PREFACE

Because my Credo attempts to synthesize a wide range of readings I have done in science, social science, and the humanities, I hope to get corrective feedback from those in the congregation who are experts in these fields. Please help me strive for accuracy in my representation of current theories in these disciplines.

As a way of enticing you to read it, I would summarize its contents as an attempt to trace and understand how the energy of the sun, the source of all life on this planet, leads to the energy that a congregation like ours expends in its various activities and social action and to ultimately derive a morality and a social policy from the science of thermodynamics.

If I had to make a mission statement for my life, I would quote from the Christopher Prayer to say that my mission is to change the world or some definite part of it for the better.

Ultimately, I am trying to live a life that is free of anguish, for in the words of the philosopher Georges Bataille, "Anguish is meaningless for someone who overflows with life, and for life as a whole, which is an overflowing by its very nature." I am grateful to this church for the abundance of energy that I receive from being a part of this community and for the opportunity to contribute my energy in its mission to change the world, or some definite part of it, for the better.

AXIOM I--On the Limitations and Role of Language

I believe that language is fundamentally flawed in its ability to express the mysteries of existence but that it is one of the only tools we have to do so.

Given this, we must recognize that all holy scriptures were written within a particular historical context by human beings for particular purposes, and it is our job to understand how these contexts affected the authorship of the texts that have been handed down to us, so that, rather than accepting them as literal renditions of actual events, we understand them to be figurative representations of spiritual truths.

In this sense, all such holy writings, not only the holy scriptures of the major world religions but also the mythologies of under-developed native peoples, are metaphorical representations of a given culture's understanding of material existence, its relationship with the universe, and its sociopolitical structures.

AXIOM II--On the Role of the Cosmopolitan

I am a "cosmopolitan"; that is, as the Greek root of the word suggests, I am a "citizen of the universe." As such, I am called upon to be a student of other faiths so that my own beliefs may be enhanced. However, I am also called upon to explore issues of faith and spirituality within the religion that I was raised. Given this requirement of a mature religious faith, the following theologians have influenced my beliefs and currently serve as guides on my journey: Anthony de Mello, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Matthew Fox, Bishop John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg and Jack Miles.

As a citizen of the universe, I am also called upon to be a "renaissance man." That is, I must be a perpetual student who thirsts for knowledge about everything: astrophysics, molecular biology, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, theology, anthropology, linguistics, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, chaos theory, mathematics--all become subjects for study by the citizen who wishes to better understand the universe we live in and our place within it. Furthermore, I must strive to synthesize these studies into a coherent theory of life, for I believe as Joseph Campbell believes, that one function of mythology is to integrate the most current scientific theories yet still elicit a sense of awe before the mystery of being. Unitarian Univeralism gives me permission to think about my faith, my conception of God, and even encourages such intellectual inquiry in its fourth principle and in its belief statements, where it is said that "we believe in the authority of reason and conscience" and that "there is no fundamental conflict between faith and knowledge."

Finally, as citizens of the universe we are called upon to be the prophets of the 21st century. This involves active political engagement as a way of realizing, of making real, the seven UU principles for which we stand.

AXIOM III—On the Credo as Organism

A Credo is a work in progress. Like Buckminster-Fuller’s statement that God is a Verb rather than a noun, "credo" is a verb in its original Latin, meaning "I believe." A Credo therefore recognizes and honors the process of the spiritual journey as a perpetual growing, the way plants will grow toward a source of light. And like a living organism, one’s Credo is born in, grows within, adapts and responds to its environment. It is nurtured by close friends, spiritual guides, revelatory experiences, artistic encounters. The Credo as organism requires spiritual food, which it digests, assimilating to itself all useful nutrients and discarding the rest. I recognize this church to be a warm soil around the seeds of my belief.

**N.B. The use of "God" in the foregoing is not meant to signify the standard notion of a supernatural Higher Power that is in control of our lives but is meant, rather, to suggest a "Spirit of Life" that perhaps is at the heart of those natural forces and processes that have brought about life as we know it, the only life we are aware of existing in the universe.

1. I believe our relationship to God as human beings is evolving over time and must continue to evolve.
2. I believe that the next stage in the evolution of God will involve what Bishop Spong calls "getting beyond theism" to a non-personified God.
3. With the above notion of a non-anthropomorphized God in mind, what if God were conceived of as Heat or Warmth? If this were the case, then study of astrophysics, physics, thermodynamics and science in general correlates to theological exploration. See Teilhard de Chardin on The Heart of Matter: "The Divine had taken on for me the form, the consistence and the properties of an ENERGY, of a FIRE: by that I mean that it had become able to insinuate itself everywhere, to be metamorphosed into no matter what. . . ." (44).
4. If God is conceived of as Heat, then it is the transfer of heat, or the generation of heat, that marks God’s presence. The worship of the sun by prehistoric peoples was not far off the mark: "Since organic matter was originally produced by photosynthesis, virtually the entire biosphere subsists on the sun’s beneficence. The ancients were not mistaken when they worshiped the sun as the fount of life!" (Harold 40). The sun is the source and sustenance of all life on earth. It’s all a matter of the transfer of heat-energy: kilocalories. . . . Plants absorb 1% of the sun’s energy and translate it into life/cells/sugars: "On a clear day at noontime, roughly 10 ²¹ photons of photosynthetically active radiation strike each square meter of the earth every second, but plants use far less than 1 percent of the energy in these photons to make carbohydrates" (Ensminger 173-4). Then animals eat plants and absorb 1% of the their energy. Then carnivores eat animals and absorb 1% of their energy. . . . In this sense, then, "God" can be seen as being immanent in the creation. Investigate creation spirituality (cf. Matthew Fox’s Original Blessing).
5. Heat amounts to an imposition of order upon chaos. Energized matter organ-izes itself into forms. This is a natural tendency of matter, as scientists now realize. See Paul Davies’ God and the New Physics: "We know that, given an external supply of energy, order can be created in one system at the expense of disorder in another. Thus the flux of heat and light from the sun generates the highly complex order of the Earth’s biosphere, but only by sacrificing irreversibly the limited fuel resources of the solar core" (50). As citizens of the wealthiest nation on Earth, we must recognize that the highly organized and developed nature of our society works to reduce the order that other societies can achieve, given our consumption of a third of the world’s meat and a third of the world’s energy for only 5% of the total population of the planet. The earth could not sustain our level of consumption on a world-wide basis.
6. The act of bringing warmth to people is therefore equivalent to the act of carrying God into the life of an other. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, being kind to those who are rejected and forgotten: these are all acts of God, of the God that is within us, the warmth/heat that the privileged have attained. To turn the Third Force psychological principles of Abraham Maslow into a moral precept, those who are higher on the pyramid of needs must tend to the needs of those lower on the pyramid. In this way will Love spread and do its powerful work of concentrating heat/energy in humanity. Consider further why this is necessary and morally right, as opposed to concentrating energy into material things which serve to comfort the rich and privileged at the expense of the suffering of all those left out in the cold.
7. "Bringing warmth to others" is also an attempt to equalize what were originally unfair beginnings: see Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies for details about how certain peoples got a head start on others and are currently more developed than others not because of any inherent racial inferiority or mental deficiency but b/c of the environmental conditions that either limited or provided opportunities for their ancestors to advance at the rates that they did. Add examples.
8. Human warmth is not necessarily a function of distance. One can be in the same room with another being and not feel "close"; on the other hand, someone can feel "close" to someone who is remotely distant in time or space. Hence the phenomenon of relating when reading literature. This phenomenon is what makes language (and other art forms—musical notation, mathematics) a conduit, a conductor, of the artist’s energy. . . . It could be said that such "texts" do work insofar as they "transfer energy." One example that comes immediately to mind is Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which "catalyzed" the nation into action regarding slavery.
9. Warmth in human relationships also signals the presence of God. It has long been known that human babies need warmth to survive and thrive. Most social problems, therefore, can be attributed to a lack of human warmth. See, for example, Richard Kotulak’s Inside the Brain, which recognizes the effect of violence on the developing brains of children: "The rising tide of abuse and neglect of children occurs during the critical period when children are developing what Harvard’s Felton Earls calls ‘moral emotions.’ These are emotions that are rooted in brain chemistry and are established in the first three years of life. The development of impulse control occurs at a time when sensitivity toward others is also being rooted in the child’s personality. The chemical patterns that are established tell a child how to react to his or her environment, whether the child sees the world as a hostile place that has to be fought, or a more peaceful one where social cooperation wins the day" (88). In effect, the brains of these children adapt to the environment in which they grow up within. If it is an environment of warmth and love, the child learns cooperation and sensitivity; if it a cold and abusive environment, on the other hand, the child learns to be impulsive and violent in order to survive: "’It is adaptive to be impulsive in that [abusive] setting’ [Dr. Bruce] Perry [of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who examined children who had lived in the Branch Davidean cult compound] said, referring to the cult. ‘If you wait, very frequently you will be victimized. So it’s highly adaptive to be hypervigilant, to be overreactive and impulsive, to actually act before you are acted upon’" (Kotulak 87).
10. In this sense, the absence of Heat (i.e. cold) is equivalent to the absence of God. In this equation, God is equal to Life in general, as the absence of heat is also equivalent to the absence of life. Think of the impending heat death of the universe and how "absolute zero" points to the end of all life. Dante intuits this when he places Satan in the middle of the Earth, at the farthest distance from God, and he is lodged in ice. In the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno, the one surrounding Satan, friends who have betrayed best friends have committed the worst sin in Dante’s eyes. Lack of human warmth, in Dante’s system of contrepasso, lands one next to Satan.
11. Explore the correlation between these ruminations and the work of theologian Martin Buber, who writes of I-Thou relationships (comparable to the UU principle of the "inherent dignity and worth of every person") vs. I-It relationships (treating others as objects to achieve our wants and desires).
12. The fight against coldness is equivalent to the fight against entropy. Warmth/heat takes a constant influx of energy to maintain. The human body, for example, on average burns 2,000 kilocalories per day to carry out its fight against entropy. Where does this energy ultimately come from? The energy is abundant from the sun; it’s just a matter of having it channeled properly and in the right directions.
13. This notion of entropy is even applicable to the mind, as seen in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s psychological study of creativity. He writes, "Entropy, the force behind the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics, applies not only to physical systems but to the functioning of the mind as well. When there is nothing specific to do, our thoughts soon return to the most predictable state, which is randomness or confusion. We pay attention and concentrate when we must—when dressing, driving the car, staying awake at work. But when there is no external force demanding that we concentrate, the mind begins to lose focus. It falls to the lowest energetic state, where the least amount of effort of required" (348).
14. If heat imposes or creates order, then disorder results from lack of heat. Consider all forms of social disorder as a result of the lack of heat, of human warmth. Also, social disorder is a result of a lack of purpose and function.
15. If entropy is "a measure of how organized or useful energy is" (Hayles 30), consider efficiency: there are more efficient uses of energy than others. . . . Need to find out when energy is "unorganized" and how this effects a system. Think of the body: are there entropic foods (like junk food)? Thinking of the mind/brain: are there entropic patterns of thinking? (ODC, depression, addiction, anxiety). This suggests that awareness of entropic clusters or "condensations" can allow the aware entity to direct energy toward the problem areas (or away from them). . . . In this sense, it is a moral imperative to think of our selves and exactly how efficiently we burn energy in each of its contexts: the body (mental and physical energy), home, city, state, nation, planet. We should re-draw our personal boundaries to encompass a larger and larger geographic space, starting with the self and evolving outwards to home, city, state and then nation, or, better yet, learning about and acting to improve upon each of these simultaneously.
16. Directing energy is an important concept. Humankind has become a master of directing or channeling energy, as well as storing energy. There are numerous examples: combustion engines, nuclear bombs, windmills, batteries, solar cells, hydrogen fuel cells. We exemplify life in this tendency: Plants are energy funnels in that they store the energy of the sun and channel it into the more advanced life forms that live off of it. Concepts are energy funnels: they store the energy of thought/brain activity in language and channel it into the future. Jesus was an energy funnel: his radical acts of compassion and love were comparable to a supernova or a theological "big bang," the fall-out of which is still organizing human activity, despite the many atrocities carried out in his name. In this way, then, churches too can be thought of as energy funnels. A funnel captures energy and directs its flow.
17. Consider the properties of conductors and insulators in terms of directing or channeling energy. Conductors of heat are typically metals whose molecular structure is highly organized and allows for the energy to travel swiftly through the molecules. (cf. superconductors) Investigate the chemical/molecular properties of insulators that make them poor conductors of heat. Extrapolate metaphors for sociopolitical structures.
18. Consider highly organized bodies (political campaigns, religious organizations, military units) as conductors through which energy is able to pass quickly and effectively. See Franklin Harold’s The Way of the Cell on "molecular logic": "each [molecule] performs a job in the service of the organism as a whole. The notion of function. . . . becomes crucial when we ask why leaves are green and blood is red. Function implies purpose, and therefore, order." Order is the result of purpose and function. If heat leads to order, then Heat is the result of purpose and function. . . . . Consider too Teilhard’s notion of the noosphere as humans are said to be equivalent to molecules in the evolving life of Gaia: "a creative tide. . . is carrying the human ‘megamolecules’ toward an almost unbelievable quasi mono-molecular state" (38). On the other hand, it will be important to consider the negative manifestations of this orderly and purposeful organization of people (e.g. fascism, fanaticism, terrorism, fundamentalism). Be sure to qualify "positive" vs. "negative" manifestations of "molecular organization."
19. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi speaks of the need to protect creative energy after it is awakened: "We must erect barriers against distractions, dig channels so that energy can flow more freely, find ways to escape outside temptations and interruptions. If we do not, entropy is sure to break down the concentration that the pursuit of an interest requires" (351). For the individual, as well as for whatever organization or group, it comes down to a matter of our "ability to control attention" (Csikszentmihalyi 352) so that "our latent creative energy. . . generates its own internal force to keep concentration focused" (Csikszentmihalyi 348, emphasis added). It is this control or concentrated focusing that is characteristic of the purposeful, functional behavior exhibited by the constellations of individual entities that constitute organisms/organizations.
20. The above ruminations on thermodynamics, entropy, and energy flows have led me to develop a new concept which I will designate with the neologism "Energenesis," the origins of energy, and a new field of study called "Energenetics," which will involve the study of how and where energy flows from these origins. This field of interdisciplinary study institutes a new way of organizing knowledge such that considerations of energy flow are the primary focus. Energenetics, then, would consider at least four kinds of energy, all of which are ultimately materialistic, i.e. ultimately deriving from the materialism of the sun’s energy:
1. Material energy-the four fundamental forces of electromagnetism, gravity, strong and weak forces and all physical manifestations thereof. Much of this discussion will focus on the phenomenon of solar energy and its local effects upon life on earth.
2. Spiritual energy-the life energy, the fire and energy that Teilhard speaks of in The Heart of Matter: "the as yet undiscovered and unnamed power which forces Matter to arrange itself in ever larger molecules, differentiated and organic in structure" (33). Scientist Frankin Harold would call it "molecular logic."
3. Linguistic/Symbolic energy-energy gathered in words, concepts, metaphors, myths, narrative, language (whether it be verbal, musical, mathematical, etc.). See Gary Snyder, "The Politics of Ethnopoetics": "Poetics of the earth. Concentrations of communication-energy result in language, certain kinds of compressions of language results in mythologies; compression of mythologies brings us to songs" (40).
4. Cultural energy-churches, fads, pop culture, religion: See Richard Dawkin's concept of the "meme." See also Csikszentmihalyi: "memes shape human energy through ideas" (320) and "The analogy to genes in the evolution of culture are memes, or units of information that we must learn if culture is to continue. . . . It is these memes that a creative person changes, and if enough of the right people see the change as an improvement, it will become part of the culture" (7).
21. The originary energy was material: astrophysicists speak of the Big Bang, which produced all of the energy in a single moment/blast.
22. Ultimately, as things slowed down a bit and galaxies, solar systems, stars, and planets formed--after billions of years--spiritual energy then emerged as a result of random molecular convergence and environmental conditions being just right. By spiritual I mean to invoke the original Latin sense of "breath," suggesting life. As suggested above, this spiritual energy is immanent in matter itself; there is no need to go outside to a transcendental being. As Manuel DeLanda writes of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, "In Spinoza, Deleuze discovers another possibility [from that of conceiving of matter "as an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside"]: that the resources involved in the genesis of form are not transcendental but immanent to matter itself." Later DeLanda writes of Deleuze’s investigation of "far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics": "It is only in these far-from-equilibrium conditions that the full variety of immanent topological forms appears. . . It is only in this zone of intensity that difference-driven morphogenesis comes into its own, and that matter becomes an active material agent, one which does not need form to come and impose itself from the outside" (DeLanda).
23. I recognize the baggage that a word like "spiritual" bears but intend to re-appropriate from its dualistic, Platonic sense of being something separate and higher than the body in order to restore to it its material basis. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought pp. 561-68, the section on "The Embodied Mind and Spiritual Life," for what cognitive scientists are saying about this issue: "One might imagine a spiritual tradition in which such a Soul is fundamentally embodied—shaped in important ways by the body, located forever as part of the body, and dependent for its ongoing existence on the body" (563).
24. As a result of this spiritual energy causing spontaneous morphogenesis (genesis of forms), humankind emerges after eons and millenia of evolution. Humans and pre-humans were nomadic at first, which requires the full attention and all available time and energy to do the work of survival. Jared Diamond writes that "Probably all humans lived in bands until at least 40,000 years ago, and most still did as recently as 11,000 years ago" (268). Eventually humans settled down and cultivated the land, harvesting crops and domesticating animals. Such activity led to a surplus of energy, which allowed for increases in population and development. Surplus food frees every person from having to contribute to the work of survival; the result, according to Diamond, is that "food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel. . . . Stored food is essential for feeding non-food-producing specialists, and certainly for supporting whole towns of them. Hence nomadic hunter-gatherer societies have few or no such full-time specialists, who instead first appear in sedentary societies" (86, 89).
25. See also Csikszentmihalyi on the importance of surplus: "To achieve creativity in an existing domain, there must be surplus attention available" (8). [This notion of attention as a potentially scarce commodity is recognized in a recent issue of Wired, where someone writes that the last scarce commodity is attention (find this reference).] Csikszentmihalyi provides 5^th Century Greece, 15^th Century Florence, and 19^th Century Paris as three exemplary milieu in which surplus attention led to remarkable creative achievements and advancements (see 8, 32-36, 332-35). Such surpluses come about when a convergence of economic, political and cultural factors allow for the particular matrix of individual, field of study, and domain of knowledge to give birth to a creative (i.e. culture-changing) phenomenon.
26. See also French philosopher Georges Bataille on the significance of surplus. In fact, the concept of energenetics can be seen as a direct outgrowth of Bataille’s notion of "General Economy": "Solar energy is the source of life’s exuberant development. The origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiance of the sun, which dispenses energy—wealth—without any return. The sun gives without ever receiving. . . . Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the globe. But, first, living matter receives this energy and accumulates it within the limits given by the space that is available to it. It then radiates or squanders it, but before devoting an appreciable share to this radiation it makes maximum use of it for growth. Only the impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander" (28-29). Bataille’s theory of the General Economy focuses on what happens to the excess energy that is sloughed off after maximal growth occurs. I am interested in that growth process itself, though Bataille’s philosophy is directly relevant to energenetics.
27. Insofar as the energy collected by humans then translates into brain-electricity which results in thoughts, concepts, and ideas that then get transcribed and stored in language, ideas have energy and can "set the world on fire." This is why the early church was concerned about maintaining control via the Inquisition and the hunt for heretics. They knew that ideas are "dangerous" insofar as they generate heat and passion. Ideas, too, are "heat-sinks." Reconsider historical moments such as these in light of energenetics.
28. This brain-energy consumes 50% of the kilocalories that humans burn in their daily fight against entropy. Therefore it could be argued that a good deal of the sun’s energy that living matter employs in the act of living ends up being channeled to the human brain. This energy-intensive organ only weighs a fraction of our total body weight, yet it is the primary consumer of our daily intake of food-energy.
29. Anthropologist Gary Snyder points out that this brain of ours has not changed much for the past 40,000 years: "Forty thousand years is a useful working time scale because we can be sure that through the whole of that period man has been in the same body and in the same mind that he is now. All the evidence we have indicates that imagination, intuition, intellect, wit, decision, speed, skill, was fully developed forty thousand years ago" (16).
30. Having such a prehistorical brain in a postmodern body causes many problems, as cognitive therapist Aaron Beck points. He is worth quoting at length: "Although the enemies of our prehistoric past, such as animal predators or bands of human marauders, are no longer a threat to our everyday existence, we are encumbered by the legacy from our ancestors, who were exposed to and feared these dangers. We unwittingly construct a phantom world composed of individuals who are poised to dominate, deceive, and exploit us. We are overly suspicious of actions that hint of manipulation or deception, and we may transform trivial or innocuous events or mild challenges into serious offenses. These automatic, exaggerated self-protective processes lead to unnecessary friction and pain in our contemporary lives. It probably was useful in our evolutionary past to react in an either-or fashion in discriminating friend from foe, prey from predator. It may have been adaptive to be on guard against the intrusive behavior of other members of the clan when our own survival was at stake, but we generally no longer need the margin of safety provided by these archaic mechanisms in our ordinary interactions" (33-34, emphasis added). A bit later he writes, "The sensitive operation of the fight-flight mechanism undoubtedly prolonged the lives of our prehistoric ancestors. The capacity to fight off or escape from an enemy was finely honed by natural selection. But it is the hyperactivity of these defensive strategies that poses problems in contemporary society, where the perceived threats are for the most part psychological rather than physical" (38, emphasis added).
31. Snyder and Beck’s work suggests that we are essentially still animals, ruled by instinctual drives. To become fully human, to become fully realized as human beings, we must free ourselves from the rule of fear. Only then can we open up to the world and let ourselves be energized by the world, and give back our energy to the world. As Georges Bataille writes, "Anguish is meaningless for someone who overflows with life, and for life as a whole, which is an overflowing by its very nature" (39).

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