the Big Bang, the subsequent coming into being of the cosmos, and the eventual evolution of life has similar limitations: all that we actually see or can understand here is that new realities have emerged in the course of time. In this account, like in the biblical account, the how and why of creation remain profound mysteries. We should not allow ancient religious assumptions and beliefs to lead us into thinking we know or understand what happens in events or processes of this kind. God, of course, has always been understood to be a profound mystery but the way in which God has been talked about has often involved fudging this point and proceeding as though we knew that God is really a personal being, one of enormous power who can create at will things that previously did not exist. Thinking of God as creativity (rather than as "the Creator") forces us to take the profundity of Gods mystery to a deeper level. For"creativity" is simply a name with which we identify this profound mystery of new realities coming into being; it is in no way an explanation of it.
What has come into being is the whole vast cosmos-with all its multifarious contents-the wide context of our human lives. Within this developing cosmos, after billions of years of further creativity life emerged on planet Earth and gradually evolved along many different lines (as we have today come to believe); on one of these trajectories, after further billions of years of creativity mammals, primates, and Finally humans came into being. This particular development represents, of course, only one line of the creativity manifest in our universe, but it is the one that-in its serendipitous superabundance--brought humans into being and thus is of special meaning and importance to us. To become aware of this awe-inspiring mystery of creativity is to come out of the dark unconsciousness of these matters--within which most of life, and of human history as well, has existed--into the paradoxical consciousness and knowledge of the profound mystery within which we humans live. It is this mystery of creativity I am suggesting, that we today should think of as God.
I
What does it mean to think of God as creativity to think of creativity as God? What is creativity? What do we know about creativity? With what kind of conception of God does this notion provide us? How is the mystery of God illuminated by this identification? The events and processes that have brought the universe, with all its enormously fascinating and diverse features, into being are today subjects of scientific inquiry; and during the last century a new overall world-picture addressing these questions has been developed and is now widely accepted as the best understanding of these matters that we humans have. In this chapter we will look at the basic outlines of this picture with a view to uncovering what (if anything) it may tell us about creativity--and thus, about God. I am not an expert in any of the scientific fields drawn upon here; I rely upon more or less popular accounts by scientists (and commentators on the sciences) for the material I am examining. I have tried to set out views on which there is fairly wide agreement among scientists, but on some points, I may have strayed down false paths. Especially in my discussion of the newly emerging "complexity theory"--important for my argument but also quite contentious--I may have made some moves that better-informed persons would regard as questionable. But I hope that the basic picture that I present here will prove illuminating--at least for theological purposes--despite its scientific shortcomings.
It is important to acknowledge right at the outset that 'creativity' is not a word much used by scientists. This may be because it has such wide potential application. Since it focuses attention on the coming-into-being of something new or novel, it can be employed with reference to almost anything, to everything-and thus it is difficult (perhaps impossible) to define and specify it with the strict conceptual and experimental controls so important in scientific work. However, precisely this comprehensiveness of application enables this term to be useful theologically and philosophically for it encourages us to focus on and hold together in a single concept a very significant feature of life and the world, namely that novel realities continuously come into being in time-an insight that, back into ancient times, has been understood as of central theological significance. The concept of creativity, thus, enables us to connect important theological concerns with central features of modern/ postmodern thinking about the cosmos, the evolution of life, and the emergence and biohistorical development of human life and culture on planet Earth.
As a framework for thinking about what we might mean by this word, I suggest that we examine three significantly different modalities of creativity each of them involved in mystery in its own distinctive way; putting this point theologically one can say that creativity (Gods activity) will be considered here in connection with three different contexts, and thus in three different forms. The first of these modalities--which I shall call creativity1--has already been briefly discussed: the initial coming into being of the universe in which we find ourselves, sometimes expressed as the creation of something from nothing (create ex nihilo). In trying to understand this baffling idea, it is worth asking ourselves why and how we humans create ideas of this sort--and that will direct our attention to a quite different modality of creation that I will label creativity3, human symbolic creativity. We will also need to consider the creativity manifest in evolutionary processes, the ongoing coming into being of trajectories of increasingly complex novel realities. In this mode creation is not thought of as simply and straightforwardly from nothing (as often with creativity1); it is, rather, creation in the context of other realities that already exist--creativity2, we shall call it, the kind of complex processes that today are believed to have produced, in the course of some billions of years, humans (as well as many other creatures). Creativity2 provides (among other things) a link between creativity1 and creativity3. There are, doubtless, other ways of thinking about the concept of creativity but this three-fold division enables us to view it from three distinctly different angles.
The ideas of the Big Bang and the subsequent evolution of the world and of life have become commonplace today, features of a very comprehensive way of thinking that some commentators believe is increasingly bringing the sciences back into relation with each other as they now proceed with their work. After some years of vigorous debate a widespread consensus appears to be developing among cosmologists about the basic facts of the universe--how old it is, how large it is, the various stages through which it developed, and so on. It is believed that the universe is very large indeed, perhaps consisting of as many as 200 billion galaxies, each of which, on average, likely contains 100 billion stars (Rue 2000, 51). The universe is thought to have begun in what is commonly called a Big Bang, now believed to have occurred 14 billion years ago (Overbye 2002). Since We often use numbers to specify with some precision what we are talking about, we may tend to overlook or forget the layers of profound mystery in the story these particular numbers set before us. I cannot go into detail on this, but I would like to mention a few points here.
Scientist Stephen Hawking tells us that "At the big bang itself the universe is thought to have had zero size, and . . . to have been infinitely hot" (Hawking 1988, 117). Though this may be plausible mathematically it is very difficult to imagine or think just what is being said here about an actual state of affairs: what could it mean to describe this whatever-it-is as of "zero size" (cf. create ex nihilo?), and how could anything of that sort be the beginning of our "universe"? What could the phrase "infinitely hot" mean? These puzzles, of course, belong only to the beginning point of everything, but with the Big Bang the universe immediately started (we are told) to expand at an enormous rate. What can it mean to say that something of zero size is "expanding"? In all of these expressions some of the words are used in very nearly unintelligible ways; at best, we seem to be dealing here with a mystery that cannot be articulated clearly in our ordinary speech. Let us continue:
As the universe expanded, the temperature of the radiation decreased. One second after the big bang, it would have fallen to about ten thousand million degrees . . . about a thousand times the temperature of the center of the sun .... At this time the universe would have contained mostly photons, electrons, and neutrinos . . . together with some protons and neutrons [these all being infinitesimal particles of which atoms are made] .,.. About one hundred seconds after the big bang, the temperature would have fallen to one thousand million degrees, the temperature inside the hottest stars. At this temperature protons and neutrons . . , would have started to combine together to produce the nuclei of atoms of . . .heavy hydrogen . . . which contain one proton and one neutron. . . . [These] nuclei then would have combined with more protons and neutrons to make helium nuclei. . . . Within only a few hours of the big bang, the production of helium and other elements would have stopped. And after that, for the next million years or so, the universe would have just continued expanding, without anything much happening. (Hawking 1988, 117-19)
Stop for a moment and think about each of the items in this picture. Though verbally intelligible, they are scarcely conceivable or imaginable: more mystery here-though Hawking assures us that "We are fairly confident that we have the right picture at least back to about one second after the big bang" (Hawking 1988, 118). Now all of this about which we are speaking is, of course, only our universe. However, as Dennis Overbye, a science writer, says, some theorists think that "the universe we see, the 14 billion light-years, is just a tiny piece of a much vaster universe, or even a whole ensemble of them, forever out of our view" (2002, D6).
We have already noted difficulty in grasping individual details of this picture. Let us consider now the picture as a whole. It is hardly imaginable or thinkable: a picture of a tiny enormously hot speck of some sort ("of zero size") which-for no reason at all-suddenly blows up in a huge Big Bang that produces, in the course of just a few hours of almost inconceivably rapid inflation, the beginnings of what we might properly call our universe, It is important to emphasize that we have no way of knowing whether there was anything before the Big Bang or, if there was, what it could have been. Nor can we know anything beyond our universe, that "vaster universe" or "ensemble" of universes which, as Overbye says, is "forever out of our view." So all of this remains utter mystery Hawking explains why: our "universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space time . . . at which the laws of science break down" (Hawking 1988, 139; emphasis mine; see also 122, 133, and 136).
According to this statement, scientists have discovered the Big Bang and the subsequent development of the universe through exceedingly ingenious imaginative application of the so-called laws of science, and we can, therefore, have considerable confidence in this picture. However, the story is somewhat more complicated than that. For where did these "laws of science" come from? As we shall see in a moment, there is a good deal more mystery of creativity here than Hawkings account suggests. For nova however, we can see that the Big Bang is for contemporary science a boundary where these laws "break down," and therefore no knowledge of what has brought it about can be attained. If Hawkings claims are correct, we have arrived at what appears to be one of the unsurpassable limits of all human knowledge of our world as we know it, Thus, we and our universe are ensconced in inscrutable mystery on all sides-though it is claimed, of course, that we know a great deal in considerable detail (through "the laws of science") about the development of our universe beginning immediately after the Big Bang. It is important that we note that the Big Bang is not regarded as an atomic event with no significant connection to anything before or after: though we cannot know anything about what might have preceded the Big Bang, its effects--what follows upon i--are cumulative and long lasting (but probably not unending) as new structures and patterns gradually emerge in the universe that is coming into being. These forms of order and ordering then become the contexts within which further creative activity (that I suggest we call creativities2,3) occurs. And this further creative activity also cumulates and develops and brings more new forms of order into being through long and increasingly complex creative evolutionary processes.
However impressive may be our knowledge of the consequences of the Big Bang, we have no way of finding out anything about how or why the Big Bang itself occurred. "This means," as Hawking says paradoxically "that one might as well cut the big bang, and any events before it, out of the theory because they can have no effect on what we observe" (Hawking 1988, 122).7 The Big Bang, thus, really gives us no answer at all to our question, Why is there something, not nothing? All we can say is that the enormous creativity obviously occurring in and with the Big Bang is a complete mystery--a mystery to us: we are at the limits of our knowledge here. But this does not mean that there was nothing before the Big Bang, or that there was no context of any kind at all within which the Big Bang occurred. It means that we humans have no way--and quite possibly will never have any way--of learning why or how the Big Bang occurred. We are in no position to say that the Big Bang is a preeminent example of "something coming from nothing" and we can have no way of knowing how this great originative event came about. This is all an utter mystery.
II
The mystery with which we are involved here goes deeper than has thus far been considered (though this is not often taken up in the scientific accounts). Where did this somewhat fantastic story about a Big Bang--this "singularity," as the scientists call it--come from?
Everything I have sketched (and there are many details that I have omitted) has been worked out carefully and painfully by scientists here on Earth--on this second-rate planet going around a third-rate sun in one of the billions of galaxies in our universe. This whole story has been built up in connection with careful observations of data all found here on planet Earth or its immediate vicinity. These observations have been studied and refined for generations, during which more and more convincing interpretations and explanations have been developed, and these involved increasingly elaborate and ambitious creative extrapolations beyond planet Earth and beyond all human experience. These highly imaginative extrapolations from our human position here in the twenty-first century extend, on the one hand, far backward in time--at least as far back as 14 billion years ago--and they include many temporal periods that came into being and passed away long before there were any living inhabitants on planet Earth, indeed before this planet existed. On the other hand, these extrapolations move unbelievably far out in space--14 billion light-years in all directions, very far away indeed from the planet on which they were created, refined, and developed.
Extrapolations of this sort-based upon and thus including the accepted interpretations and explanations of the pertinent data found here on planet Earth--are all, of course, human imaginative constructions. They have been created by the power of the human imagination (creativity3) to pull together into a coherent and intelligible picture (by means of its interpretations and explanations) observations and data from many disparate sources. Why and how did this enormous human imaginative power come into being? How reliable are its extrapolations and other constructions that are the basis of all our cosmological knowledge? We are confronted once again with profound mystery in this case the mystery of the creativity that has produced our human imaginative and cognitive powers--creativity2, taken together to some extent (as we shall see) with creativity3--as well as the mystery of the degree to which those powers are reliable. The imagination has created innumerable sets of symbols--images, noises, marks on paper--and symbol systems; these (at least some of them) are regarded as standing for the so-called "realities" of life and the world about which we seek to learn. (The symbol "God"--my principal concern in this book--and the symbol-systems in which it has been of central importance are, of course, also among these creations of the human imagination [see Kaufman 1995, especially chapter 2].) How and why did humans begin to create this whole new world of symbols? To put this question in theological terms: How are we to understand the divine creative activity--working transformatively (creativity2) within the context of the already created world--as now transmogrified somehow into the modality of creativity3 and manifesting itself in and through the self-conscious human imagination? If we think of God as creativity (as I am proposing), we have an important example here of what was traditionally spoken of as the indwelling of divine spirit in our human spirits; but how is this to be understood?
We can, of course, give a historical account of this development. From very early on humans have found it useful, indeed necessary to picture to themselves-that is, to imagine-the environment in which they lived; to create, that is to say images and ideas of the setting in which they found themselves. Without such pictures, stories, and ideas it would have been impossible to act-to think about the future, make plans for that future, and then carry through those plans in the best possible manner. Many of the more ancient of these pictures and myths, however indispensable they were to the peoples who created them and lived within the terms they provided, seem to us fanciful today; even quite absurd. That is because we are heirs to thousands of years of imagining, reflecting upon, and experimenting with a great variety of these world»pictures and have gradually devised ways of critically testing them-largely through meditation, reflection, and tentative experimentation, and then more fresh imagining. In the last three or four hundred years some of these activities have become increasingly disciplined and convincing, as the methods of modern science were gradually developed and employed. But it remains profoundly mysterious why and how all of this development (of creativity3) has occurred. What we are seeing in our exceedingly complex, carefully argued, and highly imaginative modern cosmological and evolutionary thinking is one of the outcomes to date of this long history of human attempts to understand what kind of beings we are, what kind of world we live in, what our rightful place in char world is, what are the ultimate realities and powers with which we humans must come to terms. Along with that search the slowly developing, somewhat surprising, indeed perhaps ultimately inexplicable mystery of human symbolic creativity has come into being serendipitously (more about this below).
Since all these world-pictures and myths--from the most primitive to the most highly sophisticated, whether deeply religious or thoroughly scientific or both--are creations of the human imagination, none may be regarded as revealing some kind of final truth about humanity and the world: all are fallible human symbolic products and must be subjected to ongoing critical examination. One of the most important features of modern scientific methods is that a kind of continuous critical scrutiny and questioning of the concepts, proposals, and conclusions that are being developed has, with some success, been built into them. But all such critical examination--since it is always carried out by men and women here on Earth--is itself fallible, however "creative" it might be. And perhaps, as a consensus begins to form on issues long in dispute--as may be happening now in modern cosmological science--one should hesitate about getting too quickly on the bandwagon.
I am not trying here to discredit in any way modern cosmological and evolutionary theory: it is, in my opinion, by far the best thinking we have about our world and our human place within the world. And therefore it is appropriate to live and think and act in the terms with which it provides us. But at the same time we should take up a thoroughly critical stance. Our awareness, that these modern pictures of an unimaginably great and ancient cosmos are all grounded in exceedingly ambitious human imaginative extrapolations from data here on our tiny planet in a remote corner of the universe, should lead us to recognize the fragility of these ideas. This is the best picture we have--a grander and more fully articulated vision of the world than any before it. It has been produced by the power of the human imagination to create symbols and symbol-systems (creativity3)--a truly amazing mystery; nothing of this sort (as far as we know) had existed before humans came on the scene, or exists independently of our human activity. In the future these symbolic constructions will doubtless change and develop in ways now completely unforeseeable (as has frequently happened historically).
In sharp contrast with the creativity through which the massive universe, in which we now take ourselves to be living, came into being (creativity1), many different worlds of signs and meanings--languages in innumerable fantastic variations--have come into being through our (partly conscious, perhaps largely unconscious) human symbolic creative activity The countless sorts of ideas and images; memories and hopes; fears and anxieties; achievements and failures; ways to live and act; societies and cultures of many different kinds; imaginary worlds (in the literary arts); forms and patterns and designs of all sorts (in the plastic arts); vast worlds of music and mathematics and dance; theories and hypotheses of many quite diverse philosophies, sciences, and religions; innumerable meanings of all sorts; and connected with all of this the terrifying experiences of meaninglessness-none of this would exist apart from this creativity? Nothing like this enormously prolific symbolic creativity is to be found in the story of the Big Bang; indeed, that story itself is a product (as we have just been noting) of creativity3, as articulated in modern mathematics and the modern sciences. Symbolic creativity came rather late into the world (beginning perhaps some hundreds of thousands of years ago), as human beings slowly emerged partly in and through the gradual creation of language. This latter development helped to bring about the growth of the large prefrontal cortex that distinguishes our human brains from all others, as brain scientist Terrence Deacon has argued (see below). As our remote ancestors came out of Africa and gradually spread around the globe, human linguistic developments, and along with them other forms of human symbolic and cultural creativity moved in many different directions. Obviously we cannot trace all these developments here, but they are the background without which the accelerating imaginative creativity that began to appear four centuries or so ago-the creation of all the many complex sides of the modern world, and in the course of that the creation of the modern sciences and technologies-cannot be properly understood.
The mystery of this creativity3--though very different from the mystery of the Big Bang--is surely as striking and as important to humans as those earlier mysteries that it apparently presupposes (creativities1,2). Indeed, as we have noted, it is only through our human symbolic activities that the story of those earlier mysteries was itself created. Those earlier creativities1,2 produced the material and vital orders of the world in which we live, and this later creativity3--appearing in and through the activities of our human minds, our spirits, and producing the whole mental/spiritual world--is itself an emergent outcome of those prior modalities of creativity. This seems to suggest that creativity should not be thought of as a static reality always and everywhere the same, but rather as itself modulating and developing in ways appropriate to the increasing complexity of the realities it is producing and within which it appears. (The theological implications of this point will be discussed below in section V.) Descartes and his followers thought of mind and matter as two absolutely distinct types of reality and it is not difficult to understand why they took that position. But this claim has become increasingly problematic. Darwin's idea of evolution was the most important factor in this change, for it provided a way of thinking how mind could have emerged in the course of the evolution of the material and vital orders here on planet Earth. Evolutionary theory has now become (as noted above) the great all»comprehensive picture that integrates the highly diverse features of our universe under one grand concept.
Creativity3 appears to be a special complexifying of creativity2 (to be discussed in a moment). Before and apart from it, there would have been no symbols or symbol-systems, no symbolic creativity no symbolic worlds. It was "the co-evolution of language and the brain," as brain-scientist Terrence Deacon has argued, that made possible the creation of these symbolic realities found only in human cultures. In human symbolic activity (when it is fully in place) creativity becomes for the first time self»conscious and deliberate. With the emergence of language humans became capable of naming and imagining a variety of goals toward which their actions could be directed; that is, the capability of imagining and naming matters that were not in fact present in their experience became for the first time self»conscious and deliberate. This made choice among alternative objectives possible, and with it the beginnings of planned courses of action to realize those objectives. In and through all of this, human culture was created (not deliberately and consciously of course, but coincidentally-a very serendipitous coincidence indeed!) as humans learned how to make, use, and talk about such things as tools and other desirable implements, garments to protect against the cold, and (perhaps most important of all) how to produce food-the invention of farming. (See the discussion of creativity2 below especially the portion of section IV that draws on Gerd Theissen and Jared Diamond.) Gradually humans became aware that they were able to use to their advantage not only things at hand like sticks and rocks and animal skins: they were able to deliberately design and make new objects that would be useful in their day»to»day living. That is, creativity3 was coming on the scene. But how was this creativity3 itself created, if humans were not able to imagine it first? It was creativity2--in the mysteriously serendipitous aspect that creativity sometimes manifests--which gradually produced the conditions enabling human self-conscious life to emerge. Creativity2 has, of course, continued to affect historical developments in important Ways even though deliberate human decisions and actions have come to have their own powerful creative consequences (see Kaufman l993a, chapters 19-22). So what we have in creativity; is a blend of a continuing serendipitous creativity2 which the more recently emerging self-conscious and deliberate human creative activity that is made possible by linguistic (and other) symbols and symbol-systems.
III
Let us now turn to creativity2. We obviously cannot explore all the manifestations of this modality of creation (given the exceedingly complex evolutionary picture that the modern sciences present today), but it will prove illuminating for us to look a bit at how the creative evolutionary development of the world and of life may have come about. We left the story of the beginnings and early development of the cosmos with Hawking's observation that shortly after the Big Bang the universe began rapid expansion lasting "for the next million years or so." Here is Loyal Rue's description of the latter part of that early expansion and what followed:
For several hundred thousand years the universe remained too hot for nuclei [of atoms] to succeed in capturing electrons. But when conditions were right [sit] copious amounts of hydrogen and helium atoms began to form, and for the next billion years or so the universe billowed forth in an expanding cloud of cooling gas. The organization of matter had commenced .... [After another] billion years or so ,... the gaseous universe began to fragrant ,... and then gradually reorganized into separate clouds, each moving away from all the rest. These fragmented clouds--over 100 billion of them--were destined to become galaxies. The process of galaxy fragmentation was completed by the time the universe was . . . 5 billion years old. (2000, 57)
Scientists have uncovered some very interesting and surprising details about this expansion. As Hawking puts it, "If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size” (Hawking 1988, 121-22). And, as Rue continues,"if the explosive force [of the Big Bang] were any greater (or the gravitational force . . . any less) ,... the universe would have expanded more rapidly than it did--too rapidly for any galaxies or stars to form" (2000, 62). Deeply mysterious features of the processes creating our world continue to appear!
What more needs to be said here about the mystery of creativity2, the creativity manifest in the continuing cosmic evolution and eventual emergence of life? As was noted in chapter 2, Martin Rees has summarized briefly what had to happen before complex forms of life could emerge:
For life like us to evolve, there must be time for early generations of stars to have evolved and died, to produce the chemical elements, and then time for the Sun to form and for evolution to take place on a planet around it. This takes several billion years .... The size of our universe shouldn't surprise us: its extravagant scale is necessary to allow enough time for life to evolve on even one planet around one star in one galaxy. (1997, 215)
Other details about these developments are quite surprising:
The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. . . .The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. For example, if the electric charge of the electron had been only slightly different, stars either would have been unable to burn hydrogen and helium, or else they would not have exploded .... It seems clear that there are relatively few ranges of values for the numbers that would allow the development of any form of intelligent life. Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, .would contain no one.able to wonder at that beauty. (Hawking 1988, 125)
One can see why many continue to argue that there must have been some sort of intelligent "Designer" behind this whole creativity2 process. But others, trying to understand this creativity in naturalistic terms, suggest that the increasing complexity itself--which was gradually emerging in the world at large and later developed especially in living organisms--can account for the novel realities that in due .. , course appeared. In most of our thinking (scientific and otherwise) we seek to simplify what we observe and are considering, and as a result we are often satisfied with misleading explanations of things. So when the matters with which we are dealing are in fact exceedingly complex, we may easily misunderstand what is happening. According to the new theories of complexity that are now appearing, it was the gradual growth, over billions of years, of increasingly complex organizational patterns themselves--first, in galaxies and stars, atoms and molecules--that eventually made possible the emergence of life; the increasing complexity of life then gradually brought into being the countless forms that have evolved, including those forms that have become conscious, thoughtful, imaginative, and responsible agents--humans. Understanding the importance, thus, of this growing complexity and how it works should significantly illuminate creativity2. Philosopher/theologian Mark C. Taylor, in his recent book The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (2001), explores and critically reflects on some of the remarkable ideas and theories about complexity and its creativity which are now being discussed by physicists, mathematicians, evolutionary biologists, philosophers of culture, and others. These ideas provide a conceptual apparatus that will give us a greater sense of the profound mystery of the ongoing creativity in the world and in life. Early in his book, Taylor presents an overall picture of this sort:
According to complexity theorists, all significant change takes place between too much and too little order. When there is too much order, systems are frozen, and cannot change; and when there is too little order, systems disintegrate and can no longer function .... According to [Ilya] Prigogene disorder does not merely destroy order, structure, and organization, but is also a condition of their formation and transformation. New dynamic states . . . emerge in conditions far from equilibrium .... Complex adaptive systems . . . always emerge at the edge of chaos . , . [and] are in a state of continual evolution. (2001, 14-15; emphasis mine)
It is this complex interactive intermix of order and disorder in all systems, structures, and organisms, sometimes coming to the very "edge of chaos"--this inextirpable intermix of "information" and "noise" (to use the more technical terms in which these analyses are often expressed)-that is the womb within which new forms may be created. Taylor explains:
There can be no information without noise and vice versa. Noise can no more be silenced in the world than parasites can be exterminated .... “Mistakes, wavy lines, confusion, obscurity are part of knowledge," [Taylor quotes Michel Serres as saying,] "noise is part of communication," . . . When programs are flexible and codes adaptable, noise can be processed in ways that allow novelty to emerge .... The emergence of the new reconfigures the old in unexpected ways that allow differences not previously articulated to emerge ..,. Noise becomes "responsible for the growth of the system's complexity" [Serres]. (2001, 121-122; emphasis mine)
These are startling and puzzling words. Creativity is here presented as somehow emerging-mysteriously without explanation-between the order and the disorder, the information and the noise, found in every system or structure. Ir is this mysterious creativity that is somehow intimately involved with the evolution of the cosmos from the Big Bang to the complex universe we know today; it is this mysterious creativity that is particularly manifest in the unfolding of life on planet Earth. Serres notes that an organism is "a hypercomplex system .... This system is not in equilibrium, since thermodynamic stability spells death for it .... Iris in a temporary state of imbalance, and it tends as much as possible to maintain that imbalance. Ir is . . . subject to the irreversible time of the second law since it is dying. It struggles against time" (quoted in Taylor 2001, 135).
"Life," Taylor sums up, 'continues only as long as things are out of balance" (135), Moreover, the evolutionary dynamic of life develops from relatively simple into innumerable highly complex forms. One reason we humans have found it so difficult to understand creativity is because we have all too often thought of nature as in a kind of harmony, a balance; but that is a mistake. All systems are in some respects out of balance, and sometimes--at the "tipping point" as it is called--the present order gives way to a new better-adapted order, and creativity has occurred. On other occasions the existing order simply breaks down in chaos at the tipping point and is destroyed. The tipping point is that instant when what had been ordinary "quantitative change suddenly leads to qualitative change" (Taylor 2001, 148).
"Complex behavior in nature," [Per] Bak argues, "reflects the tendency of large systems with many components to evolve into a poised critical' state, way out of balance, where minor disturbances may lead to events, called avalanches, of all sizes . . . catastrophic events rather than . . . a smooth gradual path. The evolution of this very delicate state occurs without design .... The state is established solely because of the dynamical interactions among individual elements of the system: [it] . . . is self organized." . . . In the state of self-organized criticality nonlinear events can have effects disproportionate to their causes .... The dynamic interactions , . . generate global events that require a holistic description, which cannot be reduced to an account of the individual elements. Finally at the tipping point, the effect of individual events is unpredictable. (Taylor 2001, 148-149)
The important points for us to note here are the following: (1) All complex systems, structures, and organisms have an internal organization that holds them together and makes them precisely this system or organism. This feature is not imposed from without but is a kind of self-organization. (2) This internal self-organization is always in tension, in certain respects out of balance. (3) Though it can never be predicted just when or why a tipping point will come, when it does come, an avalanche with quite unpredictable consequences follows. (4) These consequences may be completely destructive, with the earlier order breaking down into chaos, or they may have self-organized into a new pattern, better adapted to the environment than the old one--the creation of a novel reality, a reality that had not existed before. What we have here is a general description of creativity2; what we don't have is an explanation of how. or why precisely this or that novel reality has come into being through this process. Creativity2 of the new is always unpredictable, unexpected, surprising; it can be described in some detail, but not fully explained. Taylor sums up this picture of organized systems and evolution in these words:
Emerging self»organizing systems are complex adaptive systems. For complex systems to maintain themselves, they must remain open to their environment and change when conditions require it. Complex adaptive systems, therefore, inevitably evolve, or, more accurately coevolve [with their environment]. As the dynamics of evolving complexity are clarified, it not only becomes apparent that complex adaptive systems evolve, but . . . that the process of evolution is actually a complex adaptive system. (2001, 156)
These ideas--out of balance, tipping point, self-organizing systems--give us a way to think about creativity2, creativity in the world of nature. Although there is no way of applying these ideas to the Big Bang (since we can know nothing about conditions before and surrounding it), they are applicable to cosmic and biological evolutionary development, including the period of rapid expansion. Descriptions of this sort, of course, do not imply that the mystery in these developments has now been dissolved away. At present we know very little about how and why and when the crucial evolutionary tipping points occurred; and even if we were to learn much more about these matters, it is doubtful this would explain in any adequate way their creative outcome. We do not (and may never be able to?) understand the mystery of how greater and more complex things can come out of simpler and lesser things--the version, appropriate to creativity2, of the old question asking why there is something and not nothing. None of these descriptions and quasi-explanations, it should be noted, give us any real knowledge of the future toward which this whole creative process may be moving--not of the fairly immediate future, or the ultimate future of the human project on planet Earth, or the future of the universe as a whole. (Of course scientific extrapolations that present the sun's burning out, an ultimate recollapse [or expansion and dissipation into virtual nothingness] of the whole universe, and so on, have been, and doubtless will continue to be, made.) Does creativity (God) go on forever whether the universe dies or not? As we have been noting, we can reconstruct in and with our imaginations a vague and general picture of the course in our universe of creative activity to date--from the Big Bang through cosmic evolution, the evolution of life, and the emergence of history and historicity; but creativity itself--God--never becomes visible in our extrapolations. From our present standpoint it seems likely therefore, that God (if God is thought of as creativity) may remain profound mystery forever.
IV
We have now filled out a little further the notion of creativity2. It is not possible to sketch here the extraordinary complexity of the full evolutionary story. However, to round out the overall picture under construction in this chapter, it is important that we consider further the momentous transition through which the emergence of creatvity3--our own human creative activity in the world--may have come into being (was created). Let us, then, explore briefly the way in which the emergence (within the evolution of life) of human history and historicity may have occurred. Two considerations will be taken up: (1) the emergence of human history and historicity largely through the development of language and culture, and (2) the emergence and development within history (in some historical streams) of what Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology, calls "autocatalytic" processes.
Taking for granted the importance of the coevolution of language and the brain (briefly discussed above), let us consider the later stages of the process through which we human beings, as we think of ourselves today may have been created. As noted in chapter 1, section II it has been especially through our historical sociocultural development over many millennia-not our biological evolution alone-that we humans have acquired many of our most distinctive characteristics. Our increasingly comprehensive knowledge about the natural world in which we live, for example, has provided us with considerable powers over our immediate environment on planet Earth, and over the physical and biological (as Well as sociocultural and psychological) conditions of our existence, powers that go far beyond those of any other animal. As we saw it is qua our development into beings shaped in many respects by historico-cultural processes of this sort--that is, humanly created, not merely natural biological processes, our historicity--that we humans have gained these increasing measures of control over the natural order, as well as over the onward movement of history.
This is no small change, to be regarded as just one more of the many unique developments that have appeared as the evolutionary process has meandered down its many distinctive lines. This is an enormous qualitative change in the evolutionary process itself an evolution of evolution," as Gerd Theissen, a scholar in the study of religion, has called it (Theissen 1985). In the emergence of history and historicity within the evolutionary process, all the decisive factors in evolution--variation, selection and preservation--change".
What happened unconsciously in pre-cultural evolution, the furthering of life through selection (which always means suffering), becomes conscious in human beings: the dull suffering of creation finds a representative voice in [humans]. (30; emphasis added) The effect of culture is to reduce [natural] selection . . . [for] culture is able to make life possible even where nature would drastically diminish its chances. (46; emphasis added) Religion . . . the heart of human culture . . . is a rebellion against the principle of selection. It makes human beings open to a greater reality. (49) [In culture, more] important than the increase of genes is the preservation of values, norms, insights, and forms of life in which genetic rivals work together in co-operation .,.. Through religion human beings succeeded in identifying themselves with their non-genetic fellows, treating them as though they were kinfolk, indeed part of themselves .... [Through their] capacity to make and transfer symbols, human beings have been able to take that small step beyond previous evolution which allows them to have inklings of a freedom from the power of genetic and social egoism .... As cultural beings they see themselves exposed to the demand of furthering life through an increasingly comprehensive solidarity with those very people who are the losers in the fight for the distribution of opportunities. (142-45)
The growth of human cultures (and, correspondingly of human symbolic behaviors) has affected significantly (as We noted) the actual biological development of the predecessors of today's homo sapiens, including the evolution of our brains (Deacon 1997). The gradual in-building of complex culturally-created dimensions and processes into our human nature has meant that creativity3--humans, over many generations, creating in history new forms of humanity-has been as indispensable a factor as biological evolution (creativity2) in bringing today's humanity into being. Only within the order of human history have beings appeared with self-consciousness, great imaginative powers and creativity freedom and responsible agency.” (Although some of the "higher" animals show signs of some similar powers, they are far from developing the complex symbolic and cultural worlds that have enabled humans to transform themselves as well as the face of planet Earth.) In and through millennia of proto-historical developments (in concert with continuing biological evolution) human biohistorical existence came on the scene. Beings with great symbolic facility (creativity3), beings with capacities to imagine the counter-factual (What is not present in experience, indeed, what never has been nor will be experienced, a veritable infinitude of possibilities), beings with historicity--these did not appear, thus, simply as the last stage of what had hitherto been a strictly biological process; it was a biological process (creativity2) becoming increasingly blended with historical features (creativity3). Thus (as we saw in chapter 1), all the way down to the deepest layers of our distinctly human existence, we are biohistorical beings, beings decisively shaped by our historicity, itself an emerging product of our emerging creativity3.
We humans are, thus, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it, "incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture-and not through culture in general but through highly particular forms of it: Dobuan and javanese, Hopi and Italian, upper-class, academic and commercial" (Geertz 1973, 49). Each of these particular cultures, though interconnected with the others in its environment, has come into being through its own particular history (creativity3), a history that has, in quite distinctive ways, shaped it and its values and meanings, its institutions and practices, its ways of living and dying, and thus shaped the very selves of its people. The human historical project from early on has been thoroughly pluralistic. Some of these diverse historical strands became highly dynamic, giving birth to massive cultures and societies of great complexity and creativity producing artificial worlds within which human life was carried on. Others have remained much closer to the world of nature. The sharp disparities among our many diverse cultures seem now however, to be breaking down in some respects. Modern science and technology which had their beginnings in the growing dynamism of Western culture several centuries ago, have now spread around the world and are actively pursued and creatively practiced in most of today's more complex civilizations. They (along with many other factors) are becoming an intellectual and institutional force increasingly promoting (creativity3) global interaction, intercommunication, and structural interconnection. Why and how have some historico-cultural processes become so highly dynamic and creative increasingly dominating the globe?
This brings us to my second point, the development, within some historical streams, of what Jared Diamond calls "autocatalytic" processes. In our reflection on the emergence of human biohistorical existence up to this point, we have focused for the most part on the importance of the .invention of language and other forms of symbolization that made it possible for humans to live within symbolic worlds-always reshaping and transforming the given world of nature, and (sometimes) facilitating the emergence of further fruitful human creativity But why in some historical strands, has this historicity developed into enormous cultural productivity increasingly becoming global, while other less dynamic strands are either swallowed up in this powerful movement or simply left behind? Though I have argued that all human societies are biohistorical and are distinctively shaped (creativity3) by their specific historicities, the particular conception of human historicity with which I am working here-emphasizing its potential for powerful dynamism and creativity-has been drawn largely from what we see and experience in the modern/ postmodern societies and cultures in which many of us happen to live. (It is important, of course, not to forget the similar creativity and dynamism to be seen in a number of the great civilizations of the past.) Diamond points out that much of life in the hunter-gatherer stage of human existence-although made possible (as we have noted) by the beginnings of language and well developed brains much like our own-was largely ordered by basic biological needs; this, by itself was not enough to get "autocatalytic processes" (as he calls them) going in history. An autocatalytic process is "one that catalyzes itself in a positive feedback cycle, going faster and faster once it has started" (Diamond 1997, 111). Without processes of this sort getting under way in our history we would not be the particular kind of biohistorical beings that I have been suggesting we now are increasingly becoming.
According to Diamond it was, above all, the human movement into deliberate food production (8500-7500 BCE) that enabled this self-accelerating process to begin (100). Once a larger and more reliable food supply was readily available, enough leisure time was assured so that societies could begin to differentiate into diverse crafts and other groupings, each concerned with certain specific tasks and skills through which they could become inventive and productive (creativity3) in new ways. The political order also changed, and societies became more hierarchical in character. They could, thus, be mobilized to tackle new problems: warriors, for example, who could capture goods and slaves from outside groups, could be trained, and in various ways a much more complex sociocultural order gradually emerged. It emerged; it was definitely not planned by anyone but is an example in early stages of human history of what I call the"serendipitous creativity" manifest in the world (Kaufman 1993a, chapter 19 and following chapters; see also footnote 10, above). The development of food production was the site in which this change first began to occur, and without which it might never have appeared at all (Diamond 1997, 110-12).
What actually happened was not a discovery of food production, nor an invention, as we might first assume. There was often not even a conscious choice between food production and hunting-gathering. . . . The first people who adopted food production could obviously not have been making a conscious choice or consciously striving toward farming as a goal, because they had never seen farming and had no way of knowing what it would be like. . . . Food production evolved as a by-product of decisions made without awareness of their consequences [serendipitous creativity]. . . . However, once food production had arisen in one part of a continent, neighboring hunter-gatherers could see the result and make conscious decisions. (105-108)
In all parts of the World . . . archaeologists find evidence of rising densities [of population] associated with the appearance of food production . . . [which is] an autocatalytic process . . . , A gradual rise in population densities impelled people to obtain more food. . . . Once people began to produce food and become sedentary they could shorten the birth spacing and produce still more people, requiring still more food. . . . The much denser populations of food producers enabled them to displace or kill hunter-gatherers by their sheer numbers. . . . In areas where there were only hunter-gatherers to begin with, those groups . . . who adopted food production out-bred those who didn't. (111-12)
Thus a natural biological selection process gradually favored the food producers, and they had the additional bonus of the unplanned development of increasingly complex sociocultural forms of life. An auto-catalytic historical process was getting under way serendipitously a process through which human life, and the face of the earth, would be completely transformed. Humans were becoming thoroughly biohistorical beings.
We have come, by this point, to the kind of history with which we are familiar: a history of varieties of communities and institutions; social and cultural practices; moral codes and forms of life; ways of thinking and acting; diverse crafts and skills; much struggle within human populations and among various human groups; a history of human conscious and self-conscious activity; deliberate setting of personal and social goals; reflection on life and its meaning or meaninglessness; development of diverse forms of religious activity; deliberate study and speculation about the world about us and the nature of human life within that world; a history in which human imagination and reflection is becoming well-developed and consciously cultivated; a history within which human creativity therefore is manifest at many points; a history in which there is much humanly created evil as well as many goods. Humans have become, in every dimension of their lives, biohistorical beings, the kind of beings capable of creating (creativity3) the modern sciences and their world-pictures (along with all the rest of our modern highly complex human existence). It is important to note, of course, that no individual or society planned all these creative developments and then carried them through. Though human creative activity was at every point present, much of what developed was neither foreseen by anyone nor deliberately brought about by human endeavors. These great historical creations were the serendipitous product of the autocatalytic momentums that had begun to emerge in and through creativity2 and continued to unfold in and through creativity3.
V
ln the course of this chapter-concerned with sketching what it means to regard God as creativity, and thus creativity as God-we have explored briefly three "modalities" of creativity three distinctly different settings in terms of which we can focus on the coming into being of all things novel in our world. Creativity-creativity in an absolutist form (so to speak), in its total inexplicability and its questionable intelligibility--is exemplified in the contemporary picture of the origins of the universe, the Big Bang. Why and how the Big Bang occurred cannot be known because this event (if it can be properly regarded as an "event") is itself an unsurpassable limit of our knowledge; our scientific laws are thought to break down here, and we have, therefore, no way of learning what could have 'caused' this event to happen (if the notion of cause can be properly invoked here). So all we have is profound mystery-the naked and unadorned mystery of something coming into being (from nothing). Nevertheless, the Big Bang is a very important concept in contemporary cosmological theory--a fact that, of course, deepens even further its mystery,
Creativity2 and creativity3 are in some respects more readily intelligible than creativity1, since we know something of the contexts within which they occur, and we are able, therefore, to specify some of the conditions without which they would not have been possible. But we do not know how or why they can be creative. Neither of these is an unqualified create ex nihilo, though both exemplify features analogous to that,” and both remain deeply mysterious in many ways, as we have been noting. Creativity2--following on the Big Bang in a l4-billion-year exceedingly complex development--appeared within the enormous expansion and eventual proliferation of cosmic and biological evolutionary trajectories. In the course of time, billions of realities of countless different types and sorts came into being on these trajectories. Current complexity theory provides a way to think about some features of these developments, but this understanding is just the tip of an iceberg, most of which still remains hidden from view. The mystery of creativity2, as we are able to think of it today is obviously very wide and comprehensive and deep.
How creativity3--human symbolic and cultural creative activity eventually leading into self-conscious and deliberate creation of countless cultural/symbolic forms, realities, and worlds-could ever emerge out of creativity2 is also a profound mystery a mystery connected with the emergence of humans as self»conscious and responsible biohistorical beings. It seems likely that without the distinctive coevolution of language and the human brain that occurred on planet Earth, this could never have happened; but much remains unknown. In any case, without the emergence of self»conscious beings like ourselves, with our powers of symbolic creativity this whole picture of the developments from the Big Bang onward would never have been created.
Where does this leave us? If we think of God as creativity creativity as God, what does this examination of creativity tell us about God? Creativity (God)--the coming into being of the new the novel-as we have noted, is to be found everywhere we turn: from the Big Bang through the cosmic expansion into galaxies in which stars and planets emerge, through the appearance of life on planet Earth and its evolution into countless forms, ultimately including biohistorical beings in which creativity becomes to some extent self»conscious and deliberate. That is, God (creativity) apparently is always and everywhere active in some degree and some respect-a theologically momentous conclusion. In all of this, it should be clear, God is to be distinguished from everything created. And yet, creativity3 seems to be in certain respects a creation of creativity2: as creativity continues to manifest itself in a world of growing complexity it transmogrifies itself in ways appropriate to that development. Gods activity though always creative, apparently changes (and grows?) in time in distinctive ways appropriate to the context in which God is acting. And thus God also apparently grows and changes.” The theological implications of this are vast.
It is important to note that the three modalities of creativity in this analysis are dialectically interconnected with each other: we cannot think clearly about any of them without thinking of them all in their interconnection. Together they provide a sketch of the creativity in the universe (as seen from and thought about on planet Earth in the twenty-first century), a creativity that seems to be itself growing in its potential and grandeur. All that is being said here is, of course, itself a product of creativity3: it is a structure of symbols. The ideas of the Big Bang (creativity1) and of the 14-billion-years-long evolutionary path (creativity2) from the Big Bang to symbolic creativity are themselves symbol-systems (products of creativity3). They are, moreover, symbol-systems without which we would be unable to understand creativity3 itself and its coming into being. According to present evolutionary thinking, the symbolic order could not have come into existence without the 14 billion years of prior (non-symbolic) evolutionary development. There is no way, of course, for us to check this out apart from further symbolic testing and other imaginative activity (creativity3). Although we have here a completely interdependent and coherent--and in that sense an intelligible--self-explanatory whole, it is a whole that in another sense remains completely inexplicable, a mystery.”
In our examination of the three modalities of creativity we have discovered that wherever we see-or come to believe-that creativity has occurred, we End mystery This should not be difficult to understand: the modalities of creativity (as I have interpreted them) always involve the coming into being of something greater and more complex from something simpler and less complex. We humans ordinarily try to think of the coming into being of things in terms of ideas of cause and effect, but none of our conceptions of finite causality explain these kinds of development. And yet, our perception of and thinking about the world and ourselves within the World presents creative happenings of many sorts-whether we go back to the biblical account or focus on modern scientific ideas. I have suggested repeatedly in this book that it is not appropriate to reify creativity in any way, or to attribute it to some "being" (such as a creator conceived as an independent quasi-person); for it is precisely this developing activity (creativity) that should itself be thought of as God. This characterization of God as creativity is in a special way quite fitting, given the long history in the West that links all creativity with God (though God has usually not been thought of as "developing")."Creativity" designates a referent for our God-talk that-although deeply mysterious-is specifiable in terms of today's understanding of the world and the human, and it does so without compromising the important traditional insistence that God must not be confused with any of the realities of the created order. God is creativity, not one of the creatures (though deeply involved with the creatures). Thinking of God in this way means (as we have seen) that God must be understood as ultimately mystery beyond human comprehension.
Although God is not regarded here as a person and we are in no position to say what God is-God (in and through creativity3) is clearly to be thought of as the ultimate source and ground of all our human realities, values, and meanings (including all Christian values and meanings). Thus, we can say something about how we are related to God, though what God (creativity) is remains a mystery That we cannot know what God is but only how we are related to God has been a long-standing theological claim affirmed by such influential theologians as Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, and Schleiermacher (see discussion of "negative theology" in the prologue, section V). And, as we have seen, the mystery of creativity-which I have been claiming throughout is what we should think of as God-is itself unqualified, is absolute. This not only rules out all anthropomorphism in our thinking of God (as I have frequently argued in this book), it has much more radical implications. The most basic claims about God in our Western traditions--for example, that God is "being as such," God necessarily exists, or that God is one (being?) not many (monotheism)--are also put in question here. This does not mean these claims are false, that we should no longer accept them. What it does mean is that we are in no position to answer the question about their truth; what God (creativity) really is cannot be known by humans, it is beyond our cognitive reach. The radicality of this agnosticism would seem to dissolve away the question of whether it is appropriate to think of God (creativity) as "developing" or in other ways "changing," or whether we should try to think of God in terms of three (or more) creativities or only one that can be considered in three distinctly different contexts. This radicality means that when we are told to put our trust in the ultimate mystery of creativity, it is indeed a momentous act of faith char is being called for. It may be that our distress that such a radical agnosticism is required of us is actually grounded upon a long-standing Western assumption (going all the way back to Parmenides): the assumption that being must be regarded as the absolute foundation undergirding all life, reality and thinking. If we had been brought up (as many Buddhists have) thinking in terms of sunyata (emptiness, nothingness) as ultimate, would we feel more at home with the radical Ruth that life now seems to require of us? From at least the time of Moses, God has been regarded as the source and ground of human morality and for Christians that morality has been epitomized in the divine love (agape); indeed, it was possible for the early Christians to go so far as to say flatly that "God is love" (1 john 418, 16). Can such claims as these be in any way accommodated to the idea of God as the creativity in and through which our vast (impersonal) universe has come into being, a creativity that often brings forth new realities through massive violent destruction of other realities already in place-exploding stars, cosmic "black holes" char swallow up everything in their vicinity; on planet Earth volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, and so on, nature "red in tooth and claw"? This violence, it would seem, is deeply connected with the creativity manifest in the world, and if it suggests any kind of morality at all, many would say it is a morality of naked power. Ts not this sort of creativity this sort of God-of-violent-power, at the antipodes of everything central to Christian faith?
As suggested in chapter 2, we do not need to draw that conclusion. We should see all of this as the creative beginnings and under-pinnings of a remarkable trajectory in our universe that has eventuated in the creation of life and then much later in the creation of agents capable of self-conscious action and of making moral judgments about such matters as violence and nonviolence. The creativity (God) at work in our universe has brought us-in the course of our developing history-to a point where we can entertain the possibility of living in a moral order that is nonviolent, even loving, where we can deliberately choose (creativity3) to work at bringing about such an order and can try to train ourselves and our children to live and act in nonviolent loving ways (however much we continue to fall short of actualizing such dreams). In the processes through which our humanness was created, activity attitudes, and behavior of the sort we call loving emerged (creativity3) and came into focus, and in our human corner of the universe capacities and needs for agape-love gradually became important and prized (at least in some quarters). So in and through the emergence of creativity3 (our specifically human participation in creativity) loving, caring attitudes and activities-along with many other sorts-have become highly valued features of life. Nonviolent agape-love was created (during the biological evolution and historical development of life here on planet Earth) in the interplay of God (creativities 3) with emerging humankind. This development, quite unlike much of what apparently occurred in the interrelations of God with many other spheres of the cosmic order, is--at least in the judgment of those who count themselves as Christian--of great significance,”
God (creativity) has brought into being human persons and communities--in all their vast diversity--and God continues to sustain this great pluralism of human life.” This conception of God undercuts completely the anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism of the traditional Abrahamic understanding of God--and the consequent too easy authorization of excessive violence and utterly inhuman forms of domination and warfare, as is so often found in the Abrahamic traditions. It presents us with an image/concept much better fitted to encourage our coming to terms with today's massive ecological and pluralistic issues-the central religious challenge of our time. Obviously however, it raises many new theological problems of its own.
There will be those who say that in this theology God has really disappeared in the mists of mystery and that true faith in God is thus also gone. To that I reply true faith in God is not living with a conviction that everything is going to be okay in the end because we know that our heavenly father is taking care of us. It is, rather, acknowledging and accepting the ultimate mystery of things and, precisely in face of that mystery going out like Abraham (as Hebrews 11:8 puts it) not really knowing where we are going, but nevertheless moving forward creatively and with confidence-confidence in the serendipitous creativity that has brought our trajectory and us into being, has continued to sustain the human project within the web of life that surrounds and nurtures us, and has given us a measure of hope for that project here on planet Earth. Since we now see that we are to love and give ourselves and our lives not only to our human neighbors and enemies, but also to the wider orders of life in which we find ourselves, this perspective deepens and widens the radicality of the Christian ethic, and thus the radicality of Christian faith.
* * *
In the beginning was creativity and the creativity was with God, and the creativity was God. All things came into being through the mystery of creativity; apart from creativity nothing would have come into being.
