Introduction

Any attempt to address the question of how human creativity is related to the activity of other animals and artificial intelligences (AIs) provokes consideration of three concepts represented by the three words of the title of this article: “Imagining,” “imitating,” and “being.” In this article, these ideas weave in and out of the discussion in fuguelike succession, symmetry, and counterpoint. In addition to an introduction and conclusion, there are five sections in the article. Three are headed by one of the keywords of the title; each begins with a challenge to pause, conduct a thought experiment, and ponder the meaning of that word. Two other sections explore two other keywords. The section on “transcending” is placed after discussion of “imagining” and “imitating” and before introducing “being.” This is because the idea of transcending emerges repeatedly in those previous two sections in connection with divine qualities like goodness but also in diverse creative human practices: mathematics, science, mentoring, architecture, painting, portraiture, satire, songwriting, music, and fantasy writing. Clarifying what is meant by transcendence is also a prerequisite for discussing the difficult ideas of “being” and ontological order. Finally, the section on “co-creating” considers the complex interplay between imagining, imitating, and being in the vocation of the imago Dei, gifted with the Genesis co-creativity mandate.

Imagining

I ask the reader to pause here and conduct a thought experiment. Imagine! Make up an idea, a fantastic idea, that nobody ever thought of before. Create an image in your mind; picture something no one has ever seen before. Make up a sound no one has ever heard before. Imagine a new world, with monstrous beasts unlike any that have ever existed. You can do it. What’s more, you know beforehand that you can do it. And you know after you have done it that it is, in some sense, you who has done it. Importantly, you cannot help doing it, and you love doing it.

Thirty thousand years ago, humans could do it and left us a record of their inner vision and mythmaking. Artists do it as a matter of course. This almost defines great art: the imagination transforms what is perceived into a new thing, and perceiving the artwork, we are changed. Scientists live by it too; induction is an act of the imagination. Ideas are crucial to good science, especially when data makes little sense, when models mislead and theories are inadequate. At the heart of that most logically rigorous of disciplines, mathematics, it is the same: induction, intuition, and analogy are fundamental to mathematics-making. Mathematicians wave their hands about vigorously, evoking unseen images, inviting others to peer into the abstract world they see with such clarity.

I am a mathematician who is also in small ways a musician, a craftsman, and an artist; but it is in mathematics I have felt the charge of creative excitement most. Feeling an idea coming on, I struggled to sleep. Yet sleep could often be the most productive activity of all. In my postgraduate days, when the chemists and physicists were working doggedly (so it seemed to me) ten hours a day in their labs, I could play the guitar for hours, and the work was going on in my unconscious mind. For, as all mathematicians will testify, the best ideas arise when least expected. And they sometimes turn up fully formed. We know by some kind of intuition that there is something beautiful out there, and suddenly we have it, and we know it to be right. We want to rush to incarnate it in a body of theory, with words and symbols, definitions and theorems, and formal proofs, and set it lovingly in the mathematical garden and give it work to do. We want the power of that idea to be communicated through our work to others. The Idea, the Word-Symbol, and the Power proceeding from both—I will return later to this trinity of creation.

The idea, seemingly timeless and coming from nowhere, has been wrought in secret in the womb of nature and knit together in the depths of my being. It could not have been granted to me unless I had previously immersed myself in the work of others, in the abstract world of topology and the long human adventure of mathematics-making. But I have the absolute conviction that the idea is somehow of me. By a strange and wonderful alchemy of my being who I am, as well as what and where I am and have been, the idea has come into being. It appears as my idea. Yet simultaneously, I welcome it as a gift from heaven communicated through me. It is often said that mathematicians are Platonists on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and not on the other days. It is not that we vacillate and cannot make up our minds; rather, on those other days, we experience the struggle and the joy of inventing—consciously defining, constructing, reasoning, connecting, proving, refuting, correcting, refining. We feel the burden of genuine choice; this our creature-concept could have been defined otherwise. But on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, we feel it was inevitable—that we have been gifted with insights into eternal realities. We watch “our” creatures making off in their own ways, living quite independently of us in a mathematical world shared with other mathematicians and ultimately all who appreciate or benefit from them. It is like the miracle of a newborn baby—a biological product, yet so very much more. It is of us, “our baby”; yet the sense of otherness, the grateful awareness of gift, is overwhelming. And the child will (we must truly want this) eventually find its own way and live its own life. My child, and my mathematical creatures, are of me, yet transcend me. The novelist and the dramatist will say the same about their characters, which take on lives of their own. Ideas, it has been said, are almost like aliens trying to come into the real world, and we are just pregnant with them. Almost! Because I know, as surely as I know that I am, that it is I who (cooperatively) creates and procreates, who thinks and makes and imagines. And my being, as a mathematician, grows along with my imagining, but both depend fundamentally on my disciplined study of the subject and its practitioners—on my imitating.

Imitating

Once again, pause here and conduct another thought experiment. Imitate a hated politician or a beloved celebrity! Imitate your cat! Imitate one of your closest friends! Imitate Christ!—What does that mean?

Sitting at feet, following in footsteps, copying mannerisms—we begin by imitating parents, siblings, and animals. We go on to imitate friends and peers, characters in media, books, and films; throughout life, we imitate our teachers and role models. I imitated my mathematical forebears, mentors, and colleagues, and eventually also some of my students. For, while I hope my students are imitating me to some extent, I want them to transcend me, as I aim to transcend my parents and mentors. With Plato, I see my task as not only to teach my students (and children and grandchildren) to walk and run, and think somewhat like me, but also to point them away from me in the right direction, towards the light, towards the transcendent Good.

Paul Klee was a leading spirit in early twentieth century “modern art,” strongly influenced by expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. But he affirmed that “[f]or the artist, communication with nature remains the most essential condition.” Nature provides the raw material for our understanding of ourselves and our art, mathematics, and science. But all the time and all the way, our imitation of nature moves us, goads us, to abstraction, to imaginative transcendence. “Originality consists of returning to the origin,” said Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi. (This and the second statement that follows are attributed to Gaudi by numerous sources; original reference is unknown.) His organic architecture was overtly inspired by nature. “I have only read one book, and that is the book of nature.” He was “a tightrope walker on the line of bridging art and science. He understood that nature is constructed by laws of mathematics” (attributed to Adrian Bejan). Said Gaudi, “Nothing is invented, for it’s written in nature first.” Yet, his extraordinary architecture bears the unmistakable stamp of his own inner being in communion with the divine Origin as well as deep contemplation of the natural world.

The greatest painters have spent countless hours copying old masters and drawing from life, studying anatomy and the effects of gravity and light on bodies, fur, and cloth. After that, they must face the daunting challenge of the bare canvas and wait for the muse to strike. Then they find their own voice, their unique touch. Portrait painters have an uncanny way of probing beneath surface features to the character of the sitter. Great cartoonists will draw a caricature of a politician that owes much to the observation of physiognomy but delves far deeper into the public persona and inner psyche. Satirists have a similar startling gift. Probing to the being behind the farce of outward appearances and behaviors is getting ever harder in an AI-influenced and media-driven world. How do the best cartoonists and portrait painters, aware of the fragility of face and the deep complexity of being that lies beneath the surface, cut through the pretense and unmask the reality? Paradoxically, this ability to transcend facial features and expose hidden things arises out of long apprenticeship in reproducing faces on paper and canvas, practicing the art of imitation. Screen animators too base their art on a disciplined imitation. Those writers who can take us successfully inside imagined worlds of animals—even dressed-up, talking animals—have attained that transcendent ability only by patient, loving observation and study. It works because they have learned to imitate the ways of living animals and humans. Children’s book authors and illustrators who show a profound empathy with children and animals can teach scientists some things about the inner life of animals.

Scientists themselves must, of course, undergo an arduous apprenticeship in the practices and skills of their discipline before they are fit to contribute original work. Even then, they must spend long days in tedious work, simply observing, recording, reading, computing—sitting before the raw data “like a little child,” in Galileo’s and Huxley’s image. When transcendence happens, it can feel like Kepler’s and Einstein’s rapturous vision of thinking God’s thoughts after him. Galileo’s early mathematical models of the falling stone and the simple pendulum were tremendous feats of the imagination. But this followed his playing with swinging lamps and watching balls rolling, seeking to learn nature’s ways. Yet, already, in the observing, in the unconscious selection of what to see, in the questions asked, in choosing what to ignore, something transcendent is happening. This conjunction of humble submission and bold extrapolation resembles the creative imagination of the artist, where ideas often have the strange quality of earthed divinity, of half-expected visitants, of messy miracles—like a newborn baby.

The songwriter Nick Cave, responding to song lyrics produced by ChatGPT “in the style of Nick Cave,” was forthright about the difference between a clever imitation—a grotesque mockery, a kind of burlesque, he called it—and the songs that emerge from the inner life of a true artist after long and costly gestation in life, with all its highs and lows:

[T]he process of songwriting [is] a blood and guts business, here at my desk, that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea. It requires my humanness. What that new idea is, I don’t know, but it is out there somewhere, searching for me. In time, we will find each other.

ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.

. . . Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognizes as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering. This is what we humble humans can offer, that AI can only mimic, the transcendent journey of the artist that forever grapples with his or her own shortcomings. This is where human genius resides, deeply embedded within, yet reaching beyond, those limitations. (Cave 2023)

Mathematicians may have more of the algorithmic, the logical machine, about them than other artists, but mathematicians know what Cave means by those “dangerous, heart-stopping departures” that catapult us beyond the limits of the known. They know that mathematical creation starts by being embedded within concrete realities and subject to strictly logical discourse, yet it reaches far beyond those proximate limitations. Transcendence must take place before the fruits of earlier, long, and severe disciplinary apprenticeship can bear unexpected fruit—the beautiful abstractions that will one day reveal their power in grappling with concrete reality once again.

Living mathematics rests upon a fluctuation between the antithetical powers of intuition and logic, the individuality of “grounded” problems and the generality of far-reaching abstractions. We ourselves must prevent the development being forced to only one pole of this life-giving antithesis. (Richard Courant, quoted in Reid 1970, 220)

Courant was speaking in 1962 at Göttingen on the centenary of the birth of the great mathematician David Hilbert, whose life and work epitomized Courant’s message. The previous half century had brought surprise after surprise as abstract mathematics, pursued and developed for its own sake, found remarkable applications. In 1925, Alfred North Whitehead ([1925] 1932, 47) wrote:

Nothing is more impressive than the fact that, as mathematics drew increasingly into the upper regions of ever greater extremes of abstract thought, it returned back to earth with a corresponding growth of importance for the analysis of concrete fact . . . The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

The building of effective mathematical models of nature, like the writing of effective songs, begins with observing, experiencing, and imitating. Then, powered by the abstract imagination, the thought of the pure mathematician rises into transcendent realms before being harnessed for use by the applied scientist. This transcendence into Whitehead’s “upper regions of ever greater extremes of abstract thought” parallels Cave’s “dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognizes as their known self.”

Transcending

The idea of transcendence has occurred naturally at least twelve times in the preceding sections on imagining and imitating, in connection with a wide variety of human creative activities. I now attempt to elucidate what this word could mean for humans in imago Dei by analogy with the theological concept of the transcendence of the Creator-God. The word expresses the otherness of God as the creator, whose being is therefore “outside of,” “above,” or beyond all created things. I argue that the imago Dei reflects and participates in this transcendence, and human creativity participates in the work of creation, in ways beyond the capacities of other animals and AIs.

I already argued that all human creative work, while depending crucially on the imagination, is grounded in imitation. The importance of imitation is stressed by C. S. Lewis ([1939] 1967), who uses two other metaphors for the art of learning: reflection and assimilation. We have seen that, in the same way mathematicians must somehow rise above the concrete, earthly reality to create abstract theories, artists must transcend nature to produce genuine artistic novelty. The imitations of nature are launchpads for fresh flights of imagination; the reflections are refracted into new colors tinged with the hues of each artist’s self. What is assimilated is reconstituted by unique personhood into novel substance. An AI may impersonate a super-informed, super-logical, and super-mannered human, creating the impression of conscious thought and even wisdom. But it remains imitation; even the apparent innovations are recombinations of countless imitations, which can never amount to transcendence, as knowledge can never amount to wisdom. If there is one wise prophet for every thousand prolix media pundits and influencers, a large language model is bound to be greatly skewed by the many who are going confidently wrong.

Animals can mimic us. Dogs may even convince us that they share our emotions and moral sense. The reality is much more complex, though there is genuine empathy. What we love about animals (and very young children) is their artless being what they are, no pretense, no guile, no image-building. They simply are what they are, and we love and even envy them for it. They play their essential role in our human make-up and identity, for we are part of the same story. Children respond instantly to animal stories. We cannot understand and name ourselves without naming them, and they are a crucial means of beginning to understand the divine. Thomas Aquinas insisted that the words we use to refer to God arise from our knowledge of creatures by the analogy of being. Animals have much to teach us about ourselves and about the Creator; their being is prerequisite for our transcending. But humans, in imago Dei, are called to reflect both immanence and transcendence: we participate with the beasts in nature, and we are responsible for them, charged to lead them in the great doxology of nature. If this is exceptionalism, it cannot be dismissed as inappropriate speciesism or anthropocentrism; a good conductor does not dominate or subdue an orchestra but draws out its soul.

The beasts are incorporated in the complexity of the imago Dei, for humans can be entrusted with “naming” them within our common story. They have their part in “the dust of the Earth” and the genetic tree but also in the “breath of life” and the capacity to desire, suffer, enjoy, and die. Human imagining, mythmaking, and storytelling begin in our affinities with animals. Perhaps this can be described as a weak or limited transcendence of nature by living things. In a broader sense, all “emergent” phenomena might be described as transcending the material of their makeup. However, in this article, I reserve the word transcendence as applying only to the imago Dei, sharing somehow in the transcendence of the Creator. Some animals may have elements of self-awareness, but the capacity to imagine novelties is not conferred on them. An AI may be seen as made in imago hominis, but that image represents extremely limited aspects of what makes us human: the algorithmic, or that which can be programmed or described in mathematical terms. Biological evolution produces mimicries and relative novelties in huge numbers of steps over vast periods of time. AIs can produce them almost instantly. Neither beasts nor machines have anything remotely like the human capacity to imagine complex and coherent new worlds, or to reimagine old worlds. I think history produced by an AI is likely to be bad history, for historians must seek to get behind, or transcend, the superficial facts, events, and dates. A notable example is G. K. Chesterton’s brief History of England, communicating better than many historians the essential spirit of things while omitting many “facts” and dates, and getting some dates wrong. I myself write dialogues set in the history of mathematics, using primary sources as far as possible. In attempting to reconstruct the conversations and the gradual formation of ideas, I have to get inside the heads of my characters, using their recorded words and correspondence, while transcending the sources to bring the dialogue to life. I try to imagine myself within their social and intellectual milieu. I have to imitate their recorded discourse but also probe their inner life and thoughts. It is not easy. And, as with any historical novelist, my reconstruction, however well researched and disciplined, must not be mistaken for reality.

“Thinking” machines can assist humans to do mathematics, and greatly speed parts of the journey. But they cannot replace the human mathematics-making imagination. The cognitive revolution, followed by rapid cultural evolution, catapulted Homo sapiens into constructing completely novel worlds of higher orders: art, mythmaking, and mathematics-making. The latter began, of course, with imitation, reflection, and assimilation: tallying, decorating, classifying shapes, and observing patterns and cycles in the sky. Exuberant mathematical creativity emerged early, evident in oral and written records and in the artefacts of all cultures. Mathematical ideas may be seen in built structures, rock art, ornamentation, games, pottery, basketwork, drumbeats, dance, music, musical instruments, social rituals, kinship structures, and carvings. Some animals might tally up to five and display the seeds of creative activity. Mathematicians, however, not only apprehend the infinite set of natural numbers but have gone on to invent negative and complex numbers and construct the abstract, uncountable “number continuum.” They have built beautiful abstract theories of infinite cardinal and ordinal numbers and placed it all on solid, logical, axiomatic foundations. In contrast, Homo erectus made stone tools that seem not to have changed significantly over a million years. We are restlessly seeking transcendence where they did not. In three millennia, mathematics has moved from concrete to abstract, particular to general, outer to inner, informal to formal.

Music too has transcended its roots in animal communication and developed rapidly in unpredictable ways; birdsong, in contrast, evolves more slowly by small, incremental changes. However, individual birds, responding to their living environment, are capable of remarkable flexibility. While Robert Browning’s “wise thrush” repeats himself, song thrushes make up new passages all the time, and avian mimics can quickly incorporate new sounds into their repertoire. In the art of pure mimicry, of course, AIs far outdo beasts and humans and are producing ever more striking musical compositions by algorithmic compounding of multiple imitations. What is forever missing in AIs is the existential crucible out of which, I suggest, living creatures express in their songs something of “their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering,” in Cave’s words about human appreciation of art.

Humans draw from the patterns of nature and the wells of the spirit and then, by art and divine alchemy, a metamorphosis occurs in percolating through our beings. Our children imitate us and then surprise and enchant us with their unexpected idiosyncrasies, their hybridized new words, and their fantastic ideas. The rock painters long ago learned to copy the lines of the animals they knew so well, but then they transcended the visual imitation to capture something of the inner life of the beast and realities beyond the beast, including their own being in intimate relation to the beast and to greater unseen realities. If, as Whitehead observes, abstract mathematics turns out more and more to give us the true weapons to control our thought about concrete fact, then we cannot dismiss myths as “merely fictions.” If they can be called false, it is in much the same sense as that rule of thumb of good mathematical modelers: “All models are (ultimately) wrong!” For there, in the myths, we may well find the true weapons to guide our thought about facts of a higher order, including our relationships with humans and beasts, and perhaps even with AI.

Imitation can masquerade as being, as with unconscious AIs presenting as self-aware, loving creatures. In our mythmaking, math-making, history, art, and science, we construct models and images of reality. The better the imitation, the more sophisticated the model, the more danger there is of mistaking the physical or mental image for the reality. Coming from a pure mathematical background, it was a revelation for me to work for some years in an epidemiological modeling center, where I learned how good science quantifies uncertainty. Modelers are not prophets; they have to guess, months or years before good data can be collected and analyzed, what might be going on. Subject to availability of computer power and time, they must select a few measurable parameters from a hundred candidates to include and guess what might depend on what, and how. Then, they have to calibrate models using what data is available, however inadequate, corrupt, and inappropriate. The bare surmise they arrive at, with uncertainties carefully quantified, may be very useful but must not be taken for a surrogate reality.

The conceptual distinction between image and reality is not made by beast or machine, and was probably only recently made in the evolution of human consciousness. It is almost inevitable for scientists to talk as if the current paradigm is the reality. But applied mathematicians and scientists, immersed in a particular model world they have consciously created, can slip imperceptibly into speaking and acting as if the model is the reality. This is especially true in our day, I think, of cosmologists. Statements about the physical universe ought to be implicitly prefaced with “according to our current provisional model.” Biology is less ruled by lawlike principles, but many statements about animals should be implicitly prefaced with “according to our current understanding.” The modern scientific enterprise began with, and has been sustained by, the confession of ignorance. It needs to return to the stance of Galileo’s and Huxley’s child, aware of the provisionality of all knowledge and the transcendent mystery of the world.

That our best imitations can become fake realities is starkly highlighted in AI impersonations of caring humans. Morally, the difference between behavior generally described as “kind” and what the Bible calls the love of God is illustrated in the famous passage on love in chapter 13 of St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Remarkably, there are no exhortations or imperatives; Paul is not advocating certain kinds of behavior. He does not command hearers to “do” or “be” anything, he simply asserts the supremacy of the love that comes from God and describes what it is like. A person filled with such love can be expected to behave, naturally and unconsciously, in this way. For this is all about being, transcending all imitations. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy. That is not to discount the value of imitation and imagination, and exhortations to kind behavior. Small children learn to say the right words and adopt the right manners long before they actually become respectful, grateful, kind, or loving beings, and this imitation is an important part of their moral development. In a similar way, reciting arithmetical tables, memorizing grammatical rules or poems, and learning musical theory or practicing studies, are all valuable steps and tools, but these must be transcended in becoming an exponent or lover of mathematics, literature, or music.

A model, however good an imitation, can be improved, and all models must be transcended in any deep engagement with being. The objective study and detached model-building that has characterized the modern scientific enterprise is a powerful way of understanding certain aspects of the world—but only the outer world, the objective, measurable world. Similarly, our biological models and schema are inadequate to capture more than a crude selection of outward features. The zoology is not the quiddity—the essential being of the living creatures, for diagrams of reality remain diagrams. In a similar way, the still life sketch is not the life, and the objective appearance is not the subjective experience. Studying an animal’s behavior objectively, even embedded in its natural environment, is not the same as entering imaginatively into its habitat—the sensory, visual, and olfactory world and the living experience of the animal as a subject—and achieving sympathetic identification. Avoiding the twin errors of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism, we have a tough task before us. It is included in the challenge of Genesis to name the animals. Our progressive naming may converge on the beast. Our imitating, modeling, and analyzing, and even our imagining, may approach ever nearer but is always distinct from the being of the beast. What is it like, being that animal?

Being

Once again, you are asked to pause at this point and conduct a thought experiment. Be a badger! Be an otter! Be an urban fox! Be a swift! Do not simply imitate; do not even content yourself with merely imagining. Take on something of the shaman and evoke the beast within you. Children do it best. But we can call upon the insights of the evolutionary biologist and the neuroscientist to feed our imaginations.

We might also immerse ourselves physically in the landscape and imitate the activities of the beast. One of my favorite books is Charles Foster’s Being a Beast (2016). He summons all his experience and knowledge as a biologist and vet, and his reading in physiology and neuroscience. But crucially, he engages with real animals and their living environments. He spends weeks, with his eight-year-old son, digging and living naked (at first) in a badger sett and eating earthworms. It is well worth reading how he gets close to Dartmoor otters, Scottish Highland red deer, London urban foxes, and even the Oxford swifts, air dwellers commuting to central Africa.

Butterflies and moths were my first love as a child collector and would-be naturalist. I still feel that old stab of exhilaration at the flashes of improbable beauty displayed by such tiny, flimsy things, and that old longing to know what it feels like to be a butterfly. “Being an insect” is a far tougher challenge than being a badger, and much more work is needed to begin to understand their cognitive capacities and emotional lives. But also, much more time lying in the grass with butterfly binoculars and magnifying glasses—and perhaps eating some unlikely things and sucking up nectar through long tubes! It is usual to regard “sentient” beasts as nearest to us in some sense. Yet they may be vastly different in physiology and natural environment. Birds’ brains have no cerebral cortex—no “CPU,” yet we feel relatively close to them. Can we estimate this distance intuitively by their capacity to imitate or relate to us, or our capacity to imagine being them? One definition of “sentient” is having the capacity to feel, to experience sensations and emotions. Can the beast experience pain and pleasure, anxiety and relief, boredom and enjoyment, etc. in a way comparable to us? The scientist, looking for evidence and appropriate experiments, asks a simple question: Can I find something that it is like to be that animal? Recent research tends to support the view that octopi and crustaceans like lobsters and crayfish are sentient and should be treated more humanely. Humanely—what does that mean? Does it have relevance to our attitudes to AI? Can we find something that it is like to be an AI?

Foster’s physical immersion in a badger sett is a rare strategy. What happens when a brilliant imagination and lucid gift of communication is brought to bear on what it is like to be a beast? Well known are the talking, rational, or dressed-up animals in Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. Other authors, while still using anthropomorphic devices, aim to draw the reader more radically into the living experience and pain of real animals—often based on intimate knowledge and first-hand observation. Some examples: the horses in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (Book IV) and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty; the dogs and wolves in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and White Fang; the rabbits, dogs, and horses of Richard Adam’s (1972) Watership Down, The Plague Dogs, and The Traveller; the moles of William Horwood’s The Duncton Chronicles (1980, 1988, 1999), and the eagles of his Callanish ([1984] 1985). Some believe that works such as these have been unjustly dismissed from the main corpus of English writing in the humanities. Relegated to children’s literature or fantasy, or even suppressed, they have uncomfortable things to say about the human condition and relations with animals. For more on this, see Philip Armstrong (2008), Marion W. Copeland (1989), and the journal Humanimalia, at humanimalia.org.

In a less anthropomorphic vein, Lewis’s (1940) chapter “Animal Pain” in The Problem of Pain is helpful. And in his novel That Hideous Strength (Lewis [1945] 1955), the inner life and emotions of Bultitude the bear are beautifully imagined. In this and the companion books of the trilogy, Lewis also explores what nonhuman intelligent beings could be like. J. R. R. Tolkien is the arch-exponent, in Lord of the Rings, of the art of shaping complex societies of convincing nonhuman creatures. Most are sufficiently humanlike to be depicted, with some animation, by human actors in the films, but Tolkien’s walking, talking trees, orcs, spiders, and dragon are triumphs of imagination and animation. J. K. Rowling is another author who creates a coherent world of weird creatures. Many writers and filmmakers of fairy tales, fantasy, and science fiction have explored imaginatively what nonhuman life might be like. Not many have attempted and fewer have achieved the much harder feat of making the readers feel that they know what it is like to be that alien creature. Nearer to home, our earthly co-dwellers, the beasts, present us with a serious challenge.

The characters of a novel or painting, or humanoid AIs, or even the concepts of a mathematical theory each have a kind of life of a different ontological order from that we share with the beasts. That we can intentionally bring such “sub-created life” into being is an enormous privilege the beasts do not seem to share. It is as if an artist is painting a picture of an artist painting a picture, and the picture within the picture is developing as an integral contribution to the bigger picture. It is rather like a jazz composer scoring and conducting a session in which each band member has sections for improvising music to enhance the whole work. The guiding melodies, harmonic progressions, ground beat, and direction may be given, but each musician has the gift of freedom to explore this musical space and help bring out yet unimagined beauties. It is like a poetry reading where the poet invites and inspires members of the audience to participate with lines of their own that draw out the themes of the poem. These are reflections of a divine humility and respect for what can only be called cocreators, who in turn exercise a respectful, disciplined freedom. It could descend into chaos, but it could rise to art of a whole new order. The imaginative ideas that beget our artworks have their being in an ontological realm inaccessible, I believe, to beasts and AIs. These, however, produce replication and innovation in their own ways, all participating in the creative enterprise as a whole and playing their part in enhancing human creativity. I now go on to consider how human creativity relates to divine creation.

Cocreating

In our best artistic work, we come closest to creatio ex nihilo, or creation out of the essence of our inner being, as God’s creation is out of God’s being. Nikolai Berdyaev claimed that: “The image of the artist and the poet is imprinted more clearly on his works than on his children” (Berdyaev 1937 quoted by Dorothy L. Sayers (1941, vi)). Sayers draws a striking extended analogy between the mind of the human artist and the mind of the Trinitarian Creator God as formulated in the Christian creeds. Claiming that man is most godlike and most himself when he is occupied in creation, she recognizes in her own and other’s experience a trinity of distinct, equally vital, interactive aspects in the making of a work of art, focusing on her own art of writing. There is, in any act of imaginative creation, the seminal Idea, the active Energy, and the inspirational Power. The Idea is timeless, unchanging; it conceives and wills the work as a whole, the end in the beginning. The Energy (or Word) is the conscious, dynamic expression of the Idea in time, the thought, passion, and hard work that flows in incarnating the Idea into the material form—of a book, say. The Power is what moves and motivates the author throughout the sustained writing process and communicates the Idea, through the concrete realization of the book, to the readers. The best work is marked by the harmonious union of these three-as-one, clearly distinct in the artist’s experience, yet all inseparably involved in the whole work. A word, phrase, or line is not “right” when it is not “true” to the Idea, and the Power is correspondingly diminished. Sayers observes a remarkable correlation between what makes flawed art, arising from distortion, imbalance, or neglect of any aspect of the writer’s trinity, and what makes bad theology, as emerging in the various historical heresies relating to the Trinity.

In mathematics too this trinity of creation is experienced. The seminal idea expresses itself in power but remains ineffable. The mathematician must bring it into tangible being, excitedly groping in the dark and the chaos, aware of the light that must be turned on, experimenting, contemplating, conjecturing, drawing strength and inspiration from peers and ancestral ideas. Then the light shines in the darkness and the hard work of creation can begin. In the fullness of time, the idea is incarnated in the body of a theory and can be communicated in power. The word has been born! Fleshed out in symbols, words, definitions, theorems, and proofs, it appears before the world in a talk or paper or book. The joy and beauty can now be communicated and applied.

In human co-creation, reflecting and cooperating with divine creation, the sovereign idea begets a submissive dedication to incarnate the idea faithfully and confers the power to give the work sustained, communicable life. Obedient imitation and audacious imagination come together as the key to fruitful human co-creativity. The secret of this exquisite but paradoxical poise is on open display, for (in simple form) it can be glimpsed in every happy child at play. To enter the kingdom of God, said Jesus, you have to become like a child; and to be a successful scientist, Galileo saw a parallel requirement, echoed by T. H. Huxley (1900): “Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.” Children are meek and bold; teachable and argumentative; submissive and subversive; trusting and questing; accepting and questioning; responsive and provocative; receptive and proactive. Always avidly imitating, constantly imagining, experimenting, and testing the boundaries, they have a desire to please and also a readiness to challenge authority. When these childhood qualities are matured and exercised in science, art, or mathematics, there is flourishing and fruitfulness.

Conclusion

In art, mythmaking, music, science, and mathematics, and even in play, humans exhibit the godlike vocation of the imago Dei, bringing with it mysterious responsibilities and co-creative capacities. The charge to “name the animals,” applied literally to the beasts, includes both objective scientific study and (much harder) imaginative entry into the world and subjective living experience of the beast. With the advent of AI, the tools for surveillance and imitation have grown beyond our dreams, and the human imagination faces unprecedented challenges to harness this for positive, beneficial co-creativity in art, music, mathematics, and far more widely, in research, health care, business and industry, education, and life management. The age-old temptations have been magnified: copying without questioning, belief without warrant, theft and deceit without detection, moral realignment without standards, and decision-making without trustworthiness checks. The root temptation is to allow imitation to masquerade as being, thus to desecrate the sacred nature of the imago Dei, to have its mandated responsibilities usurped, its imaginative faculty diminished, and its transcendent capacities dismissed. The technology we shape is shaping us: either we rise to exercise the co-creativity mandate of the imago Dei and take responsible dominion or we are reduced to something subhuman, however “enhanced.” See Lewis (1943), Shannon Vallor (2024) and the prophetic writings of Marshall McLuhan and Jacques Ellul (e.g., Ellul 1964).

Transhumanism and techno-redemption would use machines to correct, enhance, and even “perfect” human bodies and minds. Some of these aims are inevitable and welcome. Humans have been using machines and animals to imitate human tasks, alleviate suffering, and enhance creative potential since the cognitive revolution. But the co-creativity mandate of the imago Dei is to truly transcend machines and animals and compassionately bring all into an ever-developing synergy. Our art, music, science, and mathematics may be greatly changed, even greatly enhanced but must always remain fundamentally human adventures of love and service, not divorced from, but taking full account of, our best theologies of the divine purpose, the common good, sin, suffering, redemption, the body, and the life eternal.

Fear, love, joy, and the other human emotions are reflected in animals, allowing deep communication of a nonrational form between humans and the higher animals. Life communicates with life—living things may attain a degree of empathy corresponding to their complexity. The nature of nonliving AIs is to reflect only the rational, logical, algorithm-driven aspects of the imago Dei and selected summaries of the vast, available digital deposits of the imago Dei in written verbal propositional form. In this very limited sense only can AIs be said to be made in imago hominis. These creatures-of-creatures cannot be said to want to survive, replicate, succeed, or improve themselves; they are programmed by humans to mimic such behavior patterns, as exhibited by living creatures who have attained a degree of subjectivity. Algorithms do not know they are thinking, remembering, reasoning. They have, as Nick Cave puts it, no inner being; data, he points out, cannot suffer, or feel, or want, in the animal way. A machine cannot truly know in the human way. The mathematician, the artist, and the computer scientist will join in affirming that these creations of ours cannot themselves create or imagine or aspire like humans; they merely imitate such human behavior. And they cannot even generate empathy like the animals; they can merely imitate such animal behavior. For, in the end, they cannot, I believe, transcend their own natures, no matter how complex and sophisticated they become.

In studying the relationships between humans, beasts, and AIs, we must start with and hold firmly to the enormous commonalities. Then, we must go on to explore the qualitative differences between living creatures and machines and the glorious distinctiveness of the transcending human imagination. Imagination must begin with humble imitation; imitation can look remarkably like being, and imagination allied with imitation can approach wonderfully near to being, but being is a transcendent work of creation.