The Created Co-Creator

Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner’s description of human beings as “created co-creators” directly relates religion to the technological enterprise. Human beings create things because they are (finite) creatures who have been called to join God’s creative activity in the world. Hefner’s concept is linked to a functional interpretation the Judeo-Christian concept of humans being made in the image and likeness of God, as well as paying attention to evolutionary models of development. The concept is most fully described in his book The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and Religion.

Hefner proposes the following as the “hard core” (in Lakatosian terms) of his research proposal.

Human beings are God’s created co-creators whose purpose is to be the agency, acting in freedom, to birth the future that is most wholesome for the nature that has birthed us—the nature that is not only our
own genetic heritage, but also the entire human community and the evolutionary and ecological reality in which and to which we belong. Exercising this agency is said to be God’s will for humans.

(Philip Hefner, The Human Factor : Evolution, Culture and Religion, 27)

The purpose of the “hard core” is that while it may or may not be verifiable or falsifiable it provides the stimulus for generating hypotheses and suchlike that can be evaluated.

Hefner unpacks this “hard core” as a theory as follows:

1. The human being is created by God to be a co-creator in the creation that God has brought into being and for which God has purposes.
2. The conditioning matrix that has produced the human being—the evolutionary process—is God’s process of bringing into being a creature who represents the creation’s zone of a new stage of freedom and who therefore is crucial for the emergence of a free creation.
3. The freedom that marks the created co-creator and its culture is an instrumentality of God for enabling the creation (consisting of the evolutionary past of genetic and cultural inheritance as well as the contemporary ecosystem) to participate in the intentional fulfillment of God’s purposes.

And then he supplies the following auxiliary hypotheses as the protective belt around the “hard core”.

1. Integral to Homo sapiens and its evolutionary history are certain structures and processes, the requirements for whose functioning may be said to constitute, at least in a tentative way, goals and purposes for human life.
2. The meaning and purpose of human beings are conceived in terms of their placement within natural processes and their contributions to those same processes.
3. A concept of “wholesomeness” is both unavoidable and useful as criterion governing the behavior of human beings within their natural ambience, as they consider what their contribution to nature should be.
4. Nature is the medium through which the world, including human beings, receives knowledge, as well as grace. If God is brought into the discussion, then nature is the medium of divine knowledge and grace.
5. Freedom characterizes human existence as the condition in which humans have no choice but to act and to construct the narratives and symbols that contextualize that action. Such contextualization provides justification, explanation, and norms for guiding and assess the action. This condition is intrinsic to the evolutionary processes at the level of Homo sapiens.
6. Homo sapiens is a two-natured creature, a symbiosis of genes and culture.
7. The challenge that culture poses to human being can be stated thus: Culture is a system of information that humans must construct so as to adequately serve the three tasks of interpreting the world in which humans live, guiding human behavior, and interfacing with the physico-biogenetic cultural systems that constitute the environment in which we live.
8. We now live in a condition that may be termed technological civilization. This condition is characterized by the fact that human decision has conditioned virtually all of the planetary physico-biogenetic systems, so that human decision is the critical factor in the continued functioning of the planet’s systems.
9. Myth and ritual are critical components of the cultural system of information and guidance. They are marked in linguistic form by declarative or imperative discourse, and their concepts are vastly underdetermined by the data of evidence. In light of human evolutionary history, these marks were necessary if culture was to serve its evolutionary function.

The “hard core” remains untouchable for the duration of the project but you can evaluate, generate and modify the auxiliary hypotheses as required. In Hefner’s use of this type of research programme the criteria for evaluation of the overall scheme lies with its fruitfulness for living - a pragmatic approach.

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Philip Hefner’s works

Hefner, Philip. The Human Factor : Evolution, Culture and Religion Theology and the Sciences. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.

"The Creation." In Christian Dogmatics, eds. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, 1, 265-357. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

"The Evolution of the Created Co-Creator." In Cosmos as Creation : Theology and Science in Consonance, ed. Ted Peters, 211-233. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989.

"Biocultural Evolution and the Created Co-Creator." Dialog 36, no. 3 (1997): 197-205.

"Imago Dei: The Possibility and Necessity of the Human Person." In The Human Person in Science and Theology, eds. Niels Henrik Gregersen, Willem B. Drees and Ulf Görman, 73-94. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000.

"There’s an Elephant in the Living Room." Dialog 40, no. 4 (2001): 300-301.

"Technology and Human Becoming." Zygon 37, no. 3 (2002): 655-665.

Technology and Human Becoming. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

Created to Be Creators. Metanexus Institute, 19 December 2003. Accessed 12 June 2006. Internet. Available from http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/show_article2.asp?ID=8664.

"Human Being: Questioning and Being Questioned." Zygon 39, no. 4 (2004): 733-735.

Created Co-Creator as Science and Symbol. Metanexus Institute, 30 April 2004. Accessed 12 June 2006. Internet. Available from http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/show_article2.asp?ID=8831.

The Created Co-Creator Meets Cyborg, Part One. Metanexus Institute, 29 March 2004. Accessed 12 June 2006. Internet. Available from http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/show_article2.asp?ID=8780.

The Created Co-Creator Meets Cyborg, Part Two. Metanexus Institute, 30 March 2004. Accessed 12 June 2006. Internet. Available from http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/show_article2.asp?ID=8787.

Related works

These represent a selection of works that directly or indirectly refer to the “created co-creator”. Many of these authors
draw upon the concept in other works of theirs.

Albright, John R. "Scientific Views of the Created Co-Creator." Currents in Theology and Mission 28, no. 3-4 (2001): 254-259.

Case-Winters, Anna. "Rethinking the Image of God." Zygon 39, no. 4 (2004): 813-826.

Cole-Turner, Ronald. The New Genesis: Theology and the Genetic Revolution. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993.

Deane-Drummond, Celia. "Fabricated Humans? Human Genetics, Ethics and the Christian Wisdom Tradition." Dialog 44, no. 4 (2005): 365-374.

________. "Fabricated Humans? Human Genetics, Ethics and the Christian Wisdom Tradition." Dialog 44, no. 4 (2005): 365-374.

Doncel, Manuel G. "The Kenosis of the Creator and of the Created Co-Creator." Zygon 39, no. 4 (2004): 791-800.

Drees, Willem B. "Technology and Religion." Currents in Theology and Mission 28, no. 3-4 (2001): 394-399.

Gregersen, Niels Henrik. "The Creation of Creativity and the Flourishing of Creation." Currents in Theology and Mission 28, no. 3-4 (2001): 400-410.

Hansen, Bart, and Paul Schotsmans. "Cloning: The Human as Created Co-Creator?" Ethical Perspectives 8, no. 2 (2001): 75-89.

Herzfeld, Noreen. "Terminator or Super Mario: Human/Computer Hybrids, Actual and Virtual." Dialog 44, no. 4 (2005): 347-353.

Irons, Williams. "An Evolutionary Critique of the Created Co-Creator Concept." Zygon 39, no. 4 (2004): 773-790.

Kull, Anne. "Cyborg Embodiment and the Incarnation." Currents in Theology and Mission 28, no. 3-4 (2001): 279-284.

Nordstrom, Alan. "Making Is Finding." Zygon 39, no. 4 (2004): 745.

________. "Faustus Is Us." Zygon 39, no. 4 (2004): 859.

Pederson, Ann. "The Not-Too-Distant Future: The Created Co-Creator." Currents in Theology and Mission 28, no. 3-4 (2001): 267-272.

________. "Created Co-Creator and the Practice of Medicine." Zygon 39, no. 4 (2004): 801-812.

Peters, Ted. "Genes, Creation, and Co-Creation." CTNS Bulletin 13, no. 1 (1993): 23-27.

________. "Coevolution: Pain or Promise" CTNS Bulletin 18, no. 3 (1998): 5-16.

________. Science, Theology, and Ethics Ashgate Science and Religion Series. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003.

________. "The Soul of Trans-Humanism." Dialog 44, no. 4 (2005): 381-395.

Peterson, Gregory R. "The Created Co-Creator: What It Is and Is Not." Zygon 39, no. 4 (2004): 827-840.

________. "Imaging God: Cyborgs, Brain-Machine Interfaces, and a More Human Future." Dialog 44, no. 4 (2005): 337-346.

Scott, Peter. "The Technological Factor: Redemption, Nature, and the Image of God." Zygon 35, no. 2 (2000): 371-384.

Sherman, Franklin. "The Internet, the Noosphere, and the Encounter of Religions." Currents in Theology and Mission 28, no. 3-4 (2001): 260-266.

Smedes, Taede A. "Technology and Evolution: The Quest for a New Perspective." Dialog 44, no. 4 (2005): 354-364.

Spezio, Michael L. "Brain and Machine: Minding the Transhuman Future." Dialog 44, no. 4 (2005): 375-380.

Stone, Jerome A. "Philip Hefner and the Modernist/Postmodernist Divide." Zygon 39, no. 4 (2004): 755-772.

Westhelle, Vítor. "Original Sin Revisited: Schleiermacher’s Contribution to the Hefnerian Project." Currents in Theology and Mission 28, no. 3-4 (2001): 385-393.

________. "The Poet, the Practitioner, and the Beholder: Remarks on Philip Hefner’s ‘Created Co-Creator’." Zygon 39, no. 4 (2004): 747-754.

Willer, Roger A. "Created Co-Creator in the Perspective of Church and Ethics." Zygon 39, no. 4 (2004): 841-858.

For more on Imre Lakatos and research programmes see here. It would be good also to read up on the Quine-Duhem thesis while you’re at it.