Reason and Creativity

It seems that so often, reason (and its handmaid logic) and creativity are paired off as opposites. They control different spheres. Reason is the realm of the scientist; creativity of the artist. However, many times scientists and philosophers of science state that creativity is an integral part of the field. As a mathematician, I can attest that a merely logical mathematician won't get terribly far; creativity is absolutely necessary to be a good at math, particularly higher mathematics. Am I saying that mathematics is fundamentally irrational, or at least not a rational subject? By all means no. This confusion is part of the whole misunderstanding of creativity and reason being opposites. The most rational person has both; creativity is not against reason, but shows the most promising routes for it. Sometimes, one has to take a leap with reason, whether because there are multiple open routes ahead or none. Logic is the guide along the known path, creativity the woodsman looking for a new trail or to see which trail is best. Reason is the overall process of making it through the woods. Creativity therefore can be considered a part of a full concept of reason at times, depending on how it is used.

Gödel's incompleteness theorem (my senior paper topic) may say something about this. According to J.R. Lucas (at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/Godel/implgoed.html), the theorem shows that in general, the concept of truth outruns the concept of provability. This, however, is not to mark the end of reason; merely the end of strictly formalized, single-method reason. For example, 1st order logic (logic that allows one to look at every simple object as a group, but not at all propositions or functions of the simple objects at once; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_order_logic for a better, more detailed explanation) is complete; one can prove every true statement expressible in the system starting with the standard axioms. However, it is not decidable (one cannot apply a test to see if a statement is true or false).

The implications of being complete but non-decidable are this: one can show that any true statement is true (just start with the axioms and start cranking out theorems until you get to the right one). However, there is no methodical way of telling that a given statement is false; one can tell that certain statements are false, but there is no single method (however complex) which works for all false statements. However, this is a problem for formalizability, not reason. A person could conceivably come up with an unlimited number of ways of showing propositions to be false; this is where creativity comes in. All of these ways are rational, there just is no single method of judgement. Thus, neither modernism with its criterion of methodology nor postmodernism with its avoidance of reason have it entirely correct.

As Lucas puts it,

Reason is creative and original. It goes beyond antecedently established canons of right reasoning. And it can do so in a personal way, so that one man's original insight may differ from another's without either being wrong. Just as different men, using different codings, may pick out different Gödelian formulae, each of them true, so in other disciplines too, different thinkers may develop the subject in their own individual ways without any of them being necessarily wrong. We have been too long in thrall to a monolithic view of reason, supposing that it must yield just one right answer valid for all men in all places and at all times. And then we have felt that reason's uniform light obliterated all personal idiosyncrasy and individuality, and that real fulfilment was to be found in feeling and sensibility rather than rationality and common sense, and that the life of reason was a poor thing, cold and lacking all romance. But it is a false antithesis resting on a false view of reason. Reason not only can be original, but original in very variegated ways, well capable of accommodating the variety of individual genius.

Which I agree with in that the same truth may be expressed in multiple ways, or that truth can be complex and multi-faceted, though not (of course) in that there could be multiple truths or that truth is subjective.

On a side note, I've been playing some strategy games of late (most notably Go, along with Shogi (Japanese chess, which allows one to put captured pieces back into play on ones own side) and Xiang Qi (Chinese chess, which tends to be quicker and more aggresive than Western chess)). They're forcing me to think ahead and be patient rather than trigger-happy (which is a good thing that I sorely need). I found a rather interesting chess variant here: http://www.chessvariants.org/shogivariants.dir/taikyoku_english.html with a "playable" version here: http://taikyokushogi.hp.infoseek.co.jp/taikyoku.html. I have no idea how one would even start playing that....

Major News (or, rather, New Major)

Yeah, so I did it again. Haven't even gotten to seminary yet and I'm planning on changing majors. Only have four more times to go, right? Due to interests in languages, history, the middle east, and a curiosity on how the old testament fits with the new, I had originally signed up for the Old Testament/Semitic Languages program at Trinity. However, I also want to do more work with philosophy afterwards, and I have been finding that I enjoy big-picture theology that involves putting stuff together from various sources rather than detailed exegetical work. In addition, I have over a semester's worth of entrance deficiencies to take care of as of now. So, the plan is that I will switch to either the Christian Thought major (which requires an emphasis and a cognate field, where I would have an emphasis in philosophy of religion and biblical/systematic theology as my cognate field), or to the Philosophy of Religion major with some extra Systematic Theology courses on the side (It's only 32 hours, and I'll need to spend 2 years there due to when courses are offered as well as having time to do a thesis and fieldwork). This way, I'll be better prepared for Ph.D. work, I'll probably be more interested in the subject, and I'll have no entrance deficiencies. So far, my first semester classes will be: Theology I: Intro to Theology Introduction to Theological Research Methods Philosophers of Religious Significance: Kierkegaard Seminar on Current Issues: Metaphysics of World Religions Seminar on Current Issues: Sovereignty and Salvation in Wesleyan-Arminian Theology And now for something completely different: a proof of free will. Assume that I have free will. Case 1) I have free will. Q.E.D. Case 2) I do not have free will. Thus, I could not have chosen to believe otherwise and I had no choice in giving this argument either. Q.E.D.

Contemplating New Seeds of Contemplation

I've been reading New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton. I had picked it up out of curiosity; I've been reading some stuff on Indian philosophy for a course with Dr. Corduan, and I was interested in seeing how some of the things that one sees in East Asian mysticism play out in a Christian setting (I'm not sure to what extent Merton has borrowed from Eastern sources. I know that he has been interested in Christian-Buddhist dialogue and has done some stuff with Eastern meditation practices, but I think this book stems more from the Western tradition of St. John of the Cross, whom I haven't read). I had been expecting to find a book that was full of fluff and/or semi-pantheism. While Merton does at times delve into flowery pietistic prose, and there are a couple passages that raise eyebrows, I think that overall he does a better job than expected at giving a genuinely theistic expression of contemplation based on Christian values. I don't think he focuses nearly enough on Christ and the trinitarian nature of God for me to say that his work is the best example of Christian thought on the subject. However, he generally does keep a distinction between God and human beings (except for one paragraph, where he says that God is identical with a person's true self, but this seems at odds with other stuff that he says and so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he picked a bad way of phrasing his thought).

His connection between the typically East Asian idea that we need to go beyond what we think of as our self in order to find the true self and the Christian idea of sin I think is particularly interesting. At first, I thought this was rather new-agey and rolled my eyes, but he gives a plausible explanation that our false selves are who we try to be when we seek to put ourselves in God's place and live for ourselves, while our true identity is in God. This reminds me of Revelation 2:17 ("...and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.") along with other verses about our new life and new identity in Christ (although, unfortunately, Merton does not mention much about Christ's part in forming the new identity). So, in the end it is more like a reformulation of a traditional view of sin. He also stresses the role of God in the contemplator's life; one doesn't choose to contemplate God, God calls him. I appreciate this focus on the work of God, although again I don't think he gives enough attention to the Holy Spirit's role. The goal of contemplation is to see things as God does and to will as he does; that is, to see everything God made is good, especially as it does what he meant it to do (though our desires can be evil - he is not advocating antinomianism), and that we should live our lives loving God. This love and will of God are not merely feelings (Merton emphasizes in his preface that contemplation is not about calm and pleasant feelings), but do actually result in practical results in how we live with others. In addition, he makes the point that God is, fundamentally, a "Who", not a "What". This point in particular separates Merton from pantheistic ideas of "Brahman", the impersonal absolute, as well as from trends in theology and philosophy to "deanthropomorphize" God and make him into merely a "ground of being", or identifying him with the possibility of eternal love, or some similar abstract concept (I'm still trying to figure out what Kierkegaard meant by saying "God does not exist, he is eternal.")

In the end, I think what has made what I have read interesting to me is that it almost seems to be a "translation" of ideas (and being the language geek that I am, taking something from one language, whether of sounds or concepts, and putting it into another interests me). He takes Christian ideas, which many times in Western Christianity are formulated in almost legal concepts, and translates them into his scheme of the contemplative life. It is more than mysticism with a Christian veneer, though as I have mentioned I don't think it goes far enough. It has helped me to look at things from a different angle, though I wouldn't say that I've had any profound insights. I think that the best and most orthodox example of Christian mysticism, though, would be in the Eastern Orthodox concept of Theosis (or Divinification). I'll probably blog about that in a couple days.

Hello, World!

I'll post something up here in the next day or two, this is just to set the blog up now.