When I was working on understanding the creativity of genius; I came up against the fact that biological and psychological science could not explain real originality, except by positing that it came from 'randomness'.
The basic model was that an original genius got his strange ideas from a two-stage process of randomly-generating variations upon existing knowledge; and (with high intelligence and knowledge) selecting better new ideas from the spectrum of random-novelty.
The genius was supposed to be better at generating random novelty (by his high-psychoticism personality) and also better at selecting 'good ideas' from this random spectrum (by his high-intelligence and -motivation).
This has at least two major problems as an explanation.
The first problem is that it reduces all genius to the level of the fashion designer who 'creates' new fashions from selecting, exaggerating and recombining old fashions. It reduces originality to mere 'novelty'.
Thus, it simply kicks the can/ problem-of-explaining-creativity further down the road - to whoever/ whatever came up with the original ideas, that are later being recombined and selected.
This opens-up an infinite regress.
The second problem is deeper; in that this explanation has smuggled in an unacknowledged metaphysical assumption that 'entropy' and 'randomness' are real and primary in the world - whereas creation and originality are merely derived from these essentially degenerative processes.
We are assuming a reality in which there is de-geration, but no actual generation! Again we have not explained why there is anything in the first place that can be de-generated, or why there are things with structure that can then undergo entropy...
We have posited a world in which we focus on that which dissolves creation - but with no explanation of created phenomena arise.
We have posited a secondary world, a world of secondary processes - and the primary world is always elsewhere and unexplained.
This metaphysical error is general, near-universal and taken for granted - so much so that it took me a great deal of hard-thinking to find it!
Of course it is easy to know why this strange (and incoherent) assumption happened - i.e. because the underlying intention was that God (the primary creator) Must-Be excluded from any and all explanations.
And once God is included in the explanation, as primary creator - then it becomes easy to understand that the source or real and original creativity lies in the divine - and in Man's share of that divine nature.
