CONCEIVING THE SPIRIT AS CREATIVITY

In the following essay, one will find several parts, followed by a suggestive conclusion. Each part of this essay suggests an overall thesis that God through the Spirit is both the immanent and eminent principle of creativity, ever wooing, ever beckoning, and ever empowering the advancements in complexity over 15 billion years of cosmic history, and 3.6 billion years of Earthly history, seen principally in the accompanying (or, rather, resultant) biological evolution. I will argue that via the primal kenosis of the Spirit's beingness into the world, the fullness of the deity is immanently present upon and within the Earth that has been expanding with increasing complexity in virtual perpetuity (Weber , 149), insomuch as over a period of 3.6 billion years there has arisen entities that display and promote both the goodness (defined as what God does for the “other”) and the greatness (referent to the intrinsic character) of God.

I agree with I. C. Jarvie, who holds that creativity is interesting precisely because it is uniquely mysterious (Jarvie , 44). It is all the more mysterious since I posit that it is the Spirit who is the principle of creativity within the world, for the Spirit is often seen to be the hidden member of the trinity, and not an active force prior to the ascension of Jesus. It should be noted that creative achievements are unique events, and as such they are not repeatable. However, we can nevertheless reconstruct this creativity post hoc, which of course is our perspective in the twenty‐first century. As an attempt to explain why process is at the base of actuality, Alfred North Whitehead introduces the concept of creativity. I follow Whitehead's lead in this essay.

In this sense, then, this essay argues that God, particularly in and through the activity of the Spirit of creativity, was not merely resting aloof on his (sic) proverbial throne for nearly 12 billion years before biotic entities arose upon the cooled Earth, but rather was fully present in and with what is often called “creation,” from the very beginning—and will be to the end, proleptically present as the expression of the principle of creativity. More often than not, God is understood (by Christians) to act particularly in the life of Christ, but cannot be said to do too much more beyond that. I maintain, however, that the Spirit, by her kenosis into the natural world, imbibed the natural world with an evolving fertility that has continually manifested itself in and through what we commonly term creativity. This primal imbibing of herself into the world of nature created a situation in which the natural world became marked, virtually in and of itself, by the gift of creativity (Weber ,142), or what principally amounts to an activation of the naturally occurring, inherent potentialities within nature, thereby producing (in essence) a distinctive self‐creativity within the natural environ.

What, then, is creativity? Generically, it is the defining trait of our species—but to answer what it is specifically, one must explore the various aspects of creativity. Carl R. Hausman offers the following conditions: creative outcomes have lucid constructions that are irreducible; creative outcomes are capricious; structures of creative outcomes are fundamentally instrumentally valuable; and the acts that lead to creative outcomes include a morsel of spontaneity (Hausman , 3–16, especially 4). In emphasizing the idea that the intelligibility of a creative outcome is discernible in a structure that is unpredictable, Hausman resists determinism because it excludes novelty and newness. After laying out his rationale for understanding the research undertaken by investigators of creativity, Hausman then adopts a descriptive premise that under constraints there is a select range of phenomena that is most clearly, undeniably, and unquestionably an example of creative acts and outcomes.

Again, then, what is creativity? For Edward O. Wilson, the two great branches of learning—science and the humanities—are complementary in the pursuit of creativity in that they share the same roots of innovative endeavor, as the realm of science is everything possible in the (uni/multi)verse, whereas the realm of the humanities is everything conceivable to the human mind (Wilson , 14–15). Wilson admits that it “might seem—feel is perhaps the better word—that the human suite of intellect and emotion” is the only one that could have attained creativity. Somewhat a diagnostic trait of our species, some 4 billion years in the making, creativity might seem to require some “unique feature of evolution or else the hand of God extended especially to our lineage” (Wilson , 20). But this is not the case at all. Other species of animal, particularly the gorillas, apes, monkeys, orangutans, chimpanzees, and bonobos (especially!), can display behavior that is akin to creativity in the human animal.

Because I am willingly constrained by science as much as possible, I do not want to offer much more in this essay than what could be considered prolegomena to my argument that will be successively developed over the ensuing years of doctoral study (especially regarding the causal joint), one that stays neutral with reference to most of the frameworks of contemporary science. Theologians would be wise to no longer attempt to make their hypotheses palatable to the scientists who are often so hostile toward them, often without reason (e.g., witness the vitriol by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett to all things religious, especially to that which is “Christian”). This does not mean that theologians should be dismissive or ignorant of the developments in science. On the contrary, they should be well‐versed in science, but not attempt to force their ideas into an established scientific position; doing that is more of a capitulation than a strategy to influence the public and academy (and such has often led to a god‐of‐the‐gaps argument, which subsequently gets filled, thereby leaving the Christians who advocate such in a worse position than the one with which they started). This essay suggests a unique perspective on divine action that is exclusively pneumatological (related to the Spirit) and distinctly eschatological (anticipating the future), while being aware of varied proposals originating from the Divine Action Project (DAP), which was cosponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley, CA, from 1988 to 2003.

In view of the conclusions of the DAP, which are far too varied and detailed to be explicated here, I postulate that the Spirit is ever‐before the advancement of complexity on the face of Earth. This poietic (creative) process was initiated long ago, but continues even unto this day. The infilling of the Spirit's nature into nature creates a panentheistic relationship between herself and the world, which has been continually employed by her in the perpetual and almost inexorable advancement of biota in general, the most magnificent display of which is Homo sapiens sapiens (our particular subspecies). The creative increase in complexity that is everywhere present is not a straight progression, however, for the Spirit is not the manipulator of the natural world, but its empowerment instead. In this conception, the deity is not the principle of order, but instead the very creativity—that is, the pure multiplicity—of the divine game itself, which is an affirmation that the complexification of the world is always “already all” of chance (Faber , 261) and eminently influenced by the uncontrolling love of God (cf. Oord ; , 1–29). This uncontrolling love of God is thoroughly empowering of the other, and not in any manner determinative of the outcome, much alike unto how God woos, lures, and beckons—but does not force or coerce—biologically complex organisms in the present era to do his bidding upon the Earth. In Whitehead, as with Thomas Jay Oord, the divine game is not about power, but love instead (Faber , 260). Further, for Oord, this uncontrolling love is self‐giving. We will encounter Oord and Whitehead again later in this essay, but it is worth pointing out that their critique (more so the latter than the first) of power had the net effect of philosophers largely exchanging “coercion” with respect to God's influence on the Earth, with “persuasion” regarding the same (Whitehead , 166).

WHITEHEADIAN VIEWS OF CREATIVITY

It is interesting to notice that Whitehead does not mention the concept of creativity until Religion in the Making (Whitehead ), wherein creativity is the first formative element (Weber , 184). With regard to this Whiteheadian text, creativity is seen to be the process which underlies all creatures. In fact, “the universe exhibits a creativity with infinite freedom” (Whitehead , 115). We see therein that creativity is a temporal, formative element, one that is nonactual; this is because the formative elements ground actuality and consequently are either nontemporal or nonactual. On its own, creativity is indeterminate and unable to bring about novel entities. However, in relation to the other formative elements—namely God—creativity is the perpetual force that spurs the creative advance of the universe forward.

In Process and Reality (Whitehead ), creativity is the universal of universals, that which characterizes ultimate matter of fact (Faber , 22–23). Moreover, creativity is an ultimate principle by which the many, which are disjunctively the universe, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. As such, it is the nature of things that the “many enter into complex unity” (Whitehead , 21). In looking at this text, we can see that Whitehead is referring to the process whereby the objects of the world, which are subjects that have reached satisfaction and passed over into objective immortality, enter into the inner constitution of actual entities experiencing subjective immediacy. This creative principle is the base of actuality as the principal matter of fact; it is the base of both time and novelty (Whitehead , 259). Further, it is the event of in/finite becoming (Whitehead , 104). The word “creativity” is indeed appropriate to describe this process, as expressed in the notion of each occurrence issuing in novelty (Faber , 210). The ultimate reason why novel entities emerge is due to the “‘creative advance’… the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates” (Whitehead , 21). A new entity is born in and through this process. Indeed, “[t]he many become one, and are increased by one” (Whitehead , 21).

Providing the most accurate portrayal, Whitehead contends, the best of ultimate reality is through the cosmic principle of creativity. Creativity, in fact, is the universal of universals—and it is comprised of that which is only actual in relation to its accidents (Faber , 156–57). Even God is in a sense a “creature” of creativity. Inasmuch as full autonomy is granted to the natural world post its imbibing by the Spirit of God, natural creativity becomes self‐creativity, which, in fact, is the process by which the world has become what it is (Faber , 154). Whitehead stipulates, “The world is self‐creative; and the actual entity as self‐creating creature passes into its immortal function of part‐creator of the transcendent world”; “[t]he freedom inherent in the universe is constituted by this element of self‐causation” (Whitehead , 84, 88). In fact, creativity is understood to be the self‐actualization of events of the process (cf. Bradley , as quoted in Faber , 156). Classic, essentialist science utterly failed to consider this “self‐productivity” of nature (Whitehead , 95). Thinkers such as Gordon Kaufman today, however, are striving hard to make the status of incipient creativity as the deity palatable to a large(r) audience (Kaufman , 1–32). In the contemporary environ, we are better able to determine what distinguishes self‐organization from self‐creation than previous generations. In Whitehead's own work, as for proponents of the new thinking regarding self‐creation, the ideal of progress is totally insufficient to account for the virtual self‐creativity of organisms. Similarly, for Whitehead, the concept of creativity is always creative in everything because it is only creativity to itself, and as such solely self‐creativity of everything singularly bodied (Faber , 282). Hence, “[T]he word creativity … if guarded by the phrases Immanent Creativity, or Self‐creativity … avoids the implication of a transcendent Creator” (Whitehead , 236).

MULTIPLICITY AND THEOPLICITY WITH RESPECT TO CREATIVITY

For Whitehead, creativity is yet another multiplicity of multiplicities (Whitehead , 21). In fact, God the Spirit is the creativity of the future (Faber , 292). Further, both immanent‐ and self‐creativity are marks of this overall poietic process. One could in fact say, moreover, that creativity is the becoming of multiplicity (Faber , 444). Further, in the dissolution of sameness into difference and immanence, multiplicity becomes the expression of in/finite creativeness (Faber , 210). For Whitehead, creativity functions as the ground or principle against the insinuation of unity, and instead presents us with that which is novel. Similar to how the concept of creativity is unrepeatable in its exactness, so too is novelty, which is the mainspring of much creativity. What I mean by that is this: novelty is in a sense the foundation of creativity insomuch as all that is novel will be, correlatively, creative. However, just because something is creative does not mean that it is necessarily novel. Nevertheless, it is the case, usually, that where you find one, you will also find the other. The divine game of ultimate and immanent multiplicity “becomes a poetics of theoplicity in which divine [auto‐]poiesis affirms multiplicity by subtracting itself from any power‐discourse of the Logic of the One, the Two, and the Many” (Faber , 279). This “chance,” in a paradoxical manner, is the production of beauty through the ever‐expanding multiplicity of individual forms of biological complexity (Faber , 260). In fact, rather than accepting the view that chance is contrary to order and purpose, it is the position of this article that it is actually conducive to the kind of world that one would expect a Christian‐like God to create.

In his book The Uncontrolling Love of God, Thomas Jay Oord () claims that randomness and chance are real occurrences in the natural environment. I agree, for that notion is consonant with my view of a God who lures creation to higher levels of complexity through the processes of biological evolution. God does not determine the outcome of random events, but God instead constrains randomness by setting broad boundaries. After this constraint, in which the empowered entities and individuals interact according to natural laws, a wide range of beautiful results materialize (McCall , 21–24). Instead of opposing God and chance, I further contend that chance was God the Spirit's unit of instrumentation whereby the variety and freedom necessary to achieve her purposes within the created world are ensured. This, of course, raises theological problems, some discussion of which will directly follow.

In Arthur Peacocke's 1978 Bampton Lectures, later published as Creation and the World of Science (Peacocke ), a positive function is given to chance in the purposes of providence, much like what I deem its role to be. In fact, implicit in the initial conditions of the world were many potential universes. Chance allowed all the inherent possibilities to be explored by continually mixing up the combinations of sorting, with this random sorting being the means by which potentialities become realized. According to Peacocke, “it would be more consistent with the observations to assert that the full gamut of the potentialities of living matter could be explored only through the agency of the rapid and frequent randomization which is possible at the molecular level of the DNA” (Peacocke , 34). Indeed, chance mechanisms are an efficient means of exploring all the potentialities of matter, not just DNA, and thus are part of the initial structuring of the multi‐/uni‐verse.

This above consideration, I contend, is a clue to both a reasonable and acceptable interpretation of chance processes in nature. Notably, Peacocke cannot discern any reason why randomness should be seen as evidence of irrationality in the universe, a position with which I heartily agree (Peacocke , 34). Indeed, since many—if not most—of the laws of nature are statistical, it is entirely feasible to postulate that a creator could introduce quasi‐random processes whose statistical behavior would have the result, in the long run (to use a Peircean phrase), to be achieved in due time. This process constitutes the “teleology” of the universal drive toward the multiplicity of biological entities displaying complexity (Whitehead , 268). The biological complexity just mentioned could be seen to be that which is marked by being “alive”; that is, it exhibits both metabolism and growth, and which is additionally—according to Whitehead—accompanied by the influx of beauty (cf. Whitehead , 265).

I also affirm that the “divine game” is bound to the affirmation of chance (Deleuze , 128). This affirmation of chance is reminiscent of—even comparable to—Charles Sanders Peirce, who, it could be said, is the chief expositor of chance within the natural world (his term for chance is tychism, note), noting that there is an absolute, irreducible “chanciness” (my wording) inherent within the world as we know it. Indeed, Peirce's cosmology is postulated against the framework of his universal categories—Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness (Hausman , 11–25, especially 14). These three universal categories are explanatory of the interplay of chance, action, and law in (macro‐)evolution. Chance predominates in tychistic evolution. As such, tychism is the condition of blind change, which Peirce associated with Darwinian theory. In contrast, law dominates in anancastic evolution. Taken individually, both tychism and anancasm are partially correct. However, Peirce's own view—agapasticism—embraces both of the first two forms of creativity in a synthesis by which they are both conditioned and transformed. As such, agapasticism affirms the interweaving of chance and law in a process which includes spontaneity and is directed toward an end (see Peirce , 6.287–317; hereafter CP).

Creative growth is the principal factor within evolution that points toward the need for agape. In fact, creative growth is the presence of spontaneity and the introduction of unpredictable, yet intelligible novelty into the process of evolution. This kind of creative growth includes what has been referred to as “radical creativity” (Wills , 1019). Peirce's trifold set of hypotheses regard tychism, anancasm, and agapism, which are also known as Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. It should be pointed out that Peirce's account of scientific creativity is, at root, novel.

Peirce divided scientific inquiry into three types of reasoning: abduction (also called a hypothesis), deduction, and induction. Of these three types of reasoning, Peirce states that only two are synthetic: abduction and induction. Synthetic scientific creativity, then, must begin with one or the other. For Peirce, induction “classifies” and abduction “explains” (CP 2.632). Induction, then, develops what is already known, whereas abduction introduces newness. Therefore, to find originality in scientific inquiry, one must look closely into abduction, for an abductive guess is “a bolder and more perilous step” than an inductive inference (CP 2.632). In what follows, I shall attempt a demonstration of this abductive process in Peirce. I contend that abduction is the source of scientific creativity, as well as that pure multiplicity is an affirmation of the “game” that follows no preexisting set of rules, along with no preestablished harmonies. Instead, what Faber refers to as the “divine game” is an affirmation of “unrepeatable” creativeness, comprised of a singularity (CP 2.632). Thus, the game of creativity is innovative.

SPIRIT'S NATURE AS CREATIVE

Roland Faber notes that one can discern that humanism means, simply, that humans are self‐creative. Moreover, Whitehead says that everything is self‐creative. For postmodern people, however, this is an illusion, because one is a subject of the power structures which give rise to them (Faber ). After all, because there is always the element of creativity according to Whitehead, correlatively there is always something new—and therefore we cannot successfully reduce the synthesis of elements to the analytic elements that constitute it. Therefore, one cannot stabilize it. Traditionally, we think we have a ground first, then things emerging from it. Whitehead, in a paraphrase, states that within philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its instantiations. In fact, only in the actualization of accidents is there a real ultimate. So then, Whitehead calls that creativity—which means that becoming never stops at any point (Faber , 10/3/18).

Faber noted that Whitehead claims ultimate reality is only immanent to the process (Faber , 10/3/18). Beyond that, ultimate reality is merely an abstraction. As such, something like creativity is only an abstraction of the process. Indeed, for Whitehead, the search is not for an eternal or universal principle, but for the conditions under which something new is created, which is known thereby as creativeness or creativity (Faber , 10/10/18). Further, according to Faber's Whitehead, creativity is the principle of novelty (Faber , 10/17/18). Indeed, creativity introduces novelty into the content of the many. The elements of the universe are finite—even in a very huge way with numbers, and there is no other way than repetition at a certain point. But in Whitehead everything becomes uniquely one only once and nothing can be repeated in this way. For Whitehead, further, creativity as a principle is not finite—there is no beginning—it just spreads out instead (Faber , 10/24/18).

God's nature, as it is pictured within the Process tradition, is nothing short of “creative‐responsive love,” which is based upon, fundamentally, an infinitely relational God, who is redemptively present in everything that happens, from beginning to end (Faber , 13). Indeed, Whitehead's unique solution to the problem of the bifurcation of reality is none other than God himself, who is present with us at all times (Faber , 23), through the being of the Spirit (I add). For Whitehead, creativity is the activity of becoming and perishing, which describes the pure happening of the moving quality of the universe as the emergence of new happenings in perpetuity (Faber , 24). Indeed, he notes, with regard to creativity, that unity is always an integration (or synthesis) that simply happens. It is not, Faber contends, that this particular unity emerges from within the universe; instead, the universe itself as a moving “whole” becomes within this unity (Faber , 24). In a sense, then, a unity emerges as creative novelty out of multiplicity. Or, one might say, this unity is relativized into one unity among many in a universe that precisely thereby is creatively renewed. Hence, Whitehead's universe is an ecological process of integration and relativization, and a process of processes.

In Whitehead's ecological doctrine of God, God is the “Poet of the World” that encompasses all that is processual, that is, the creatively formative process in a full sense (Faber , 25). While the world requires creative form and deliverance in and through God, it is God who happens as event Godself, that is, who gives Godself to the world and takes it up as reality. From Whitehead, Faber contends that the creative process throughout the universe is the form of the unity which comprises it; that God constitutes the universe as process by offering to it various possibilities for realization; that it is as the creative power of the universe in which truth is actualized; and that God is the salvific “poet” of the world (Faber , 15). Faber further avers that Process theology is perichoretic, representative of God's creative dance within the world, insomuch as he is the ground of its novelty, as well as its constant companion. It is in this sense that Whitehead refers to the world process thoroughly and completely as “creativity” (Faber , 76). Creative events at once receive their ground of the arising “newness” of an entity, but also at the same time, the ground of the efficacious influence of the old (Faber , 76). In view of this assertion, creativity refers to the principles of both spontaneity and causality, as it is at once also the pure activity of becoming—without even the hint of passivity—while it refers to the shaping principles inherent in the process of an event that has already become, that is, the power of events to bring themselves forth.

Whitehead calls this aspect “immanent creativity” (or spontaneous self‐creativity) and “transitory creativity,” because it is causally potent to produce other events (Faber , 76). As a ground of an event, creativity is moored by nothing “in and of itself,” for it is beyond the actualization of events, as it is only real “in” them. It is in this sense, further, that creativity is inherently immanent (1), while also spontaneous and transitory (2), in part because it causally produces other events (Faber , 76). As “ground,” creativity is truly nothing in and of itself, for it is only real in the actualization of events. Faber points out that creativity refers to the power of “pure self‐giving” (Faber , 76), a contention which resonates nicely with my (and Oord's) depiction of kenosis as “self‐giving.”

CONCLUSION: MUTUAL IMMANENCE, UNCONTROLLING LOVE, AND THE CREATIVITY OF THE SPIRIT

The world and God, by the kenosis of the Spirit into the natural environ, are marked by mutual immanence: each is interpenetrating of the other. This mutual immanence is based upon pure divine love that itself is a process of poiesis—that is, the weaving of a poem of the baseless fabric (cf. Faber , 11). Although Whitehead had contested the theistic conclusion that poiesis meant “immanent self‐creativity,” which is wrought with the world via eminent relationality (Faber , 130), “becoming” is nevertheless a creative (self‐driven) advance “into novelty” (Whitehead , 28; cf. Faber , 203). In fact, if divine poiesis “has any meaning at all,” it must be “subtracted from immanent self‐creativity” as it is from creature or creator (Faber , 122; cf. 156). Self‐realization is the ultimate fact of facts. As such, an actuality is self‐realizing (Whitehead , 222). The world itself is self‐creative, due to the kenosis of the Spirit into creation earlier alluded to, and the self‐creating creatures pass into their function as partial creators of the world (Whitehead , 85). I contend that the above‐referenced purely immanent self‐creativity is nothing more or less than the thoroughly immanent Spirit of God. The phrases “immanent creativity” and “self‐creativity” avoid the implication of a transcendent creator, which—although biblical—is entirely insufficient as a metaphysical position upon reality (cf. Faber , 211).

Somewhat akin to Peirce, who said that we need a “thorough‐going evolutionism or none” (CP 6.14), I contend that we need a (nearly) thoroughly immanent God or none at all. For Peirce, nothing less than this “thorough‐going” evolutionism would provide the basis for an adequate cosmology. In fact, “a pseudo‐evolutionism which enthrones mechanical law above the principle of growth is at once scientifically unsatisfactory, as giving no possible hint as to how the universe has come about” (CP 6.157). I share Peirce's desire for a fully thorough‐going evolutionism, understanding that it alone can fully explicate the magnificent journey of species over the last, roughly, 3.5 billion years. Peirce's account of developmental teleology applies to all growth, demonstrating thereafter how a telos develops during a creative process. In developmental teleology, the telos is partially indeterminate at the onset of the process, and is developed and specified in and through the process itself. I would like to appropriate this perspective in my model of creativity by the kenosis of the Spirit into nature. Here, I would like to point out that considering the creative process as a sort of developmental teleology is a potent understanding of it, when thereafter applied to the modern theology and science conversation. This developmental teleology may be the basis of the thorough‐going evolutionism of which Peirce speaks.

All in all, this essay has contributed to a systematic theology of creation by constructing a theological synthesis between kenosis and the evolutionary complexification of matter (Bradnick and McCall , 240–57). This theological synthesis is mediated by the uncontrolling love of God through the creative Spirit. Pointedly, I proffer that the existence—and especially the success—of the evolutionary creative advance and the pursuit of novelty depend upon the primal kenotic (in‐filling) act of the creative Spirit pouring herself into creation, which onsets the long and laborious process of prebiotic evolution. Thereafter, the shift to biological evolution toward increasing complexity occurs (McCall ). So then, the complexification of matter has its ontological origin in and through the agency of the Spirit of creativity, who is present within the contingency of evolution, as well as in its lawful regularity (Polkinghorne , 96).

The kenotic creating Spirit, who donates uncontrolling love to her creation, is present “in, with, and under” the processes of biological evolution and should be seen to act—exclusively perhaps (probably?)—through natural law and later human action (Peacocke , 301–10). One may accurately posit that creation therefore possesses the Spirit of creativity from its very origin (Lucien , 33), a contention which holds much import for the relation of (post‐)modern biological and theological sciences. In summation, the creative Spirit is directly and inherently found within creation, which grants the proximity—immanently and eminently—to influence the incessant derivation of different (and often, but not always, “higher”) entities in the (macro‐)evolution of all things, but especially species. That last statement is critical, in my opinion, for the future of the theology and science dialogue (which may be better termed a trilogue—composed of theology, science, and the mediating philosophy betwixt the two), of which I desire to be a part. After all, one may not consistently ignore in one field what one finds convincing in another. May we all, therefore—much like Peirce and Whitehead—seek a thorough integration of all of our various data points, all the while realizing that the contemplation of such is forever beyond our understanding, as “the limitations of human intelligence” make this point necessary (Whitehead , 73).