The Creative Universe

Anyone who views our fellow world as a mega-machine will neither be able to love it nor want to preserve it - fortunately, it is much more than that.

By Roland Rottenfußer

[This article published on Feb 18, 2022 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/das-kreative-universum]



Evolution is more than struggle for existence and competition. Modern scientists are discovering elements of beauty, play and freedom in nature. Apparently spontaneously, life keeps producing new forms. Yet evolution seems headed toward a goal: the creation of living things through whose eyes the universe can view and enjoy itself. Does this bring science closer to proving God? At the very least, it generates joy and awe to watch nature unfold in creative freedom.

What do animals actually do when they are not fighting, eating or raising their offspring? Is there something like free time for them, when they are simply there and enjoy life? Nature films like to reduce animals to the necessities of the struggle for survival: the cheetah chases the gazelle. Monkeys fight with each other over the fruit of the fig tree. Manatees copulate and soon graze the sea grass of the rivers with their calves. Very rarely one catches a glimpse of play and joie de vivre, for example when a litter of Arctic fox cubs frolics exuberantly in a meadow. Last year in Alsace, when the morning fog still lay over the meadows, my partner observed the exuberant dance of a squirrel hopping around in the garden of our vacation home. The movements followed no discernible purpose.

Biologist Stephan Harding was writing his doctoral dissertation on the Asian muntjac deer. What he observed didn't fit any scientific grid:

"While chewing the grass, the animal fell into a meditative state of total relaxation. I was surprised by this quality of peacefulness that rose from him like invisible smoke. Like an aroma that also penetrated me and put me into a deep calm."

Forest scientist and natural philosopher Pia Mayer-Gampe watched a few seagulls in the evening light at Lake Starnberg:

"The quiet waves play with the colors of the sunset. The seagulls do nothing, not the slightest thing. They bob between the silhouettes of the jetties and seem neither to sleep nor to wait for anything. I actually have the anthropocentric impression that they are enjoying the evening light and the water."

All these observations suggest: animals also behave purposelessly, "meditatively" - and they enjoy it.

Is the world battle?

Pia Mayer-Gampe is a critic of one-sided Darwinism. That's why her seagull story turns into a satire at the end: "Up, you seagulls, life is a fight! Hunt, kill, multiply, peck out the eyes of your competitors, do something!"

There is no doubt that all this exists in nature: territorial struggle, courtship dance, eating and being eaten, the almost desperate greed for food. But isn't our view too one-sidedly focused on these aspects? And isn't there a certain ideology behind the emphasis on competitive elements?

Darwin attributed the development of the brain to the fact that with its help one can kill better: "To avoid enemies or to attack them with success, to catch wild animals and to invent and form weapons, requires the help of the higher mental faculties." But isn't a brain also good for farming, empathizing with others, or painting a picture?

The neo-Darwinist and critic of religion Richard Dawkins delivers in "Summit of Improbabilities" almost a self-parody of materialism:

"We seem (...) to see an arms race, or rather a series of ever new arms races between carnivores and herbivores. This parallel with the human arms race is especially satisfying because the brain is a built-in computer used by both carnivores and herbivores."

Pia Mayer-Gampe, from whose book "The Golden Egg" I took these quotes, comments sarcastically on such a view of humanity: "The world is a dead computer in which software fights each other for computing time."

Nature avoids competition

Already at the beginning of the 20th century, resistance arose against Darwin's one-sided paradigm of struggle. In 1902, anarchist Peter Kropotkin published his book, "Mutual Aid in the Animal and Human Worlds - A Factor in Evolution."

Modern animal observation also confirms the great importance of cooperation for survival. For example, when dolphins and seals "enviously" graze a school of fish together. Or when monkeys act as sentries in their trees and warn antelopes of predators. Fighting deer interlocking their antlers provide dramatic images. Kropotkin, however, paints a gentler picture of nature:

"Fortunately, competition is not the rule either in the animal kingdom or in humanity. (...) In the great struggle for existence - for the greatest possible abundance and intensity of life with the least expenditure of force - natural selection continually seeks out explicitly the ways in which competition can be avoided as far as possible."

We can confirm this by simple observation: The crocus does not compete with the autumn crocus for pollinating insects. Both bloom in different seasons. Hyenas do not compete with lions; they consume their scraps. Woodpeckers do not compete with moles. Some forage in the bark of trees for small animals, others burrow underground.

Nature creates the widest possible range by exploring the extremes. Each species seeks a niche in which it is unrivaled, a unique diet and reproductive strategy. Displacement struggles are more likely to occur when humans intervene.

In Britain, for example, the "immigrant" gray squirrels are in the process of displacing the native red squirrels. In nature, there is both struggle and cooperation. The only question is which of the two tendencies humans want to cultivate in their coexistence.

Darwinism or creationism

Doubts about Darwin are gladly wiped off the table with the reference to religious fundamentalism in the USA. "Creationists" and followers of the theory of "Intelligent Design" try to undermine Darwin with a mixture of partial truths and fidelity to the Bible. The hallmark of fundamentalism, however, is always the reference to an inviolable "Holy Scripture".

Science rightly refuses to compromise with an ideology that amounts to circular reasoning: Why should I believe in God? Because it is written in the Bible. And why should I believe the Bible? Because it is the word of God. Reasonable Darwin critics point out gaps in textbook Darwinism and ask intelligent questions without immediately giving the blanket answer "God." Actually, then, they represent not anti-Darwinism but trans-Darwinism-a modern view of nature that acknowledges what was good and right about Darwin while pointing beyond him.

Such theories often move in an attractive field of tension between science and spirituality. They invite us to think along with them and do not demand any obedience of faith. The excellent documentary film "The Creative Universe" by Rüdiger Sünner presents theories of new thinking and interviews some of their protagonists: Rupert Sheldrake, Hans-Peter Dürr, Stephan Harding and others. The film asks what drives evolution and whether a creative intelligence plays a role in it.

The emergence of forms

Example "Cambrian Revolution". In a relatively short period of time, circa 540 million years ago, almost all of the "blueprints of the animal world," the precursors to our living creatures today, came into being. "As if created by an artist in a drugged stupor, hundreds of bizarre creatures came into being," director Rüdiger Sünner puts it. No fossils of precursors of the life forms in question were found. So did life appear suddenly and without transition on the stage of evolution, and if so: Is there a creator who designed these forms?

Example "crystal growth": Each ice crystal has an individual shape, but its six "arms" are exactly the same. So there must be something that coordinates the growth of the arms, an overarching order.

Example "morphogenesis": Animal and human life arises from a cell, which divides, divides again and so on. How does the cell know whether it is to become a liver cell or a skin cell? Why do the cells arrange themselves in such a way that they become the fetus of a human being, not that of a crocodile?

Rupert Sheldrake created his theory of the "morphogenetic field" - a form-creating field - on the basis of such considerations. A field is quasi a frame within which forms move. But this frame is not - like a magnetic field - neutral, it is intelligent. It contains information and is able to transfer it to organisms - cells and living beings. For Sheldrake, the emergence of forms cannot be explained from the smallest unit (seed, germ, DNA), but from a context that is larger than the organism itself. The germ drives the plant out of itself; the morphogenetic field pulls, as it were, from the outside on an organism until it has grown into the intended form.

Is the evolution determined?

Materialism thinks deterministically. Everything is completely explainable from a chain of causes and effects. But one cannot explain the adult form of an organism - frog, kangaroo or human being - from cell division. No one can predict in the early stages of crystallization what form an ice crystal will grow into. Above all, life could not be simulated or created by scientists until now. Although organic molecules have been produced in experiments, the basic form of life, the cell, has never been created.

Not explainable, not predictable, not imitable - here modern science must capitulate to life in three respects. Terms like "mutation" or "self-organization" do not really offer a satisfying explanation, they are only elegant names for an enduring puzzle. Components lying around alone do not explain the shape of a house, says Rupert Sheldrake. It requires a plan, a shaping intelligence.

The theory of morphogenetic fields has not solved the basic question of creation. "The puzzle remains that the forms of nature cannot simply be derived from their genes or molecules," says Rüdiger Sünner. "These need information to group into a shape. Information, however, is something non-material, spiritual." But is it possible to imagine spirit without at the same time imagining an "owner" of mental abilities? In any case, it is obvious to think of a creative intelligence. As a materialist, the indeterminacy (unpredictability) in evolution can be called chance. But according to what criteria does evolution select some "coincidences" from an infinite pool of possibilities and discard others?

The universe sees itself

You can use a simple example to show how unlikely it is that even primitive life forms would arise by chance. Hack once for a few minutes with closed eyes wildly on your keyboard. How many such attempts would you have to make, so that from the combination of the letters a poem of Rilke develops by coincidence? Already a unicellular organism contains however infinitely much more information than such a poem. Is the effectiveness of a creative spirit proven with it then?

It is certain that evolution unfolds in the trying out of an almost unlimited abundance of possibilities. These possibilities unfold along a time axis - in the course of millions of years. Although some Earth ages suggest that life forms suddenly burst forth in creative explosions, scientists do not doubt that Darwin was right about much. For example, when he described the gradual adaptation to habitats through the survival of the fittest. But these theories never solve the whole puzzle.

On a small scale, man cannot predict what will happen next; on a large scale, however, evolution seems to follow a line of development. It leads from the simpler to the more complex, from restriction to higher degrees of freedom (mobility), from unconsciousness to self-awareness and self-reflection.

Eyes, for example, have evolved independently several times in evolution. Vertebrates such as octopuses evolved the camera eye, which gave them a more accurate perception of the world. Over millions of years, the innovation "eye" had been prepared beforehand, for example by the emergence of proteins and a nervous system. Paleontologist Simon Conway Morris claims, "The universe has long worked to finally be able to look at itself." The eye now led to "selection advantages" - recognizing danger earlier - on the one hand, and on the other, it allowed us to perceive beauty.

Excess of beauty

With beauty, however, a perceptual and sensory instance also comes into play. It is not limited to humans. Consider, for example, the plumage of a peacock. As Rupert Sheldrake explains in "The Creative Universe," this serves to select hereditary material. The most magnificent male is noticed by the female and is allowed to reproduce. But reproduction is also possible with very inconspicuous birds like the thrush. So why this blaze of color, this downright artistic design of the feathers? And doesn't the courtship dance of an ornamental bird show that its female also has an aesthetic sensibility?

Rüdiger Sünner sees a "tremendous surplus of beauty and play" at work in nature. If it were enough for creation that "something is alive," it could have left it at a few unadorned plant varieties and a few gray small rodents.

Anyone who has ever leafed through a book of photographs in which many species of birds are depicted cannot help but be amazed. Countless varieties of enchanting beauty in color and form. Of course, there are always life forms that seem less attractive to us, such as the sea cucumber. But there are enough to make us feel awe, even love, if we really get involved with these impressions: different species of butterflies on a flower bush; the eye of a deer; fox cubs playing. Some of it can only be grasped in cinematic editing: the leap of a squirrel from tree to tree in slow motion; blossoming spring forest flowers in fast motion - the beauty just jumps out at you. Often - as in the run of a cheetah - the beautiful and the utilitarian seem to be one.

Awe - an ecological feeling

The beauty of this world, sums up "The Creative Universe," goes far beyond what is necessary for survival and selection. "There seems to be in nature a kind of gratuitous production of beauty" (Sheldrake). The dance of a large flock of birds in the sky shown in the film is what Rüdiger Sünner calls a "beguiling celestial sculpture, woven of coordination and unpredictability."

Creation itself seems more like a dance than the predictable flow of a machine. Nature is the greatest of artists.

Reductionism and strict determinism have failed as explanations for evolution. We live in a creative universe - regardless of whether one believes in a creator. Experienced scientists go into raptures, speak of "astonishment and devotion" and emphasize, like the neurobiologist Joachim Bauer, the "creative-self-purposefulness in biology".

But if "care, awe, and reverence" (Sünner) are appropriate attitudes toward nature, then an ecological impulse also emerges from this. A sense of the sacred is the best conservation. Whereby the term "sacred" undoubtedly goes beyond a scientific approach. Whether one wants to use it depends on the mentality and faith background of a naturalist. I maintain, however, that a deeper, meditative contemplation of nature can evoke awe in almost everyone. Though not everyone goes into raptures like astronomer and priest George Coyne:

"God intended a universe that would gradually bring forth living beings who could in turn love God."

Roland Rottenfußer, born in 1963, studied German and worked as a book editor and journalist for various publishing houses. From 2001 to 2005 he was editor at the spiritual magazine connection, later for the "Zeitpunkt". He currently works as an editor, book copywriter and author scout for Goldmann Verlag. Since 2006 he has been editor-in-chief of Hinter den Schlagzeilen.