Salon.com gives its interview with biologist Stuart Kauffman the title, "God Enough," meaning -- as Kauffman explains in a very interesting and profound conversation with interviewer Steve Paulson -- that the "ceaseless creativity of nature" fulfills for him the role of what has traditionally been understood as God. Says Kauffman, "One either does or does not take the step of saying God is the creativity of the universe. I do. Or you say there is divinity in the creativity in the universe."
If by "ceaseless" Kauffman means "eternal" or "infinite," then he is taking seriously a kind of elephant-in-the-room topic that I find missing in the arguments of the so-called "new atheists:" Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris. These writers (whose rants are, for the most part, against the church rather than the existence of an eternal God), fail to deal with those age-old questions of "what was there before there was something?" and "why is there something and not nothing?"
Dawkins posits (and many others seem to assume) a kind of random eternality (my phrase) out of which the universe springs of its own accord, but this, it seems to me, begs the question. If you are going to bypass the prime mover or "first cause" argument of Aristotle and Aquinas (that which is material and finite must by necessity have been brought into existence by that which is non-material and infinite) and go straight to an eternal material universe, then are you not defining the divine ? That which is infinite, by any name, is God. (And by "God" I mean a creative power without beginning or end -- not necessarily the divinity of Judeo-Christian tradition.) Reader, where is the flaw in this thinking?
