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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

When Creativity Becomes Fundamental

How a Metaphysics of Novelty Undermines Science

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Introduction: The Seduction of Cosmic Creativity

In recent decades, “creativity” has increasingly been elevated from a descriptive feature of human activity to a metaphysical principle of the universe itself. We are told that the cosmos is intrinsically creative, that novelty is not merely produced by natural processes but is a fundamental driver of reality. This idea appears in various guises: evolutionary spiritualism, process philosophy, panpsychism, and integral theory. It is rhetorically appealing, flattering to human self-understanding, and emotionally reassuring in an age disenchanted with mechanistic worldviews.

Yet once creativity is treated as a fundamental property of the universe, science—understood as a disciplined inquiry into lawful, testable, and constrained regularities—quietly dissolves. What is gained in metaphysical poetry is lost in explanatory rigor. This essay argues that making creativity fundamental does not enrich science; it terminates it.

Creativity as Explanation-Stopper

At the core of science lies a commitment to explanation through constraint. Scientific theories succeed precisely because they limit what can happen. Conservation laws, symmetries, selection pressures, and boundary conditions narrow the space of possibilities. When something unexpected occurs, science does not invoke an open-ended power of novelty; it searches for hidden variables, unrecognized interactions, or incomplete models.

By contrast, when creativity is elevated to a basic ontological principle, it functions as an explanation-stopper. Any anomaly, complexity, or emergence can be waved away with the claim that “the universe is creative.” This is not an explanation but a license for intellectual abdication. A principle that can account for everything accounts for nothing.

In this respect, cosmic creativity plays the same role as “God did it” in pre-modern natural philosophy. It halts inquiry rather than extending it.

The Collapse of Predictability and Lawfulness

Science depends on the assumption that nature is, to a significant extent, law-governed. This does not mean determinism in a crude Laplacian sense, but it does require stability of relations: given certain conditions, certain outcomes are more likely than others. Even probabilistic sciences, such as quantum mechanics, rely on tightly specified mathematical structures.

If creativity is fundamental, however, novelty is no longer constrained by prior states or lawful transitions. Genuinely radical emergence—emergence not derivable even in principle from antecedent conditions—undermines prediction, retrodiction, and modeling alike. The universe becomes an improvisational artist, not a system amenable to scientific understanding.

At that point, the very notion of scientific law is demoted from discovery to mere habit, a temporary pattern that could dissolve at any moment under the pressure of cosmic inventiveness.

Anthropomorphic Projection Disguised as Ontology

The idea of universal creativity is also deeply anthropomorphic. Creativity is a concept rooted in human psychology, culture, and intentional action. To project it onto the universe at large is to mistake a local, evolved cognitive capacity for a cosmic principle.

Science has progressed precisely by resisting such projections. The history of science is, in many ways, a systematic stripping away of human-centered categories: purpose, intention, value, and meaning. To reinstall creativity at the foundation of reality is to reverse this hard-won discipline and re-enchant the cosmos with a thinly veiled human self-image.

This is not a neutral metaphysical move; it is a regressive one.

Creativity Versus Naturalistic Emergence

Defenders of cosmic creativity often invoke “emergence” as their bridge to science. But this conflation is misleading. Naturalistic emergence refers to higher-level patterns arising from lower-level interactions under specific constraints. It does not posit an additional causal force called “creativity.” Evolutionary novelty, for example, arises from variation, inheritance, selection, and drift—none of which require creativity as an ontological primitive.

To say that evolution is “creative” is a metaphor. To say that creativity causes evolution is to replace a well-supported explanatory framework with a vacuous abstraction.

Once creativity becomes a causal agent, the explanatory work done by mechanisms evaporates.

Why Science Cannot Compete with Unlimited Novelty

A universe governed by creativity rather than constraint is one in which any outcome is always possible. In such a universe, failed predictions cannot falsify theories, because novelty can always be invoked post hoc. This destroys the core epistemic virtue of science: falsifiability.

Moreover, scientific progress depends on cumulative knowledge. Each generation builds on the reliable results of the previous one. But if creativity is fundamental and unconstrained, there is no guarantee that past regularities will hold in the future. Science becomes historically contingent storytelling, not systematic knowledge.

At that point, science no longer competes with myth, art, or spirituality—nor should it. But it also no longer deserves its privileged epistemic status.

The Integral Temptation

In integral and evolutionary spiritual frameworks, creativity often appears as a benevolent cosmic force pushing the universe toward greater complexity, depth, or consciousness. This narrative is seductive because it offers meaning without discipline, purpose without evidence, and transcendence without restraint.

But this is precisely the problem. Science advances by resisting such temptations, not by sanctifying them. The more “generous” the ontology, the poorer the epistemology.

An ontology that can explain everything explains nothing in particular.

Conclusion: Constraint Is the Price of Knowledge

Science does not deny novelty, complexity, or emergence. It explains them by showing how they arise from constrained processes operating over time. Creativity, insofar as it exists, is an emergent description of what such processes look like from the human perspective—not a fundamental feature of the universe itself.

Once creativity is elevated to an ontological primitive, explanation gives way to celebration, inquiry to affirmation, and science to metaphysics. The universe may indeed be surprising, intricate, and even awe-inspiring. But it is precisely because it is not free to do just anything that it can be understood at all.

In making creativity fundamental, we do not deepen science. We end it.