Philip Hefner, the created co-creator and me

Slogging through understanding, appropriating and then adapting Philip Hefner’s metaphor as human beings as created co-creators into something of my own to apply to my research field (Christian anthropology, the imago Dei and emergent digital and transhuman technology). Figured I’d whack a summary out here so then when people ask me what I’m referring to I’ll just refer them over to here. May not make much sense to them but its a starting point.

Of course, this doesn’t sketch out here any of the criticisms of the metaphor (I came up with a few (yay!) but then found them listed elsewhere already along with a whole lot of others (which was somewhat affirming and dampening at the same time)).

Anyway, 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”.

Hypothesis #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.

Hypothesis #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.

Hypothesis #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.

Hypothesis #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.

Hypothesis #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.

Hypothesis #6: Homo sapiens is a two-natured creature, a symbiosis of genes and culture.

Hypothesis #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.

Hypothesis #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.

Hypothesis #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.

So there you go. 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.

Key source at noted earlier is:

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

Other relevant sources include:

Hefner, Philip. “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.
Hefner, Philip. Technology and Human Becoming. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

And Zygon Vol 39 Issue 4 (2004) which has this issue as a free one you can download the articles from currently. (I’d recommend Gregory R. Peterson “THE CREATED CO-CREATOR: WHAT IT IS AND IS NOT” as a starter.)

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.