Emergence enters the creation debate
Who says ``Frankenstein" was just a horror flick? It turns out that what obsessed Dr. Frankenstein -- creating life from lifeless matter -- is one of the animating passions behind a scientific idea called emergence. And whenever science delves into creation, it raises implications for religion.
Emergence refers to nature's tendency to organize unpredictable and complex things out of simple components. Examples are endless: carbon atoms forming a diamond, water coalescing into snowflakes, neurons creating a memory.
Unlike intelligent design, which argues that only a supernatural architect could construct this elegantly complex universe, emergence scientists, hailing from physics, chemistry, and life sciences, say that since the big bang, just about everything has demonstrated an innate bent for processing information to create complex systems.
So if complexity is natural, what happens to the idea of God? To paraphrase a former president, it depends on what the meaning of ``God" is.
Or so says Gordon Kaufman, who is a professor emeritus at Harvard Divinity School, a member of the Mennonite Church, and a proponent of defining God not as a supernatural deity but as the process of creativity itself.
This month, Kaufman, 81, is scheduled to board a ferry for Star Island, located off the coast of New Hampshire, to lay out his views before an audience of scientists and theologians at the annual conference of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, or IRAS.
Years ago, Kaufman says, the transparent sensibleness to him of the theory of evolution led him to rethink the nature of God.
With natural selection and random mutation as the engines, humanity hardly seemed the foreordained outcome of a divine plan, though he concedes that some religious faiths comfortably embrace both divinity and Darwin.
Kaufman also thinks the traditional view of God strips the Almighty of his majesty.
``God is too much [like] a human being," Kaufman says, making decisions and plans like some celestial CEO. Consider, for example, the vastness of the universe, he says: ``How can we think of [a] human being running that show?"
Still, he found his breath taken away by ``this magnificent panorama of creativity" that got us from a cosmic broth of inanimate elements 14 billion years ago after the big bang to the diversity of life today. Kaufman concluded that God is not the creator but creativity, the apparently immortal process of mixing and matching that has produced complex reality. With emergence, he found a scientific cousin to his theological pondering.
Kaufman acknowledges that his theology doesn't square with that of his own church -- he stays, he says, partly because he grew up Mennonite -- or with traditional Christian views of God.
The Rev. Christopher Corbally, a member of the institute and a Jesuit priest who is vice director of the Vatican Observatory's research arm in Tucson, said in an e-mail that Kaufman's concept of God ``seems a philosophical rather than theological idea. Certainly, traditional Catholic theology puts God beyond what God created out of love, namely creation. That is the point of using the word `God' rather than just `Creativity' for the ultimate and personal origin of the universe."
The scientist-heavy audience on Star Island probably won't boo when it hears Kaufman dress emergence in theological robes. His is ``a beautiful idea, because it is much closer to being consistent with what we think of as scientific truth" than conventional religion, says Jack B. Dennis, a retired MIT professor of computer science and engineering who is on the IRAS board. ``His position will not strike anyone as outlandish or unusual or even provocative."
It wouldn't in that setting. The Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, founded in the Eisenhower era, is itself an example of creative complexity, a coming together of scientists and religious believers who thought that the two fields could be harmonized.
The July 29 to Aug. 5 conference that Kaufman and other speakers will address is the institute's 53d annual meeting on Star Island, which is owned by a corporation that began in 1916 as a joint effort of Unitarians and Congregationalists.
There's one other objection a traditionalist might have to Kaufman's theology: It seems cold, denuded of the love proffered by God as traditionally understood.
Kaufman disagrees. Creativity allowed a man like Jesus to creatively upend previous thinking, juxtaposing the sometimes harsh God found in parts of Scripture with a radically different understanding: Love your enemies.
``Creativity has to be understood as also making possible . . . these human dreams for a better world, these human dreams for a peaceful world," he said. ``To have that dream is very, very important when we are tempted to go beating up on other nations, other people."
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