Our Maker’s Creativity is Ambiguous

We project our longings onto natural transformations

Photo by Daian Gan, on Pexels

What’s the difference between building and destroying something, or between being creative and destructive?

We understand what it means for us to build things or be productive, rather than wasting our time. We might plan to build something based on a design in our minds, and we gather tools and materials and assemble the thing that matches our mental image.

Destruction would be disassembly, or the reversion of an artificial state to the natural, wild default. For instance, a tornado may demolish houses, reducing them to their components and rendering them unusable. What was once a product of intelligent design becomes junk, so that creativity is the opposite of wastefulness.

Yet how creative are we? We build things only by extracting the planet’s resources, and thus destroying the ecosystems that nature evolved. Moreover, a destructive process could be a step in the creation of something new. A tornado clears an area, which frees up space for a new design to be realized. The evolution of life is both highly creative and destructive since new species emerge from the pruning of unfit members, and the age of dinosaurs, for example, had to be eliminated for the age of mammals to emerge.

Creativity and destruction are intertwined processes, as the first law of thermodynamics implies: energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only transformed. What this means, I think, is that “creativity” and “destruction” have subjective, implicitly normative meanings that don’t apply to nature. If we assume that creativity is due to intelligent design, as it is in our case, we presuppose that building things is better than destroying them. We assume as much because we’re civilized, so we’d prefer to live in the artificial cities we build than in the wilderness.

Objectively, we can speak of transformations of energy (and thus of matter, given Einstein’s point about their equivalence), which is to say that in scientific terms, there’s no such thing as creation or destruction since those values apply only to personal or cultural assessments. These are anthropocentric projections of how we do things onto what nature at large is doing.

Yet the second law of thermodynamics undermines this implication of the first law since the second law is that in any natural process, the amount of disorder or randomness in a closed system will either stay the same or increase. The second law adds more objective specificity to natural “transformations,” pointing out that they can be “ordered” or “disordered.” So instead of talking about creativity and destruction, which are overtly human-centered concepts, we can opt for the more scientific conceptions of the same duality.

Assuming the universe is roughly a closed system, and maximum order was reached in the moment of the Big Bang, we can infer that the universe’s evolution of galaxies, stars, and planets is overall a dissolution, or a way of maximizing disorder (entropy). Cosmologists predict that eventually the stars will burn their fuel and even black holes will disintegrate, so the universe will likely end in a Big Freeze, or a state of maximum entropy that prevents further thermodynamic processes or useful energy transfers, this complete dissolution being the opposite of the Big Bang.

Yet again, the long dissolution that is the history of the universe’s unfolding seems constructive to us because the Big Bang singularity is quite stubborn and slow in degrading. The complete dissolution of infinite order must apparently go through many substages of order, such as our present state of the universe, which includes galaxies of stars, planets, and even living things and their intelligently designed constructs, so that they can all be broken up in turn. Ordered arrangements of matter and energy must obtain for all physically possible configurations to arise statistically and be eliminated so that the next round can emerge and be similarly extinguished.

Mind you, this rather tragic model in which entropy prevails is based only on present measurements, and since dark energy isn’t well understood and may change, the Big Freeze scenario is tentative. Other cosmological scenarios posit cycles of universes.

The Big Rip assumes that dark energy may increase, eventually overwhelming nature’s other forces so that everything would return eventually to the state of a final singularity, setting the stage for another Big Bang. The Big Crunch assumes that the universe’s density will eventually overcome the expansion caused by the Big Bang, pulling everything back into a singularity, which again is the precondition of a Big Bang. The Big Bounce posits an endless cycle of such expansions and contractions.

In a cyclical model, the difference between order and disorder is perspectival because there would be no overall trajectory favouring one or the other. The so-called singularity would negate the results from the previous universe, as it were, like the shuffling of a deck of cards for a new game to be played.

At any rate, if we confine our attention to our universe, we should reflect on how what seems like a cosmically creative process might be bound up not only with destruction, as in a Daoist conception, but overall with a tragic negation of order. That value judgment assumes that creativity is better than the elimination of forms. If creativity is possible only by destroying intermediary stages or exploiting resources that upset previous balances, we nevertheless want to think that the overall trend is towards increasing complexity and novelty.

The alternative makes creativity seem futile. The attempt to produce and sustain forms would be at odds with what the cosmos at large is doing. In other words, nature’s creative capacities and living creators would be pawns in a grand elimination of order. The possibility that the universe will end in a permanent cessation of activity is precisely as unthinkable as the finality of our personal death.

Those cosmological considerations may seem academic because there’s much beauty in nature’s exhaustive exploration of constructs to decompose. In the interim, between the moments of maximal and minimal potentials for growth, there’s the choice of perspective: Do you wish to be thankful for nature’s immense creation of molecular and celestial forms, or resentful towards the tragic trajectory?

If that choice were wholly arbitrary, we’d have to acknowledge that our existential situation is inherently ambiguous and perhaps absurd. Ultimately, cosmic destruction might prevail, but it would do so only by exhausting all creative possibilities. The universe would maximize both creativity and destructiveness.

Again, we civilized folks prefer the creation and preservation of order, regardless of what we might say in certain spiritual moods or settings. We’d like to think we can be as neutral and nonchalant as nature’s impersonal way of cycling through forms, but we treasure our routines and creature comforts. Deeds speak louder than hollow words. Mythically speaking, civilization sets us on a Promethean, Luciferian revolt against our Maker, and our Maker is nature’s wild overcoming of some inconceivable stasis in the Big Bang.

Still, we can waver between devoting ourselves with simple-mindedness to order and creativity, and acknowledging not just that creativity is a transformation that’s typically as destructive as it is constructive, but that destruction and disorder will likely win out in the end.

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