|
Email
|
If you enjoy this article, consider making an online donation to support the Global Spiral.
|
| Creation and Creativity
The Creation of Creativity and the Flourishing of Creation [1]
Creativity seems to be an almost ubiquitous feature of nature. In a cosmic scale, protons and neutrons were formed from their constituent quarks in the first milliseconds after the Big Bang (10-4 seconds); within the first three minutes the nuclei of hydrogen and helium were born; around a half million years later the lighter atoms were developed; however, not less than two generations of stars were necessary to create the heavier atoms, among them carbon, without which life would not have developed.
Details are open for discussion, but seen from the perspective of Big Bang cosmology, the material universe has shown a staggering capacity for self-organization. Again and again, nature brings together what were hitherto unconnected particles, atoms, and molecules in a general trend toward the evolution of higher-order complex systems. As a consequence, we live in a multifarious world, always in process yet also highly structured. Molecular structures are widely distributed in the cosmos. However, only a few of these have further coalesced into those macromolecules that were to become the building blocks of living systems. Thus, life itself is an example of a local order. After all, life is a rare phenomenon that appears here and there but not everywhere.
The question to be discussed in this essay is, How can we understand the local processes of life against the background of the vast physical cosmos in general? What are the scientific options for seeking an answer to the riddle of biogenesis? And, most important in our context, How could one from an informed Christian perspective think consistently about God's relation to a universe that seems to be self-organizing, if not self-creative? Could it be that God has so created the material world that it has an innate ability to form life out of matter and thus give rise to new emergent phenomena such as perception, feeling, and consciousness? In fact, this is the theological hypothesis to be explored in the following.
Creativity in nature-a brute fact?
If creativity is in fact a pervasive feature of cosmic evolution, how we are to reflect this fact in our personal lives and in our more encompassing worldviews? One option is to take an attitude of intellectual indifference or complacency. One could argue that it is fine that nature happens to give rise to living beings like ourselves, but it is futile to bother further about this fact. In a more subtle version the argument runs as follows:
Raising the question about the abundant nature of nature may be an ineradicable part of the human mindset, but unfortunately our questions are misplaced in face of a nature that is and remains mute. On this view, the creativity of cosmos as well as the ingenuity of life processes are simply to be taken as brute facts. Nature is not designed to answer all the metaphysical questions that have landed on the human mind-as an infelicitous by-product of the evolution of human intelligence.
Is such a position an expression of an appropriate intellectual modesty, or is it an evasion of questions that need to be posed, even answered? The decision is ours, and it will in the end always be personal. However, two of the great cultural forces of our age, religion and science, remain intrigued by the feature of cosmic creativity, and neither of them is satisfied with a premature reference to brute facts. Just as science cannot escape questions about how nature works to produce such a multifarious
world, religion cannot stop wondering about the inherent qualities of nature that make life worthwhile and exciting. Life is non-trivial, and therefore significant to human beings.
Scientific perspectives on biogenetic creativity
Let me outline several scientific perspectives on biogenesis. As is well known, the riddle about the historical route leading from nonliving to living systems is not solved, nor do we yet have a sufficient understanding of the biochemical dynamics of biogenesis.[2] However, scientists are naturally inclined to assume that the emergence of living systems occurs naturally, that is, as a sequence of ordinary physical processes, and as a result of a general propensity towards molecular self-assembly.
The difficulty is that living systems depend on an already existing self-sustaining community of molecules. We thus face a problem of
circularity. In order to explain life, something very much like life has to be presupposed. Complex protein enzymes cannot exist without substantial lengths of DNA, which are coding for the proteins, but DNA could not be reliably copied without the enzymes.[3] This is what physicist Paul Davies has rightly called the "Chicken-and-Egg Paradox." [4]
This circularity problem reminds us that the creativity of the biological world does not reside with its individual components but is a result of a well-adjusted coordination between myriad material elements.
Life cannot be extrapolated from the behavior of any single component of a living system. DNA on its own is chemically impotent unless it is part of a functioning system and protected by the safe environment within the cell wall. Most scientists therefore agree that we should not begin the story of biogenesis with DNA. According to current research, three scenarios are possible:
1. The RNA World Model. Life may have started with major cycles of self-replicating cykluses of RNA. The most famous version of the RNA world hypothesis is the so-called hypercykle theory of Manfred Eigen and colleagues. This is an empirically tested theory that shows that a species of RNA-virus of the Escherichia coli bacteria is able to reproduce itself by utilizing the chemical products of the bacteria as a catalyst for the replication of the virus.[5] While this property of self-replication is found in nature only in host cells with fully developed DNA-structures, it has been possible to recreate important steps of such autocatalytic processes outside living cells under specific in vitro conditions. [6]
2. The Protein Path. Another possibility is that the route to life may have come through a prebiotic protein world. Proteins may have been able to replicate themselves and survive over generations, unaided by the RNA-DNA cooperation. Indeed, recently it has been shown that small peptide chains can replicate. The mad-cow disease BSE, which recently has caused so many problems for European farmers, also replicates by fragments of proteins and not by whole bacteria or virus.[7]
Already in his book, Origins of Life, from 1985,[8] physicist Freeman Dyson has suggested that proteins might have come first and only later the nucleic acids, whether in the form of DNA or RNA. What is needed for biogenesis is first some protective environments like proto-cells or vesicles that may have been assembled in a concentrated primordial soup. Unlike Eigen, Dyson has no empirical test case on which he can base his suggestion, but Dyson also points to symbiotic processes as the clue to biogenesis. Life might have arisen as a fusion between primordial creatures, some of which were able of metabolism and others that were capable of self-replication. Only much later did the primitive nucleic-acid replicators invade the geneless cells. The mechanisms that are nowadays performed by the specialized functions of DNA and RNA may once have been performed through the more decentralized cooperation of proto-organisms. It remains to be seen whether a similar piecemeal model of biogenesis can be substantiated.
3. The "Invisible Hand" of Self-organization. A third and more general approach appeals to the widespread feature of natural tendencies toward self-organization. Though this approach is motivated by the empirical amount of autocatalytic properties in chemistry, it uses a mathematical approach to the riddle of biogenesis; as such, it is mostly based on computer simulations of emergent processes.
In his book Life's Other Secret, mathematician Ian Stewart contends that there are two secrets of life. One is the highly specified (yet
transformable) information of the RNA-DNA circuit. Another, and more neglected, secret is the mathematics of nonlinear processes (that is, processes in which a little input may cause an enormous output). Without universal mathematical laws driving matter toward increased complexity we cannot account for the fact that life came out matter in the first place, nor for the fact that particular pathways of evolution are unnegotiably preferred to others. An example is the virtually universal form of a sixfold symmetry that we find in snowflakes, crystals, and in the lattices on which cells are formed.[9] Evolution always takes place within a universal mathematical phase space, i.e. the possibility spectrum of all developmental options, but within this phase space some blueprints and forms are very much more likely to occur than others, simply by virtue of their physical economy. Life is continuously governed by, or at least constrained by, a deep-seated mathematical order that is prior to evolution and not a by-product of evolution. The "other secret of life" is the primordial secret!
The new computer sciences of complexity are still in the process of finding ways of mimicking the particular algorithms that may explain the evolution of evolution. One of the first sustained attempts in this direction was Stuart Kauffman's The Origins of Order (1993), followed by his more popular account, At Home in the Universe (1995). According to Kauffman,the neo-Darwinian paradigm has to be supplemented with a search for the mathematical laws of self-organization and complexity. The evolutionary story is driven by selection and by prebiotic laws of self-organization. Kauffman thus focuses on the spontaneous forma-tion of chemical autocatalytic networks far below the threshold of the interplay between RNA and DNA. According to this model, "The secret of life, the wellspring of reproduction, is not to be found in the beauty of the Watson-Crick pairing, but in the achievement of collective catalytic closure."[10]
Redescribing cosmic and biological creativity
The choice between these three scientific models is not of primary theological importance. First, it should be noted that the three models are not necessarily incompatible, for it could well be that life is the combined result of a complexification process within both the RNA world and the protein sequences, a complexification propagated by general mathematical properties of nature. Second, religion in general (and Christian faith in particular) is not concerned with the exact routes and mechanisms of biogenesis; religion rather deals with firsthand experiences of nature, i.e., the results of the workings of natural laws and functions, whatever these may be. Provided that a scientifically satisfying explanation of the path from inorganic to organic life will be found in the future, I suggest that the theological hypothesis would in all cases be the same: We are awaited by God, the creator of creativity.
Let is see how this suggestion could be spelled out in a thought experiment. Provided that we inhabit a world that is capable of
self-organization, and provided that God is the creator of all-that-is, how can we then understand God as the creator of cosmic creativity and biological fertility? Note that the issue for discussion here is not whether God's existence is the best explanation as to why the world is as it is, nor how we may understand God's causal modes of interaction with the world. These are important philosophical questions, but they are not pursued here. Rather, my purpose is to develop a "thick" theological redescription of cosmic and biological creativity as seen from a Christian point of view yet informed from the scientific perspective on self-organizational principles. This approach is qualitative in nature, since I explore how we may see God's creative presence in a seemingly self-regulated world, if we assume a Christian perspective and if we take for granted nature's innate propensity for complexity.
If the goal is not so much theological explanation in causal terms, the issue is rather to engage theology in a constructive redescription of the world of nature. How might the Christian tradition understand itself in the light of the sciences by redescribing, from a religious point of view, a world already explained (or at least explainable) in the context of science? Such re-description will have to be in touch with religious traditions and yet will have to be both constrained and propelled by scientific insights.[11] Since theological redescriptions, thus defined, may be said to "make intelligible" the existence and quality of the world of nature, they may be said to be explanatory in a broad semantic sense of the term but not in the sense of offering a causal account of the particular routes and mechanisms of nature.
Theology1, theology2, and theology3
My first and most general proposal is that we should take leave of the persistent thought model that God's glory is magnified when nature is conceived as purely passive, and that God's power, correspondingly, is diminished if God's creatures are empowered. Already classic philosophical theology made clear that "divine omnipotence" should not be taken as an abstract description saying, for example, that God "can do everything," or "actually does all" in a way that excludes the activity of the creatures. Even if the concept of omnipotence has misled many religious minds to adopt such a view, mainstream Christian theologians always knew that there was something that God could not do (for instance, make something done undone, or lie) and that God de facto has chosen to cooperate with the powers of the creatures that were given by God in the first place.[12] I will press this point further by arguing that the term "the almighty God" should be understood within the grammar of Christian practice-that is, as an invocation of God by believers who already understand themselves as participating in a two-way communication with God.
In general it is pertinent to make clear whether we are speaking theologically from an internal perspective of lived Christian faith, or in terms of a observer-neutral theory about theism as a causal explanation of the world. In fact, the theological redescription of a self-organized world proposed here will be nourished from metaphors, concepts, and thought models derived from first-order Christian practice and language. Giving voice to the concerns of the lived Christian faith is the role of a theology1, as I shall call it. We cannot expect to find a direct link between local religious practices such as invocations and prayers on the one hand and scientific theories on the other. There exist no such shortcuts from religion to science. I am convinced, however, that there are important yet widely neglected re-sources for the dialogue between theology and science in taking seriously indigenous religious conceptions of reality. In what follows, I argue that the biblical traditions of "creation" and "blessing" identify God's presence precisely in human and natural processes where the creatures flourish in their self-development. Certainly, biblical concepts of God's "creation" and "blessing" do not offer anything like a theory of self-organizing natural systems, yet they do offer important clues as to how God may be using a divine power in a self-limiting way by eliciting the flourishing of created powers.
By generalizing these pictures of God's identity as Creator, we can theologically re-describe-or reidentify-God's creativity also in nature's capacity for self-organization. Such a constructive generalization is of course not part of first-order religious life; it is a theological hypothesis on the level of a theology2, i.e., an extended theological reflection upon the potential meanings of a given religion. The task of a theology2 is to generalize our notions of God and to allow an external perspective on religious beliefs. For example, theology1 images of God as comforting God's children, as blessing creatures, as establishing a covenant, are generalized into theology2 concepts of God as "creator" and "providence" (as we are used to deal with such concepts within the discipline of systematic theology). The virtue of theology2 concepts lies in their encompassing nature so that they may serve as important bridging concepts for discussion between theology and the sciences.
While theology2 concepts are still informed by the semantics of a given religious tradition, we can go one step further in abstraction to the level of a theology3, where one could speak about "divine design" or "divine action" in the language of a historically decontextualized philosophical theology. The virtue of such theology3 concepts is that they may provide a common ground for discussing very general features of reality (such as the anthropic principle) and can do so also in interreligious dialogue. The danger, however, is that we end up with highly ambiguous concepts such as "divine design" that leave the nature of the divine designer wholly indeterminate. For this reason, theology3 is not always perceived by religious practitioners as being relevant. What appears to be a discussion between science and religion may actually be a discussion between science and a speculate metaphysics. The science-religion discussion would therefore benefit significantly if the theology partners did not refrain from using theology1 resources in redescriptions of the world of nature. Also, the more systematic theology2s would then be continuously informed from an internal religious perspective provided by theology1 descriptions and would resist sliding too easily into abstract metaphysical discourse.[13]
In what follows I shall present some theology1 sketches of the biblical concepts of "creation" and "blessing," on the basis of which I propose a more generalized theology2 description of the world which says that God's presence can be recognized exactly in nature's capacity for self-organization. On this view, God is the generous creator of creativity.
Divine creativity and nature's self-productivity
In the Genesis narratives we find a recurrent pattern of God (1) unilaterally creating the world in order to make room for (2) bilateral relations between creator and creature in the horizon of (3) multilateral relations among the creatures. In fact, the question of how creation is to be understood in relation to "self-making" creatures is not quite as modern as one might expect.
In the Genesis 1 story of creation, we hear that God invited the created world to produce further creatures on its own: "Let the earth produce growing things; let there be on the earth plants that bear seed, and trees bearing fruit each with its own kind of seed" (Gen 1:11 REB). Historically, one might find here traces of the old mythology of the fertile Mother Earth (Cf. Sir 40:1; Ps 139:5). If so, the authors behind Genesis 1 apparently used this mythology to point to the processes of natural self-unfolding well known from everyday life.[14] Be this as it may, the crucial point is that the objects of creation become the subjects of creation. There is no hint of a fear that this limitation is imposed upon God from the outside. It is rather seen as the manner in which God attunes the splendor of divine power to the capacities of a world already created by God.
Especially in the second creation story (Gen 2:4b-25), the idea of cooperation between creator and creature is central. God cooperates with the powers of the earth by sending the rain and by forming adam (literally, "soil-creature") from the dust of the ground (adamah soil). And again, God formed the human beings in order to continue God's work of "giving names" to the co-creatures of the human being (Gen 2:19).
Soon, in the perspective of Genesis 3-11, the assignment of human beings is to take an active part in the transformation of the ongoing story of creation, in breeding (monadic life-forms) as well as in tilling (agricultural life-forms). The evolution goes on from the domain of sexual reproduction into the sociocultural domain. In this picture, the inventions of human culture are not seen as deviations from God's "original" creation but rather as a mode of participation in God's creative act of unfolding and fostering new appearances on the scene of history. Created in the image and likeness of God, the human person is, in the helpful phrase of Philip Hefner, the "created co-creator": "Homo sapiens is God's created co-creator, whose purpose is the 'stretching/enabling' of the systems of nature so that they can participate in God's purposes in the mode of freedom."[15]
God apparently creates by inaugurating a colon rather than putting a period. The world is given, and yet it is in the process of unfolding. Thus, being a creature means enjoying the gifts of life and actively participating in God's creative works. God's creativity not only sets the scene of creation but also supports and stimulates the productivity of the creatures. Humanity is not in the center of creation by being separated from other creatures but by being placed in the midst of nature as nature.
Divine blessing and the divine-human economy of superabundance
The distinctive togetherness of God and creatures comes even more to the fore in the notion of God's blessing of the living creatures. In the creation account, the same words of blessing are said to animals and human beings: "Be fruitful and increase" (Gen 1:22, 28). This blessing is imagined not only as a word but as a creative power that God gives away to the living creatures so that they can reproduce themselves abundantly: "multiply and fill the earth."
The Semitic word for blessing (in Hebrew barak) has many connotations, from praying and praising to blessing, thanking, and greeting. Also the Greek equivalent (euloge) means both blessing and praising. These findings indicate that the concept of blessing is rooted in everyday life and is shaped by typical forms of human interaction. The term blessing can simply be used as a way of greeting one another (Gen 47:7; cf. 1 Sam 13:10, 25:14) as well as a manner of bidding farewell (Gen 47:10: cf. 24:60, 28:1, 32:1).[16] In the Icelandic language, the word for hello is still like godbless, just as the Bavarian greeting is still Grüssgott. Even the English
good-bye or farewell entails a relic of blessing in its wish for the well-being of the other.
When Isaac blesses Jacob (and Esau), he is also saying farewell, but more important, he is passing on a blessing that he had already received through his father Abraham (Genesis 27). Blessing is here something more than a mere wish; it is a translocation of a generative power. This vital power had been given to Isaac through Abraham who in the first place had received the constitutive blessing from God for free: "I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Gen 12:2-3).
Several features of blessing are clear here. First, God's blessing spreads. Just like the primordial blessing in the beginning of creation (Gen 1: 22, 28) initiates an ever-expanding history of biological fertility, so does the divine blessing of Abraham entail God's promise of further flourishing in the biocultural history of humanity. Seen in a historical perspective, the original concept of divine blessing as a transfer of vitality has perhaps only secondarily been combined with a theological favoritism toward the people of Israel (cf. Numbers 22-24).[17] This controversial issue is not of primary interest here, but it shows how the vitality and joy of blessing is always bound to a specific local context-someone is blessed and not everybody-and yet God's blessing has the will to widen its scope and fertilize those for whom Abraham will become a blessing. An inclusive tendency inhabits the exclusiveness of being picked out for a special divine blessing.
Second, the blessing is something like an interactive power, a wellspring emerging in the in human encounters as well as in the zones of cooperation between human beings and nature. Thus there is an inherent expectation of reciprocity in the phenomenon of blessing. The one who is meeting the other with "good-bye" is inviting the greeting of the other, and so it is said to both Abraham and Jacob, "cursed be everyone who curses you, blessed be everyone who blesses you!" (Gen 27:29; cf. Gen 12:3, Num 24:9). The blessed is the one who is creative and who is therefore capable of further spreading the ambience of health and creativity around him or her. Being blessed invites being more blessed, and cursed is the one who breaks this spiral of creativity. Similarly, there is "blessing" in a cluster of grapes, as long as there is juice in the grapes, and this blessing should not be destroyed (Isa 65:8).
Interestingly, this reciprocity of blessing also encompasses the relation between God and humanity. There is an economy of superabundance between God the Creator, who inaugurates the spirals of blessing and who sends blessing, and the human beings (or even God's whole creation, Ps 103:20-22), who give back to God what comes from God in the first place. In the divine-human ecology humans are "blessing God," that is, praising, thanking, or, more precisely, designating God as baruk, the one who is the Wellspring of well-being. Just as human beings are enriched by God, so is God enriched by receiving the blessings of creatures. This divine-creature economy is both dangerous and abundant. The blessing never reaches a state of natural equilibrium; it can be irrupted by non-reciprocation, which may initiate avalanches of cursing; the blessing, however, is abundant as long as it lasts.
This feature of the reversibility of blessing has different shapes in the Old Testament. In the law traditions we find an emphasis on a very direct reciprocation be-tween God and human beings: if the human beings keep the law, then they shall be blessed in all their undertakings; but if they don't, they shall be cursed wherever they move (Deuteronomy 28). In the so-called priestly blessing, which is still used in many Christian services, we find an unconditional blessing of God:
The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you,
and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his Countenance upon you,
and give you peace. (Num 6:22-26)
This blessing is here indiscriminately conferred on those present in the temple.[18] The cultic theology of blessing may be called a theology of the divine presence in glory. The temple is seen as the particular dwelling place (shekinah) of God the Creator, who is present throughout creation but not everywhere manifest, not everywhere shining forth (1 Kings 8). In the cultic traditions, the favoritism of the historical traditions is at least momentarily suspended. In the encounter with God's face in the cult, the blessing of creation is present in concentrated form.[19] What matters is no longer our belonging to a specific people but facing the face of God. Inherent in this spatial dimension of blessing is also a temporal dimension: encountering the blessing face of God is an iterative process, which again reminds us of God's primordial blessing of all living beings (Genesis 1).God's blessing and keeping extends after Paradise has been lost.
A third recurring feature of blessing is its combination of divine immanence and transcendence. The Old Testament scholar Hans-Peter Moller rightly points out that God's blessing is conceived as an immanently working spatiotemporal force.[20] The blessing of God is not only bestowed upon the creatures but is working inside them.
This archaic notion of blessing not only transcends the Early Modern division between human and nonhuman nature, since fertility is common to all created beings. God's accompanying the blessed beings also pervades their very functioning and existence:
"You are a brave man, and the Lord is with you," it is said to Gideon, and in a following verse it is said to him: "Go and use this strength of yours. . . ." (Jdg 6:12-14).
In the blessing there seems to be no opposition between the transcendence and immanence of God. The blessing is at once personally assigned by God and working as a quasi-natural force. The power of the blessing is in its givenness, and yet at the same time the blessing is what it turns out to effect in the future process of unfolding and use. In fact, archaic thinking and recent scientific modes of thought might be comparable on this point, insofar as both are focusing upon the "structuring tendencies" (Strukturierungstendenzen) in the development of living beings (Moller 1991, 245-51). We might say that the blessing of God is a structuring principle, at once transcendent in its origination and immanent in its efficiency.
Finally, the blessing of God combines God's fundamental sustenance with an element of superabundance. God supports the inner fruitfulness of the "ordinary" processes of growth, necessary for survival, but God's blessing also stimulates the "extra-ordinary" energies by giving a surplus of strength and life-value to groups and individuals. The fact that the dynamic of the blessing is finite, however, shows its transitory presence in the creatures. At some time or other, the power of the blessing shall return to God.
Thus also with respect to biological fertility we face a two-phased structure of, first, God's unilateral creation "In the Beginning," then the multiple divine-creaturely cooperations, "each of its kind." Even if the concept of divine blessing does not address specific issues of modern science, it certainly deals with the question of creativity and indeed identifies God as the creator of creativity. Against this background, one can then proceed and propose a more general hypothesis-that God is the generous creator of self-organizing systems. God is the creative Pattern or Logos (John 1) that frees the capacities of self-organized patterns in the world of nature as well as in the midst of human existence.
Concluding perspectives
How far have these considerations led us? First, I took my point of departure in a pervasive yet enigmatic feature of nature: its immense creativity and propensity for developing life out of nonliving chemical systems.
Second, I described three scientific models that guide current research in explaining the emergence of the local pockets of life in the vast physical universe. Clearly, none of these is fully satisfactory. But note that I have not invoked theology to explain the gaps that are not yet filled up by plausible scientific explanation.[21] Even if the construction of scientific theories is always informed by the general cultural climate, the choice between the different scientific models should finally be decided on the scientific ground of the most economic natural explanation.
Third, I argued that a theological view must see God as the creator of creativity and the human person as God's created co-creator who is destined to participate in nature's creativity. Heuristically guided by the scientific theories of self-organization, I furthermore identified elements of Christian tradition that might be relevant for a more extended theological response to the understanding of biological creativity. In fact, the biblical concepts of "creation" and "blessing" do address the issue of creativity, even though they are not concerned with the scientific riddles of biogenesis. Questions about the routes, mechanisms, and mathematics of biological systems fall outside the religious purview. More important, however, these traditions-sometimes archaic and sometimes highly sophisticated-see the distinguishing characteristic of divine activity in the sparking of creativity in and between God's creatures.
Against this background, I argued that a Christian theology should be naturally inclined to appreciate the very principle of self-organization of nature. The argument runs in two steps. First, I offered two examples of a theology1, a theology nourished and inspired by the concepts and metaphors of first-order religious belief (in this case, notions of divine creation and blessing). On this basis I lined out a more general hypothesis, a theology 2, that is able to redescribe the world of nature as explained by the sciences from the informed perspective of a religious tradition. In this view there is no contradiction between the notion of God's creation (Greek, ktisis) and the scientific concept of the self-development of nature (Greek, physis self-growth). On the contrary, there is an astonishing affinity in the basic thought models of science and theology. God the Creator not only initiates but continuously supports and stimulates the self-creative dynamics of self-organizing systems.
The qualitative features of the universe that we inhabit seem to be very much like the features that one would expect it to have, if God is really the generous creator of creativity.[22]
Notes
1 This essay, given for the Zygon Center for Science and Religion on March 10, 2000, is dedicated to Philip Hefner, who also invited me as speaker. An earlier version of the paper was given several times in South Africa in August 1999; at Princeton Theological Seminary October 12, 1999; and in Uppsala October 23, 1999. Thanks to Wentzel van Huyssteen and Cornel duToit for helpful comments on earlier versions.
2 For an overview of the current situation, see The Molecular Origins of Life: Assembling Pieces of the Puzzle, ed. Andre Brack (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1998.
3 John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary, The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origins of Language (New York: Oxford University Press [1999]2000), 37.
4 Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1999), 123-25.
5 Manfred Eigen, "Stufen zum Leben". Die frhe Evolution in Visier der Molekularbiologie (Munich: Piper, 1987), 225-45.
6 Details in Bernd-Olaf Küppers, "Der Ursprung biologischer Evolution". Zur Natur-phiolosophie der Naturentstehung (Munich: Piper, [1986] 1990), 271-73.
7 See Philip Cohen, "Can Protein Spring into Life?" New Scientist (April 1997), 18ff., and the account of Davies, The Fifth Miracle, 133-38, on which I build here.
8 Freeman Dyson, Origins of Life (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
9 Ian Stewart, Life's Other Secret: The New Mathematics of the Living World (London: Penguin, 1998), esp. chaps. 2 and 12.
10 Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1995] 1996), 48.
11 On the concept of theology as a "redescription of the world" on the basis of a particular religious semantics, see Niels Hen-rik Gregersen, "Theology in a Neo-Darwinian World," Studia Theologica 48 (1994): 125-33, and J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Duet or Duel? Theology and Science in a Postmodern World (London: SCM Press, 1998), 125-28.
12 See, for instance, Thomas Aquinas, "Summa Theologiae I:25" (on the meaning of divine omnipotence) and the doctrine of the divine-human cooperation in the concursus of divine providence that was held in common by Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed, see the critical discussion in Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, [1960] 1986), 94-107.
13 The distinction between a theology1 and a theology2 (while admitting a constant circularity between the two levels) is derived from Hans W. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), esp. 19-27. I have applied this distinction to the science-theology discussion in "Autopoiesis: Less Than Self-Constitution, More than Self-Organization: Reply to Gilkey, McClelland and Deltete, and Brun," Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 34 (March 1999), 117-38. The typology is here extended with the notion of a theology3.
14 Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11 (BKAT I/1) (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1976), 122.
15 Philip Hefner, "Biocultural Evolution and the Created Co-Creator," in Science and Theology: The New Consonance, ed. Ted Peters (Boulder: Westview Press), 185, or "Homo Sapiens: Natura et Imago Dei," in Studies in Science and Theology 3 (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1995), 225-34.
16 See C. A. Keller and G. Wehmeier, "Barak," in Ernst Jenni and Claus Westermann, Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997), 1:266-82, 271. Willy Schrottroff, Der israelitische Fluchspruch (WMANT 30) (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1969), 195, suggests that the greeting constitutes the original Sitz im Leben of the formula "Blessed be you."
17 So Claus Westermann, Der Segen in der Bibel und im Handeln der Kirche (München: Chr. Kaiser, [1968] 1992), 43-61. Cf. his commentary in Genesis12-36 (BKAT I/2) (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1981), 522-45.
18 Thanks to my Old Testament colleague Hans J. Lundager Jensen for making these points clear to me.
19 As phrased by Sigurd Mowinckel, Psalmenstudien V. Segen und Kult in Israels Kult und Psalmendichtung (Kristiania: [Gyldendal], 1924), 23: "Durch die heiligen Handlungen und Worte wird der ganze Segensschatz der Gesellschaft sozusagen in ein Zentrum konzentriert und dadurch gestei-gert, um von diesem Zentrum heraus zu allen Teilnehmenden herauszustrahlen."
Instead of Mowinckel's reference to "the blessing-treasures of the society," Claus Westermann more appropriately refers to the continuity between the priestly concept of blessing and that of Genesis 1 (also part of the Priestly tradition); see Westermann, Der Segen, 2-3.
20 Hans-Peter Müller, "Segen im Alten Testament," in Mythos-Kerygma-Wahrheit (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1991), 261-304.
21 Here my approach differs markedly from that of the so-called Intelligent Design movement; see, e.g., Steven C. Meyer, "The Explanatory Power of Design," in Mere Creation: Science, Faith & Intelligent Design, ed. William A. Dembski (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1998), 113-47.
22 A more technical version of the theological argument developed here can be found in my article, "The Idea of Creation and the Theory of Autopoietic Processes," Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 33 (September 1998): 333-67.
Did you enjoy this article? ... Your donation is tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.
Published 2002.05.15
|
Printer-Friendly |
Email This Article
©1997-2008 Metanexus Institute
www.metanexus.net |
|
|